'Backlash' looks at anti-Obama anger in America

Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters,
and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama
By Will Bunch

Harper, 354 pp. $25.99

Welcome to the fear-fueled, full-boil anger that Will Bunch portrays in The Backlash. A senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News and husband of Inquirer staff writer Kathy Boccella, Bunch takes to the road to report what animates anti-Obama Americans. The book will be released Tuesday. For anyone uninitiated in this crusade of unrelenting criticism, The Backlash will be a read on the wild side.

As Bunch documents on almost every page, excoriation of the Oval Office occupant is personal and at the highest decibel of free speech. Obama is (take your pick) a socialist, a communist, a new Hitler, a Manchurian candidate, even the Antichrist. Each epithet does more than demean; there's a larger purpose at work. One Arizona minister interviewed isn't reluctant to say he's praying for the president's death.

Several circumstances feed such anger. The current economy, with its troubling unemployment, middling growth, and declining confidence, is a definite factor, especially for people in their 50s or early 60s. The new media, with their abundance of single-minded messages and 24/7 connectivity, play another key role. And America is dramatically changing in terms of demography and socio-economic makeup.

In short, patterns established during the latter decades of the 20th century no longer exist. Adjusting to a new world - of which Obama is both symbol and embodiment - can become a bridge too far for some people, with foursquare opposition a more satisfying place to be.

Bunch describes the contemporary landscape with skill, and he provides context by looking back to the writings of historian Richard Hofstadter and communications theorist Neil Postman. In the early 1960s, Hofstadter identified "the paranoid style in American politics" as an evergreen trait that repeatedly flowered in U.S. soil, while Postman (particularly in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death) argued that entertainment on broadcast airwaves overwhelmed - and supplanted - the educational function of the printed word.