David Cantwell writes:

The morning after we elected a new president of the United States, Michelle Malkin posted a blog entry entitled So Much for AmeriKKKa, in which she asked, “If we live in such a racist country as the friends and fellow travelers of Barack Obama have argued throughout this campaign season, how did AmeriKKKa end up electing The One?”

I hesitate to grant Malkin any credence as a serious commentator; she makes Bill O’Reilly look like King Solomon. But her question–actually, it’s an assertion impersonating a question–is one, unfortunately, I think many people will be asking over the next couple of months (and even though the friends and fellow travelers of The One have most definately not been arguing anything like Malkin’s straw figure). The short answer is that Malkin makes the mistake here of envisioning a world without greys, one where there is either racism or there isn’t. As I’ve tried to explain before, the issue of race in America demands more nuance.

But it’s the polarized, one-or-the-other, with-us-or-against-us, love-it-or-leave-it way that Malkin and so many others approach not just race but…everything that I want to talk about. At Zoilus, Carl Wilson recently wrote about so-called fan democracy and how it is representative of, or leads us to, political polarization, an attitude that says my choice is best and yours is not only different but evil, un-American, traitorous. Carl points us to an article by Univerisity of California-Berkely professor Abigail De Kosnik, which finds similiarities in “political constituencies and fan cultures.” So, per Wilson and De Kosnik, Hillary Clinton supporters bitterly predicted they would vote for John McCain before they would ever vote for Obama in a way not unlike some Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans were actively angered that Buffy and Spike didn’t stay together.

Though there is a new found sense of good feeling in the air this week, we’re also seeing a great deal of rage over Obama’s election. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but there are already a few Impeach Obama groups on Facebook, and you can purchase a t-shirt expressing the same sentiment at Cafe Press. What’s more, people continue to harp on Obama’s connections to Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers (P. J. O’Rourke at the Weekly Standard won’t let it go, neither will E. Thomas McClanahan at the Star here in Kansas City, and so many others). His associations, we’re told, don’t just make Obama a poor choice but an illegitimate one.

I’ve been wondering lately if there isn’t something built into American politics, something fundamental, that at the very least encourages this sort of hostile, scorched earth, zero-sum approach to political life. When you have only two not-so-different-as-we-like-to-think political parties to choose from, and when even the electoral college system is all or nothing (except in Nebraska and Maine), perhaps the wonder is how we aren’t even more polarized than we are. This state of affairs, where everything gets reduced to one or the other, is actually quite consistent with a disdain for nuance, and it rewards the bullying personal styles of commentators, politicians and just plain cititizens alike. Could it be that more political choices, not to mention proportional representation, would by definition push us to coalitions and to practical compromise?

Obama plays the game differently, sometimes, and that is one of the reasons I’ve been attracted to his style (if not always to his politics). To pick just one example…After the first debate, McCain was commended for prefacing his remarks with “Senator Obama is wrong” or “He just doesn’t get it.” This purely adversarial approach was seen as a sign of McCain’s strength. Obama, on the other hand, was mocked after that encounter for frequently beginning his comments with some version or other of “He’s correct.” Never mind that each “He’s correct” inevitably led to a “But…” I still appreciated that Obama’s instinct appeared to be to identify the common ground.

*****

I’m optimistic about an Obama administration, though I think people are also getting a bit carried away in their praise for just what this election portends. Each time I hear that parents can now, finally, honestly, tell their children, see, anyone can make it here, I want to remind the speaker that Barack Obama may be our first obviously half-white president (a mutt, as he called himself this week), but he is not, say, our first jewish, atheist lesbian president.

On the other hand, am I the only one who found each revelation of Obama’s “sinister” associations to be just one more reason for optimism? I’ve written here before that Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, however limited it actually was, is an example of the sort of concrete pragmatism that Americans, particularly conservative Americans, once valued. Ditto his alleged willingness to sit down with any leader, even without pre-conditions, if it might lead to a safer planet.

I’ll take it a step further. I don’t think Obama’s a socialist, but his history suggests to me that he might actually understand the term (unlike, say, Jonah Goldberg, Sean Hannity or Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Malkin, Sarah Palin, or Joe the Plumber). He might even have studied some Marx along the way. Therefore, he might understand just a tad bit better the built-in cruelties–”immoralities” would be a better word–of capitalism in a way that free-market fundamentalists never can. Similarly, I don’t think Obama is a radical on issues of race. But it seems fair to assume that anyone who spent twenty years listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright would be conversant with, and at least partially sympathetic to, a critique of white supremacy, which at any rate, as I’ve written before, is hardly as radical or shocking as is usually claimed. To my mind, that’s all potentially to the good. How good? We’ll see…

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