Is Race the Motivation Behind Opposition to Obama's Immigration Order?

In my days as a Republican activist there were some in the GOP base who were out and out racists and most considered them to be unwanted outsiders who were truth be told viewed as an embarrassment to the party.  All too often, these folks were also far right Christians.  With the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP, these people have gone mainstream in the party base and the leadership, even if it tries to disguise its motivation by evasive language generally plays right along with the ugly sentiments of this element of the GOP base.  With a black man occupying the White House, many in this racist element of the Republican Party believe the world is ending.  What they are really frantic about is the growing reality that their power and white privilege is dwindling.  A column in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon in the context of Barack Obama's immigration executive order.  Here are excepts:

When The Journal looked at some of the people who “say they want to see a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants — which is beyond what Mr. Obama’s executive order would do — but say they disapprove of presidential executive action,” it found that the group was “overwhelmingly white and more likely to be Republican than not” and some said that they simply “don’t like anything associated with the president.”

Pay attention to the overall response from all sources, particularly the rhetoric in which it is wrapped.

There is no denying the insinuations in such language: a fear of subjugation by people like this president, an “other” person, predisposed to lawlessness.

As usual, issue-oriented opposition overlaps with a historical undercurrent, one desperate for demonstration (of liberal folly) and preservation (of conservative principles and traditional power).

Maybe that’s why the president cited Scripture when laying out his immigration plan: “Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger — we were strangers once, too.”

But that is surely to have fallen on deaf ears, if not hostile ones. Conservatives slammed the usage, and Mike Huckabee went so far as to accuse the president of trying to rewrite the Bible . . .

How dare the president — seen by some as a threat to Christianity — invoke Christianity in his defense!

As Paul Ryan put it in 2012, the president’s policies put us on a “dangerous path,” one that “grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.”

Senator Tom Coburn upped the rhetoric last week, suggesting to USA Today that there could be a violent reaction to the president’s actions:  “You’re going to see — hopefully not — but you could see instances of anarchy.”

Make no mistake: This debate is not just about this president, this executive order or immigration. This is about the fear that makes the face flush when people stare into a future in which traditional power — their power — is eroded, and about their desperate, by-any-means determination to deny that future.