From Daily Kos:
It was merely the election of a President from a Party that
endorsed Abolition, even if that President at the time DID NOT make
accomplishing that party of his platform or an agenda item of his
administration - that drove the South in a complete overreaction to losing an Election to begin to dismantle the nation State by State.
And now today we see more and more Tea Partiers - while also overreacting to an election they lost - slowly endorsing the legitimacy of a new secession
and further - of ABSOLUTE rights of the BUSINESS OWNER over their
EMPLOYEES (as well as CLIENTS) in everything from denying them a living
wage and working conditions to Dictating Whether they can have access to Preventive Services in their HealthCare, impose llfetime caps, and openly discriminate against those who had the temerity to previously GET SICK.
Apparently Modern Confederate Tea Partiers think the cruelty of that system is just "Fine".
More here.
A buddy of mine posted that link on my facebook page. Here's the comment I left in response.
It's a good essay, to be sure.'Nuff said.
As you know, I've been trying to find a way to articulate this idea, which seems so obvious and clear to me, but is dead on arrival with conservatives and moderates. I forget the guy's name, but a guest on Moyers a few weeks back said something to the effect that the Republican takeover of the South ended up being a Southern takeover of the GOP. So we're fighting the Civil War all over again, in a cultural and political sense, but most of the country appears to be completely unaware.
It seems to me that if we, as Americans, had a handle on what's actually happening, if we had some historical perspective, a dispassionate view of the cultural forces at work here, we'd have a much better chance of sorting things out.
Culture is like the air we breathe. It's all around us, but invisible, affecting our thoughts, feelings, actions, values, and behavior in ways we often don't understand. Contemporary white Southern culture, incubated in a womb of guilt over slavery, and fear of black retribution, then born into and reared within a bubble of paranoid resentment toward African-Americans and the North alike, has embedded within it all the crazy shit that modern conservatives now embrace. But to so many Southern whites, it all seems so normal--the Civil War was a long time ago; what does it have to do with lazy welfare moochers and "socialism" and liberals who want to take away their guns and property? No, to Southern white conservatives, their politics are just good sense, having nothing to do with the pathetic, elitist, violent, racist regime which their ancestors embraced.
White Southern conservatives are just as captive to these ideas, handed down from parent to child for over a century, as the Republican Party is to them, and as the nation is to the Republican Party. I like the Baudelaire paraphrase from that movie The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." That's as good of a description of the situation we're in today as any I can imagine. An entire conceptual framework of dangerous and discredited ideas was allowed for generations to fester and then finally flourish once nobody could remember where it came from in the first place.
Slavery, and every institution and philosophical system supporting it, was a deadly cancer on this nation which we believe to have been cut out in a bloody and deeply traumatic surgical procedure. But we never followed up with chemo and radiation. The cancer hid within our national body and mutated. And it has now returned in full force, threatening, once again, to destroy us all.
And very few of us seem to realize how sick we really are.
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