Old school panic
One of the more regrettable, if consistent, attitudes of the American right wing is that they always need An Other. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, argues that it has been ever thus- we define communities by whom we exclude.
But in the political arena, at least since Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley Jr, among others, defined American conservatism as a defensive position against Communism, challenges to Anglo-Catholic religious nostrums (and strictures) and other odd, new-fangled forms of modernity's advance (Russell Kirk was the movement's schoolmarm, lips pursed and acolytes gathered round a cozy fire).
Communists had a good run They were everywhere. They were furtive. They might be under your bed.
Bra-burning women were scary, but with that weird lesbianic allure that straight men somehow get off about.
McGovernite and "San Francisco" Democrats have sputtered in and out of vogue.
Violent black people are always lurking just under the surface, even as conservatives try to appropriate the language of the civil rights movement to themselves.
Immigrants- legal or not- have some regional attraction, but despite claims they carry diseases and anchor babies with them- they don't have guns and bombs, so they're a non-starter except as a border state issue and as Tom Tancredo's reason to live.
Gay Americans are a biennial fear since Pat Buchanan's culture war speech in 1992 but they're fast losing issue traction as people realize gay couples keep their yards tidier than most of the schlubs around them and even Ann Coulter will talk to them- for pay (see, e.g., Woody Allen's story, "The Whore of Mensa").
Now, some suggest, the new Other will be the swarthy Moor- the hordes of Islam. The numberless, unemployed, young men of the Middle East who would calm down considerably if relations with the opposite sex weren't so restrictive and you could get a drink once in a while. Nothing for a raging libido like a good demonstration with lots of chanting and burning and big crowds and the approbation of the government.
And, like Communism in its heyday, Islam is a hidden war one can characterize as one likes, with the added advantage of making it a zero-sum conflict. One side must win, the other must lose.
It can go on forever. Like Communists and homosexuals, Islamists lurk in our midst. Normal Americans are being turned into domestic terrorists. The government defines the terms of the war on terror but you can't check to see how it's going because it's all secret.
And, underneath it all, fear that demographics are going to leave white people- especially in the South- subject to some of the treatment they so cavalierly dished out for so long.
Christopher Hitchens sums it up:
At the last "Tea Party" rally I attended, earlier this year at the Washington Monument, some in the crowd made at least an attempt to look fierce and minatory. I stood behind signs that read: "We left our guns at home—this time" and "We invoke the First Amendment today—the Second Amendment tomorrow." But Beck's event was tepid by comparison: a call to sink to the knees rather than rise from them. It was clever of him not to overbill it as a "Million"-type march (though Rep. Michele Bachmann was tempted toclaim that magic figure). The numbers were impressive enough on their own, but the overall effect was large, vague, moist, and undirected: the Waterworld of white self-pity.
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