Posted on 12/01/2015 4:43:30 AM PST by Servant of the Cross
The Left's highly selective application of today's standards to yesterday's heroes.
The latest round of condemning the past on the moral criteria of the present started with banning the Confederate flag from public places. Now it is on to airbrushing away progressive old white guy Woodrow Wilson, in Trotskyized fashion, from public commemoration.
But do those on the Left realize that they are rapidly becoming captives to the consequences of their own ideology? Their current effort to rewrite the past is doomed to failure for a variety of reasons.
Left-Wing Hypocrisy
First, this damnation of memory is not a balanced enterprise, but predicated on today's notions of politics, race, and gender. No one is insisting that the great work of Martin Luther King Jr. be dismissed from the pantheon of American heroism because he was a known plagiarist and often a callous womanizer who did not live up to our current notions of gender equality. The racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger is still a saint.
No one is claiming that Franklin Roosevelt was a third-rate president because his State Department was full of racists and anti-Semites, who were not too bothered by reports reaching the United States about the Final Solution, and who green-lighted the illegal internment of Japanese-Americans.
And why is Mohandas K. Gandhi exempt from left-wing ethical erasure? Was not his creed of non-violence tainted by the fact that his opposition to apartheid did not include much sympathy for blacks, while his advice to Jews facing extermination in Europe was heartless and anti-Semitic?
To be fair, shouldn't liberals demand that the memory of César Chávez be airbrushed? In 1969 Chavez sent his union thugs to the border to help turn away illegal immigrants, and he called for closing the border to prevent future illegal immigration.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
VDH ping ...
‘illegal internment of Japanese-Americans.’
I thought the internment was ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court. Reparations paid were voluntary.
LOL. Are you kidding?
Just like ObamaCare, right?
1) Statistical studies of voter turnout by Richard McCormick and others showed that the first time "democracy foamed near the crest" was with the election of the WHIG, William Henry Harrison in 1840. It is true that Harrison used Jacksonian party principles for his campaign, but still . . .
2) What Hanson and other Jackson lovers should understand is that Jackson was entirely a creation of Martin Van Buren and his new political party, the Democrat Party (1824) and that this party, THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, was created for one purpose only---to protect and perpetuate slavery. I deal with this at length both in "A Patriot's History of the United States" and in "Seven Events that Made America America." Van Buren was "personally opposed" to slavery (like so many "pro-choice" people say they are with regards to abortion) but felt it in the nation's interest to ensure and guarantee the permanence of slavery via the electoral system. To that end he created the "spoils system" and really created the modern partisan press, fully subsidized by the DEM PARTY. (One study showed 80% of the nation's "newspapers" were pure party organs).
This is why those seeking to paint Jackson as some great "populist" (another misused term) president are clueless. Now, I do think AJ was a patriot, and that he had America's interest at heart MOST of the time, but as a slaveowner himself (as, technically, VB was), he played right along with Van Buren's program of GROWING government through handouts in order to protect slavery.
3) Finally, although Jackson apologists try to say he was a small-government guy because he vetoed more legislation than Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams put together, the reverse is true. His constant use of EXECUTIVE power, even for "negative" purposes, so greatly expanded the power of the presidency that once it fell into the "wrong" hands (i.e., someone who opposed slavery, and whose very appointments would put it on its road to death), a civil war was inevitable.
‘Judging history by the mores of today is an exercise in futility’-originalbuckeye.
Except Leftists keep doing it and Big Media keeps parroting it. This country is in deep doo doo if those college kids of today think they are going to be able to ‘LEAD’ in the coming decades. This world is on fire and I doubt our enemies will allow the kids to run to a ‘safe space’ to regroup. History is documented to provide information on the foundation of our society. Good or bad, right or wrong, we HAD become the envy of the world. But our current ‘leaders’ resent that we were so successful and now have to tear apart our foundation. Including those who would now be deemed politically incorrect.
You say Jackson was the invention of Martin Van Buren? I’ve always thought the opposite was true, the Van Buren was the protege, indeed the proxy, of Jackson after the latter served his terms.
I’m not saying you’re wrong; you’re much more the historian than I am. It’s just that I’ve never considered VB influential enough — at least in the pre-Jacksonian years — to have invented anything of note. It was only after Jackson gave him a few plum assignments that he gained any real clout.
It bears further investigation.
“The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”
—David Horowitz, quoting unnamed SDS leader.
Perhaps he shouldn't have included the Jackson analogy in an otherwise spot on analysis. However, the whole point is that it's a very slippery slope once you begin to revise history hundreds of years after the fact. It's opinion and conjecture more than fact.
And perhaps you shouldn't judge the entire article based upon the inclusion of Jackson?
The de-mythologizing of Jackson is crucial to CORRECTLY labeling the Dems as the permanent party of slavery.
Even though he had been a senator, AJ was never really a politician. He always viewed things through the eyes of a general.
Van Buren totally created the Dem Party years before Jackson was influential. He designed it to overcome sectional tensions over slavery by rewarding his party loyalists with jobs, and basically created the modern "spoils system." Jackson didn't give him "plum assignments," The Little Magician as he was called told Jackson what to do. He knew he couldn't personally run in 1828---yet---so behind the scenes he set himself up as Jackson's veep then took the presidency in 1836.
>> Liberalism is a mental disease.
The problem with hospitalizing them is we would be paying for their room and board. We are already paying for many of them but not all.
Thank you for extending your comments. This provides so much more context than post #6 by itself.
I was aware of VB’s support of Crawford over Jackson, but considering how AJ and VB diverged on the slavery issue (eventually), I guess I’ve always seen Jackson as Obi-Wan and Martin as Young Skywalker.
I’ll check out your citations.
That is a really good quote that explains it.
Now, in VB's case, he really did think he was creating a solution to a pending civil war. But he IS the father of big government.
The free ride the Dems get on being the party OF slavery, FOR slavery, and BY slavery is incredible, and more so because so often today it is perpetuated by people who see Jackson as a “small government” president. He was no such thing. The structure of his party was inherently the “grow government” structure. He threw up a smoke screen with his “attack” on the BUS (which wasn’t truly a “government” bank so much as a private bank that the government had a minority share of, and which had to compete with its own notes with every other bank in the US and their notes. Drives me nuts.
Sigh. I almost always end up feeling depressed after reading works by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson and Thomas Sowell.
Depressed, because it is generally so clear and absolutely true and is largely impervious to logical deconstruction, but knowing full well there is a huge segment of American society today that sees this type of truth as heresy.
Horowitz is a sharp cookie.
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