Liberals Are Done Debating

First of all, not all the 48ers were socialists.

But the ones who achieved high public office and Lincolnian appointments as political generals (e.g. Schurz), were.

Funny how we don't run into deepthink articles in middlebrow Stateside magazines about the socialists' bromance with Lincoln, and vice versa.

Outrageous hypothetical: "Would Lincoln have supported suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolt?"

.....and the Southerners are always the put-upon working guys.

The Southern legacy boys were mostly killed on the battlefield during the Late Unpleasantness. I'm sure you'll have heard.

The old man may have received a Confederate governmental pass to go home and keep his slaves from rising and slaying a la the heroic Nat Turner and Cincque; but his sons and stepsons did not; and like Bobby Lee's junior kinsmen, they remained in the saddle while they were able.

Part of the poverty of the South after the Civil War had to do with losing the war. Part of it had to do with the slump in agricultural prices, something which affected farmers in other parts of the country as well (including the West and the rural Northeast).

Which was the triumph of the risen Gilded Age class, or O. Henry's "Four Hundred".

Northeastern businessmen have always lived on the spread between materials cost and selling price. That's why (not even my colleagues, a lot of them, figured it out) the Bush family have been the biggest enemies the American oil industry has had since John D. Rockefeller tried to corner it by himself.

Northeastern businessmen hate farm prosperity and oil-patch prosperity alike, and for the same reason: They're on the opposite side of the table, when the dullards come to market with their goods, not realizing that the Chicago pits are rigged against them -- for over 140 years, rigged I said. Yellow sheets, Henry Hub gas, West Texas Intermediate quotes -- all phonied up by the meddlesome hands of businessmen's conspiracies, exactly the ones Adam Smith warned us about, now all grown up from huddling in a back booth at the Rose and Crown, to mahogany-paneled back rooms at the Chamber of Commerce, to unlocatable chatrooms in Vaporland. Occasionally, a few words escape a keyhole, as when Enron's traders were caught notoriously laughing and sneering about mulcting natural-gas and electricity prices on the West Coast markets. But mostly it's business as usual, with evergreen quarterly checks rolling out to Muffy and Buffy and Chip and Skip, and irreproachable blue-haired ladies living in you-can't-afford-it-here-do-we-need-to-explain-it-to-you "good buildings" on Fifth Avenue.

Meanwhile, the land has fallen into the hands of the same corporations that beggared its former owners, corporations that now have created something like a Leninist agricultural economy and foster "modern" agronomy with hireling hands who would be lucky to share the old kholkhozy's payout of annual crop receipts to its workers' soviet.

Modern access-capitalists (Ayn Rand's loathesome Orren Boyle) don't hate socialism; they just want to be the guy you can't dissent from.

.... most of the socialists in Germany (Social Democrats) in the 1950s opposed Communism and the GDR.

Certainly in the 30's the socialist and communist parties of central Europe kept separate identities (although Hitler, in his purges and his rants, seems to have treated them as interchangeable) -- I rely on Wm. Shirer here -- but after World War II, who constituted Germany's GDR but "reliable" people (see Robert Conquest on "reliability" versus doctrinal purity for Communist 'crats working at the practical level), and did it matter whether they'd been members of the Communist Party in the interwar period? I ask not to push an answer, because I don't know about the composition of the GDR's rank and file, but because I sense a weak supposition in your argument, that interwar Party affiliation counted for a lot.

I'd need to know more about the size and composition of the GDR government before I could guess whether only simon-pure Communists filled its ranks.

Those were hard times for a lot of people. Putting so much reliance on cotton, though, was a lousy move. Even without the war and even without increases in domestic production those prices were going to fall when Africa, India, Latin America and other parts of the world enter production in a big way.

True, even without hardship-generating moves by big bankers to capture the wealth of others by engineering market crashes (the German bank crash of 1877, which went international, and the Panic of 1893, for which the smoking gun has now been found in an old desk drawer: a contemporary banker's memo that nails the blame and limns the conspiracy) that allow them to skim off assets at hugely-depressed prices.

But it's a mistake to think that U.S. cotton growers and northeastern banks lending against their crops in 1857, say, were wrong to foresee clear sailing. The Egyptian and other cotton industries were initiated by the Union blockade and Confederate boycott of the war years, aggravating postwar problems by enlarging supplies.

But I don't know about clinging to grievances from a century ago. Being perpetually angry about things that happened before you were born (and being so one-sided about everything that happened) may stoke your self-righteousness, but it may not be the best way to make friends or win allies.

Tell it to the Jews. They only need one good ally, just as they did in the time of the Maccabees.

Tell it to the Irish. Tell it to the Russians. Tell it to everyone who desires a Great Justice against historical malefactors and, as one of the Roosevelts called them, "malefactors of great wealth".

And lastly, to your warning that I will die friendless in a cardboard box, it's like Kenny Loggins sang it: "I'm alright -- Nobody's worried 'bout me", which would be true in any case.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.