Red-Neck, Trailer Park Rage Over Immigration

With the Congress' recent legislation on immigration and Pres. Bush's plan to send troops to help protect the border, much has been made in the rightist blogosphere about making sure that immigrants from Mexico not taint the purity of the American spirit.

I have maintained that much of the outrage expressed in the media and at the grass roots level emanating from the nativist undercurrent in American political life comes from a rage by dispossessed white Americans. ...

The socio-economic factors surrounding the enraged trailer redneck are paramount in understanding this rage. That rage is well-earned but it is misdirected. Their rage should be directed at a government that refuses to carry through on the promise of a revolution which was supposed to benefit everyone. The ugly fact is that the revolution has only benefited those at the top.

Bush and the Right has tried to deflect that rage by scapegoating--symbolically as you put it--the illegal immigrants. The problem is, the rage is so deep and the socio-economic disenfranchisement is so great that symbolic actions will not work. As these pundits exhibit, for the hardcore nativist nothing short of a military-style stand is enough.

One is right to note how the Bushites and the necons conned the religious right and the nativists. They played those cards, hoping to keep them at bay with largely irrelvant but ideologically powerful shadow plays.

Now, those factions want the promissory note paid. And Bush has to eat shit because he knows that if he pays them what they want, he'd look like the fascist fool many take him for anyway. The problem is the reality of his actions have not yet sunk in for Bush--he really thinks he's Gary Cooper or something. But the reality of his actions makes him out to be more like the Gene Hackman sheriff in Eastwood's Unforgiven. Witrh this issue on immigration, he's realizing the devil's pact he made with the nativists but which he thought he could wiggle out of.

On the other hand, the evangelical Xtians are pretty conflicted about the immigration issue, it seems. If true, then Bush is alienating some part of his evangelical base.

According to CBN News:

But other evangelical Christians are torn between a biblical belief in law and order, and the commandment to love one's neighbor.

When Marc Galli, the editor of Christianity Today, wrote an editorial praising illegal immigrants, he received a flood of angry emails.

Galli said, "The feeling was that if we allow illegal immigrants in and if we don't hold them accountable -- the illegal immigrants that are here -- we are going to have anarchy."

"What's concerning to some evangelicals,” said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, “is that immigration has gotten out of control. And there's the illegal side of immigration - not the legal side - that causes concern."

But in the end, Vallet believes her response to the immigration debate is in line with what Jesus would do.

She said, "There is law, of course, but there is also this thing called grace."