1.<\/strong> At a town hall meeting on Tuesday, February 22, a supporter of Georgia Republican Paul Broun asked the U.S. representative<\/a>, \u201cWho\u2019s going to shoot Obama?\u201d The question got laughs from the audience and reportedly a chuckle from Broun himself, along with this response:<\/p>\n The thing is, I know there\u2019s a lot of frustration with this president. We\u2019re going to have an election next year. Hopefully, we\u2019ll elect somebody that\u2019s going to be a conservative, limited-government president that will take a smaller, who will sign a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This ugly little exchange crystallizes over two centuries\u2019 worth of racial, economic, and political history in America.<\/p>\n Did that old man in Georgia clamoring for the assassination of America\u2019s first black president really have health care<\/em> on his mind, as Broun implied? And how could Broun pivot so smoothly from talk of assassination to talk of repealing \u201cObamacare\u201d and its modest efforts to spread out some of the wealth that has become so concentrated in America?<\/p>\n How? It\u2019s the same old song. Politicians of Broun\u2019s ilk have been pivoting smoothly from racism to economics since our country\u2019s beginning.<\/strong><\/p>\n 2.<\/strong> During the run-up to the last presidential election, Republicans mounted an attack on Barack Obama based on his response to Joe the Plumber\u2019s question about taxes<\/a>. At the end of a long and nuanced response, Obama talked about how he thought the country worked better when you \u201cspread the wealth\u201d around. Republicans gradually mustered a sense of moral outrage at this notion, even though it underlies accepted economic practices in most developed nations that aren\u2019t straight-up oligarchies.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a step back to consider some of the history of \u201cspreading the wealth\u201d in America.<\/p>\n The end of slavery in the South, for instance, constituted a gigantic transfer of wealth\u2014from Southern slaveholders to the slaves themselves. The wealth transferred, of course, was the value of the slaves, a tangible monetary loss for all of the slaveholders. The emancipation of the slaves was the starkest redistribution of wealth in American history. Our nation is arguably still feeling the aftershocks of that cataclysmic act of justice.<\/p>\n In the debate leading to the passage of the health care bill\u2014to whose repeal Rep. Broun so quickly turned in response to a proposed political assassination\u2014what was ultimately at stake was another, much less dramatic redistribution. As Hendrik Hertzberg noted in a New Yorker<\/em> piece<\/a> from August of 2009, the Blue Dog Democrats (not to mention Republicans), resisted Barack Obama’s plan to provide health care for all because they “vociferously oppose[d] a modest surtax on the top one per cent, whose effective tax rates have dropped by fifteen per cent since 1979, while their after-tax incomes have more than tripled.”<\/p>\n The debate over health care, at its core, was really about this central question of American politics: To what extent should government intervene to ameliorate inequality and offset the damages wrought by vicious greed?<\/p>\n The federal government fought a war and amended the Constitution to outlaw the owning of one human being by another. Then, over a period of decades, Southern states gradually clawed their way back toward a slave system (as Douglas Blackmon argues persuasively in his 2008 book Slavery By Another Name<\/em><\/a>). Eventually, under the intense pressure of the Civil Rights Movement, the federal government again came down hard on the side of equality.<\/p>\n In response, as LBJ predicted, the South turned its back on the Democratic party and conservatives embraced a doctrine of states’ rights and laissez-faire capitalism, essentially declaring that the government should do little or nothing to protect its citizens from being exploited. Profiteering and prejudice, in the minds of some, became synonymous with patriotism.<\/p>\n Those who control wealth will always complain about its redistribution. Slave owners were outraged to have their chattel taken from them. FDR was a “traitor to his class” for engineering the New Deal. White southerners violently resented the federal troops who made them open schools to blacks. And now Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and \u201cliberty-loving\u201d Tea Partiers decry Obama’s health care plan as socialism.<\/p>\n