Homegrown Terrorism

Charlie Pierce looks at the attempted bombing in Spokane in January, other recent incidents, and their roots:

The past two years have seen not only an unprecedented spike in these kinds of events but also a curious tolerance for the kind of
unhinged rhetoric that used to be found only among our more exotic political fauna. Years ago, when the John Birch Society accused Dwight Eisenhower of being a "conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," it was laughed out of conservative politics and into the political wilderness. Today, while the unfounded speculation about the place of Barack Obama's birth may well have been interred with the bones of the Trump for President campaign, it is still perfectly respectable within conservative politics to infer that the president is somehow less of an American by his very nature, which must be different from "our" own.
It began almost immediately with his election, despite the fact that, ironically, he spends more time telling his fellow Americans how great they are than any four of his predecessors combined. By his fifth month in office, the major television networks were carrying scenes of people at political gatherings, sobbing that they "want their country back." From whom was never really explored.
There was something visceral to the anger. As daffy as many of them were, most of the attacks on Bill Clinton were recognizably political. His attempts to reform health care were criticized merely as bad policy. The attacks on Obama have been different. It is not merely that he is black, although that is undeniably part of what's going on. The attacks on Obama are attempting to affix to him the blame for a genuine feeling of economic and social dislocation that arose when the economic system nearly collapsed entirely before the 2008 elections.
When Michele Bachmann, a member of Congress, states publicly that she is running for president "to take our country back," she is not talking about clawing back the money and jobs and basic security that were sluiced away into the investment banks. She's focusing those fears and that insecurity on one person and on what she believes he represents. Politicians used to say that they would bring America back, or that they would restore America to its former greatness, or wrap their policies in some such fluffy rhetorical excelsior. Today, though, it is perfectly acceptable to intimate, as Bachmann does, and as those hundreds of people at the congressional town meetings said outright, that America is not here anymore. That someone has stolen it away. America is no longer a political commonwealth of shared ideas that its citizens can restore. It is objectified, something tangible, something that a stranger has broken in and stolen. And if that's the case, why be surprised when someone tries to take "our country back" the way you might confront a midnight prowler in the living room?

While I think race plays a significant part in the opposition to Obama, I really don't understand why so many people come unglued when we have a Democratic president.  We went through the exact same thing with Clinton, and both Clinton and Obama are comparable to Eisenhower, and even Nixon Republicans of old.  Heck, right now Obama's debt ceiling negotiating offers are to the right of Ronald Reagan's proposals in 1986.  Reagan raised taxes several times to reduce the deficit, but now that just isn't allowed.  What country are these people trying to get back?  I think the political tenor of the times is much more conservative than in the past.  Socially, they will never get back to the past, and if it is a white one, they are screwed, and deservedly so.