By Lee A. Daniels

I want to thank two people in the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American community—Rush Limbaugh here in the U.S., and Nick Griffin, head of Britain’s major white-supremacist party—for their bracing directness.

Not for them the pusillanimous posture of reasonableness so many racists have affected in recent decades as people of color in both countries have fought for and achieved more of the full measure of their inalienable rights. Not for them the honeyed words spoken to conceal a diseased mind. No smiling face that hides the bent toward callousness and brutality. Limbaugh and Griffin are two of a kind: They practice bigotry straight up—racism without disguise.

I sometimes think there’s a tendency, especially in the mainstream media, to discount Limbaugh’s bigotry or take him as a joke, because we in the U.S. are so used to his rancid expressions of prejudice. His ravings, and the ravings of those he speaks for, have become the background noise of daily life in America. Indeed, it’s precisely because his bellowing is now background noise that some feel he’s of little real importance.

The truth is just the opposite. It’s because Limbaugh’s views carry on the evil tradition that not so long ago controlled America’s social and political life that it’s critically necessary to look without blinders into the spiritual sewer Limbaugh and his kind inhabit, and face squarely the desperate pathological needs that drive him and them.

One can, speaking generally, link those needs fundamentally to the romance of white supremacy: the need that drove much of the white world from the 1500s to the early 1900s to justify its war on many of the world’s people of color via tricked-up theories of moral or developmental superiority. In the old days, the days before the 1950s, white racists could be heard expounding all the silly facets of this great lie with confidence.

Since, then, however, I think what’s mostly driven the Limbaughs of the world is fear—the fear of our success.

Growing up in the early 1960s, I quickly understood that fear was the dominant motive for the brutality with which the Southern segregationists tried to hold back the tide of history. There was nothing about the slick Southern governors, senators and representatives or Jim Crow’s front-line enforcers like Birmingham’s Eugene “Bull” Connor and the leaders of the KKK that bespoke a sense of confidence. Even a teenager could sense that beneath the bully-boy bluster, they were all so frightened of having to live with the truth of blacks’ humanity—and compete against blacks for the status and resources of the society—that they felt they could do nothing but behave like savages.

Spiritually speaking, Rush Limbaugh is their child. He is so desperate to feel that being white makes him “superior” to any and every person of color in the world that he has, this week for his latest pathetic bluster, referred to President Obama as “this little boy, this little man-child president. ”

Earlier, last weekend, he eagerly seized upon a satirical article that sailed across the blogosphere claiming to have found proof that President Obama had trashed the U.S. Constitution in his college thesis. Limbaugh immediately gleefully denounced the president on his radio program—refusing to retract his criticism even after learning the truth about the article because he said it nonetheless did represent Obama’s thinking.

Is this any way for a responsible person to behave? One almost feels sorry for Limbaugh, struggling so hard to beat back the personal demons haunting him and build up a sense of his own self-worth by denigrating others.

Until, that is, one looks at Britain’s reasonable facsimile of Limbaugh, Nick Griffin. Griffin’s recent appearance on a usually-staid talk show produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation ignited a heated controversy there, with many criticizing the network for providing a forum for the Griffin’s British National Party, which recently won two seats on Britain’s 72-member contingent to the European Parliament.

Griffin, a Cambridge University law graduate, took heavy criticism. But he was able to make clear that his party’s racist platform has a very wide scope. It would force most of the country’s immigrant population out, including those of Asian, African and Caribbean descent and those of Muslim faith in order to reserve Britain for what he described as its “indigenous” white population. Griffin has also spoken against civil contracts for same-sex relationships, and has many times expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and doubts that the Holocaust was actually a deliberate policy of the Nazis.

For me, Griffin’s racism and that of Limbaugh, whose homophobia is well-known, lies in underscoring that the virus of bigotry is ecumenical, if I may use that word here. It’s never limited to just one group of people. All the anti-human pathogens exist in the same muck. One can’t root around in it without being infected by all of them.

So, thanks to Rush and Nick, for revealing, again, their disgraceful attitudes. They help, I say, give decent people the evidence to measure the size of the considerable gap between the bright future all of humanity deserves and humanity’s present reality.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.