Six-and-a-half months into the Obama Administration and domestic instability is becoming palpable.

This week saw a ratcheting up of passions in town hall meetings organized to discuss health care reform, including incoherent and misinformed rants, misplaced swastikas, and even sporadic violence. A politician hanged in effigy, a dramatized poisoning of the Speaker of the House on TV, and lynching jokes by a US Congressman have become unsettling parts of the political landscape. Such a heated and unhinged atmosphere, with Democrats systematically being compared to Nazis by opinion makers, may lend validation to terrorism or assassination as a solution to political disagreement, an increasingly likely prospect according to author Frank Schaeffer.

With widespread economic insecurity as the backdrop, Obama and leading Congressional Democrats are pushing for relatively small changes to the status quo of an inefficient and expensive health care system. Single-payer health care (e.g., Medicare for everybody) despite its overwhelming popularity among citizens, isn’t even on the table because it would eliminate profits altogether for established business interests. So, a watered-down version is being negotiated, and the option to sign up for publically-funded health care is desperately trying to be saved by the more progressive US politicians. Yet, because public interest is being trumpeted over private profit by those Democrats pushing for reform, Republican politicians, conservative media pundits and some citizens are becoming increasingly paranoid and angry and are preventing rational conversation from taking place.

As Congress breaks for vacation in the middle of back-room negotiations on health care reform, right wing media content is sounding increasingly desperate, turning up the dial on hate, rage, fear, and lies. Some of the most popular TV and radio commentators appear to be doing their best to incite mobs to maintain the privileges and injustices of current power structures.

Much of this behavior appears to be related to white nationalism and xenophobia. The "birther" movement and propaganda campaign has been very successful. According to a recent poll, only 42% of Republicans say they are certain that President Obama is a legitimate American-born citizen. Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, 28% said they believe Obama was not born in the United States, and 30% are not sure what to think.

Racial demographics have been changing in America for a while now, but in 2009 racial politics are shifting and the fading of institutionalized white privilege, a slow process, can be seen with the naked eye. Not only is the President black, but the national conversation about race is front and center.

The anxiety that goes with questioning racial and class privilege for many Americans is being dangerously exploited by Republican talking heads with loudspeakers interested in maintaining the socioeconomic status quo. Politicians are actually telling citizens that Obama wants to kill old people and babies. Others interested parties with sketchy histories and a lot of money are organizing and inciting angry citizens into disrupting rational political discourse.

Things are starting to get ugly. The global economic crisis, the food crisis, and the climate crisis have increased stress around the globe.  Here in the USA, where we are disproportionally responsible for these problems, tensions are probably at their highest point outside of a Presidential election or war debate than they have been in the last few decades. This has a chance to be a progressive moment, a democratic push forward towards greater social justice amid great uncertainty. But this past week, swimming in misinformation, fear and hate, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction.

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