Racism, Sexism, and the Republican Party's Benghazi Obsession

The Benghazi “scandal” is a political fetish for Republicans and the Right-wing media. This obsession is one more example of how fringe and extreme political ideas—what were once conspiracy theories exiled to late night AM talk radio—have become the legitimate and mainstream in contemporary Republican politics.

While Republicans would like to believe that Benghazi could be Obama’s “Watergate,” recent data from Public Policy Polling suggests that the Benghazi issue is not resonating among the general public. As such, the Benghazi fixation is a niche issue that has valence only for those already immersed within the Right-wing media echo chamber and news entertainment complex.

Yet, for minimal political gains, and at the risk of further marginalizing their political party, the Republican leadership persists in its Benghazi fetish. Why?

Republicans are fixated on Benghazi in an effort to recapture a sense that despite many of Obama’s successes in this area (and George W. Bush’s legendary failings) they are the de facto party of “national security.” Benghazi is also an opportunity to preemptively target Hillary Clinton before her presumed 2016 Presidential election run.

This is the political logic driving the Republican’s behavior. However it is justified, there is also an ugly lie at the heart of the Right-wing’s Benghazi fixation.

Republicans would like the American people to believe that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton betrayed their oaths of office by watching Americans die in Benghazi, and were either so callous as not to care about what transpired before their eyes in real time, or were more concerned with politics and “spin” than in rescuing the besieged personnel at the diplomatic outpost.

In essence, the Republican Party is accusing President Barack Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of murder by proxy as a result of willful negligence.

While trying to unpack and work through the Republican Party’s conspiratorial machinations, many in the pundit and media classes have been distracted by a sensational example of political theater.

Consequently, the broader context of the Republican Party’s most recent assault on the Obama administration has gone little commented upon. 

Despite the political chaff thrown up to to distract and confuse, in all, Benghazi is one more effort by Republicans to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s first black president.

Obama has been subjected to absurd attacks by conservatives. He is not an American citizen, is a closet “Muslim,” “hates” white people, attended an “anti-white” church, and was mentored by domestic terrorists. Mitt Romney’s (failed presidential campaign) strategy was dependent on mobilizing white voters through an appeal to racial tribalism and white identity politics. As such, Romney used a mix of “dog whistles” and overt racial appeals designed to signal to his base that Obama was a type of racial Other, one not to be trusted as President of the United States.

The attack on Hillary Clinton is a function of many of the same anxieties about a country where a particular type of white masculinity feels both imperiled and under siege. In a mirror of the racially tinged attacks on Barack Obama by the Right-wing media, Hillary Clinton has also been described as “angry” and “not knowing her place.”

Republican Senator James Inhofe, channeled the crude sexism driving the Right’s efforts to use Benghazi to smear Hillary Clinton when he observed how during the January hearings, “I think that she has gotten by with that type of a forceful attitude, something that’s not normally accustomed — that you don’t hear from women as much as you do men.” 

Of course, Hillary Clinton is no stranger to assaults on her integrity and character—during her husband’s term as president, the Clintons were faced with charges by conservatives that they conspired to commit murder in what came to be known as the Whitewater Scandal. 

As we saw during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, contemporary populist conservatism is nothing if not an exercise in protecting white male privilege through an appeal to white victimhood through such polarizing language as “real America” and “taking our country back.”

In this context, a black President and a female Secretary of State are potent symbols that arouse a sense of hostility and anxiety among many Republicans--and especially among the Tea Party base of their party.

In post civil rights era America, there has been a retreat from a constructive and critical engagement with how inequalities of race and gender impact social policy and the Good Society. Moreover, the ethic of “colorblindness” has been reimagined and twisted such that those who even dare to discuss systemic, personal, or institutional examples of white racism in American society are actually marginalized by many on the Right as “the real racists.”

This strategy has born fruit: despite all the available evidence of how racism and racial inequality continues to negatively impact the life changes of people of color in the United States, recent public opinion surveys reveal that a significant percentage of white Americans feel “oppressed” because of their race, and they believe that “racism” against white people is a bigger social problem than discrimination against racial minorities.

The Benghazi scandal is the union of two very powerful forces in post civil rights America and the Age of Obama.

The first, what social scientists have termed “symbolic racism,” is a type of white racial animus which views people of color, and blacks in particular, as being disloyal and not worthy of trust or full citizenship. 

The second is how the Right-wing's war on women’s reproductive rights, equality, and freedom is predicated upon an understanding that men are naturally dominant and women are pre-judged as naturally subordinate.

A black President and a female Secretary of State cannot be reconciled within such a worldview.

Sexism and racism are the guiding impetus behind the Republican Party’s Benghazi obsession. Conservatives will predictably respond in a shrill manner to such a suggestion. Nevertheless, given the ways in which racism and sexism are dominant landmarks on the cognitive map of contemporary Right-wing politics, the synergy of those two social forces are over-determining the Republican Party’s hostility to a black president, and a female Secretary of State.

The manufactured Benghazi scandal is a perfect storm for a Republican Party wherein racism and sexism are synonymous with contemporary conservatism.