My reply (reposted here in expanded form):

The furor here doesn't really have anything to do with health care per se, except insofar as health insurance reform threatens some powerful parasitical corporations with the means to fan the crazy flames. But the crazy flames themselves have a different source.

During the campaign I saw a lot of interviews with poor red-state voters, and they returned again and again to the same refrain: they were scared that Barack Obama was going to "take everything away from the white people and give it to the black people." It's an odd sentiment. What exactly were these West Virginians and Kentuckians, haggard and half toothless at age 30, afraid of losing as they muttered unintelligibly about redistribution? The dilapidated trailers they were sitting in front of? It was hard to escape the conclusion that they meant this: no matter how dire their socioeconomic circumstances, historically whites in the U.S. have been able to rely on their skin color to convey at least some measure of privilege. No matter how poor their circumstances, they've had an entire class of people they could look down upon. And many, especially those for whom skin color is their only real source of privilege, are terrified that a more racially egalitarian society would mean losing that and winding up on the very bottom. So now that Obama actually is in the White House, any initiative the government puts forward is going to encounter the same response. Economic stimulus, health insurance reform, energy policy, immigration... they're going to completely ignore the substance of the legislation and interpret the government's proposals as a grand scheme to chip away at white privilege. This is what these people mean when they shriek, "I want MY country back!!"

But while that may explain the anger... why the unreasoning terror? The hysteria over "death panels" reminds me of nothing so much as those penis-theft panics that regularly sweep places like Kinshasa and Khartoum — why have patently insane messages such as "Obama wants to kill your grandma" found such currency?

Projection is a well-attested psychological phenomenon: people tend to suspect others of crimes they themselves have committed. You're cheating on your wife, and every time she goes somewhere you wonder whether she's meeting a lover... after all, that's what you're doing. And there are few better examples of projection than those furnished by the Republican Party. Every election the Republicans work themselves into a lather over voter fraud; many of them are convinced that an organization called ACORN which conducts voter registration drives is actually a sinister cabal that stole the election. John McCain accused ACORN of "destroying the fabric of democracy," and if you watch some of the Youtube videos of crazy protesters at town halls you can hear them accusing the organizers of being ACORN members. Why so much concern about voter fraud? Because Republicans commit voter fraud. Which party wound up with operatives in jail for voter fraud? The Republicans. Which party has made illegal voter caging part of its standard election procedure? The Republicans. Of course they're going to see the specter of fraud lurking behind every voter registration drive. After all, if they were running those drives, they'd be fraudulent! The same goes for many of the other Republican accusations. They claim Democrats — not normally credited with staying on message — simply parrot the rhetoric of puppetmasters like George Soros or Markos Moulitsas; in fact, as The Daily Show and others have documented, it's the Republicans who repeat verbatim the talking points distributed through the GOP and Fox News hierarchies. They gibber that the Democrats are setting up secret re-education camps; this from the party that actually did operate a network of secret overseas prisons? And so on.

So what terrifies the deathers, Mandy? It's the same thing that terrified Thomas Jefferson. Where we see health insurance reform, they see SLAVE REVOLT. What is it that, consciously or not, they think Obama is going to "take away from the white people and give to the black people"? The lash. They can believe that Obama wants to kill their grandmothers because they know that the privileges they cling to in the America of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs came at the expense of millions of dead grandmothers, granddaughters, grandsons, grandfathers. They know that when the people they identify with in the history books were in charge, they enslaved an entire race for centuries and conducted a terror campaign of murder and apartheid for a century more. The deathers squawk about "tyranny" because America has known tyranny, and the deathers are its heirs. So what they fear is not the public option or the rescission ban. It's payback.

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