Bernard Keane on the right-wing protest groups—”the Convoy of No Confidence, the anti-carbon tax protests and efforts such as last week’s anti-gay marriage rally”—that have popped up in recent months:
While the Tea Party (particularly where it overlaps with the birther movement) contains racist elements and there’s a strain of misogyny in the attacks on Gillard, I suggest these groups aren’t driven by overt racism or sexism. The participants in such groups are unlikely to be any more racist or sexist than the rest of us. ¶ Instead, the motivating force behind these groups appears to be more about expressing resentment about social and economic change in recent decades, and particularly because such changes have delivered nothing but difficulties for the demographics we’re talking about: social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heterosexual people and males in particular… ¶ For such people, Gillard’s gender (and unmarried status) or Obama’s race are not so much a problem as a high-profile, indeed inescapable, symbol of how much the world has changed and changed in ways that deliver nothing but pain for such people.
Matt Yglesias sarcastically summed up this argument in relation to the Tea Party: “cranky old white conservative nostalgics aren’t racists, they’re just white people who are nostalgic for a whiter, more racist America”. If you’re unhappy about the real problems facing rural Australia, you don’t fix the blame on faggots if you’re not a disgusting bigot.