More seriously, there is reason to suspect that some of the opposition to health care reform is driven by racial animosity. Obviously there are good criticisms and legitimate worries to have about it, but there is some interesting data suggesting that some of the unreasoning criticism is driven by racism— and given what we already know about HotAir commenters and racism, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a racist dynamic underlies some of their opposition: (the rest of it I’d put down to their apocalyptic visions and general nutbaggery)

Racial Resentment, Authoritarianism, and Health Care

scholars have demonstrated that racial animosity and opposition to policies perceived as re-distributive appear to go hand in hand. When people think of welfare, they think of Blacks. And one can surmise that, with the election of a Black president, and the rising to the surface of racial animosity among voters who, last year, were desperate enough to give Obama a chance, these relationships are even stronger now than when these data were collected last year.

In sum, there is reason to think that beneath the arguments about government intrusion into the health care market, death panels, and such, a much more visceral dynamic is at work. To be perfectly clear, it is far from the case that every opponent or skeptic of significant health-care reform is a racist or racially motivated in her or his thinking. But there is, at the least, very strong circumstantial evidence that views of race and beliefs about health care reform are linked significantly among many Americans, which probably explains why the debate on health care reform has caused a much stronger uproar in 2009 than it did in 1994.