We are not in a Civil War....anyone who thinks we are should read how bloody the last one was or come down where I live and check out what it was really like. We still have signs of the damage down here and the graves to prove it.
We are however sharply and distinctly divided....and dug in. And one side is EXPERIENCING A LONG HELD WAY OF LIFE AND SENSE OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY TAKEN FROM THEM BY FORCE....that is a key similarity. And yes Virginia, it involves color a bit this time around again....at least the way the sides have lined up. Much like the 1850s.
It is reasonable to think the current strife today which does lay out on racial lines to a degree with so many blacks still not neatly functioning in our culture to the same degree as whites has roots back to the same issues which played in the Civil War. Obama is Lincoln to them today metaphorically except they can vote, even if they are dead, in prison or 7 years old. Recompense for the evils of slavery....let’s call it “enriched enfranchisement”.. The 40 acres and a mules the Radical Republicans never fully delivered is in the works, let’s just give Obama and Nan a chance. ‘Course ya’ll will have to share with other folks of color who know btw outnumber you. Conyo!
But then, it goes beyond black and white too..well beyond.
Folks like this author who think it’s simply a matter of Democrats always bad and GOP always good have no inkling of social conservatism and how it has always played down South and they conveniently ignore the Radical Republicans who while maybe heroes to some revisionist northern GOPers here were the greatest Constitutional usurpers we had known at that time prior to FDR’s plans later in the 1930s.
History is simply more complicated.
Imagine:
Lancasters always right. Yorkists always wrong. Roses stink.
Silly and such logic defines one’s underlying prejudice. (prejudice used as the word should be historically)
Well, we see the result. The nation's demographics are changing, with Democrats now taking several states that were once solid GOP. Most people under age 30, educated by MTV and the publik skools, lean far to the left and are indifferent to their own nation's survival. Speech codes are sprouting up. Diversity training seminars tell us what beliefs we're allowed to hold, at risk of being fired for straying too far outside the PC realm. People increasingly define freedom not as free speech, political liberty, economic liberty, or religious liberty, but as having a “right” to health care, housing, or other goodies, and as a “right” not to be offended by non-PC speech.
And the result is, not only have we lost our culture, but we're not even going to maintain the economic freedom or strong national defense that the “moderate” Republicans supposedly wanted to defend. They never figured out that the reason the left spent so much time pushing social liberalism was that once a society becomes socially liberal, it was automatically demand socialist economics and a passive, weak military. They seemed to think we could have a population of activist homosexuals, abortion-loving feminists, and Third World migrants who were committed to the military, to patriotism, and to economic liberty.
So the impending Obama elevation (if it occurs) will be the final judgment on “moderate” Republicanism. And that judgment is, it doesn't work. It only whets the public’s appetite for dependency and socialism. Looks like the hated Southern social conservatives and Northern ethnic Catholics were right all along.
But I have great confidence in the ability of some around here to tell us, if Obama wins, that his election proves we need to be even more socially liberal in future elections.
Oh, yes, and I should have commented on this aspect: The constant attempt around here to link modern, far left, totalitarian, multiculturalist Democrats with the Democrats of the post-Civil War era is beyond bizarre. It’s like telling a conservative voter in North Carolina in 1984 that he should have voted against Reagan & Helms because the GOP was the party that invaded their state in the Civil War and later imposed Reconstruction on them. We’ve had a record number of posts this year arguing that blacks should reject Obama because the Dems housed anti-black politicians circa 1898 or 1936, as if that has any relevance whatsoever today. Anyone posting that “Martin Luther King was a Republican” stuff must truly think blacks are stupid. Either that, or they think we’re stupid.
To the THINKING people aware of the game McCain won hands down. To those told what to think led by leashes Obama was the winner as he didn’t cut an orphan’s throat to make a point.
Seriously, McCain made up big time by taking his notorious notes during the previous debates while Obama had too much faith in his supposedly eidetic memory. McCain’s mastery of the forum (while easing in Obama’s faults) definitely garnered him the advantage here. While Barrack was his usual cool bobble-head self he was definitely caught off balance having to defend his actions and associations more often than not.
It seems to come down to who’s responsible for this financial crunch. I see Carter to Clinton to Bush trying to stop what’s happening five years back. The Demons are (of course) trying to put it off on the Pubs. Obama was right in there working to get the undeserved mortgages from lenders who would never have done so without the threat of being sued for racial discrimination.
Here’s a thread that has a long, but very important booklet called “The Revolution Was”, by Garet Garrett (1938). Lots of parallels to today. I wish more folks would read this lesson from history.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/929392/posts
Here’s an excerpt:
So it was that a revolution took place within the form. Like the hagfish, the New Deal entered the old form and devoured its meaning from within. The revolutionaries were inside; the defenders were outside. A government that had been supported by the people and so controlled by the people became one that supported the people and so controlled them. Much of it is irreversible. That is true because habits of dependence are much easier to form than to break. Once the government, on ground of public policy, has assumed the responsibility to provide people with buying power when they are in want of it, or when they are unable to provide themselves with enough of it, according to a minimum proclaimed by government, it will never be the same again.
All of this is said by one who believes that people have an absolute right to any form of government they like, even to an American Welfare state, with status in place of freedom, if that is what they want. The first of all objections to the New Deal is neither political nor economic. It is moral.