Saturday, November 20, 2010

Killer angels and liberal fascists

Well, this is in Newsweek after all, so I know we can't expect much, and the headline is obviously just link bait: "Tea Partiers Are Today’s Slave-Owners". Oh sure -- or, you know, today's Nazis, or the Hun, or psychopathic racist killers, or whatever other bogeyman you can think of. But how did he get to "slave-owners" particularly? Turns out it's because before the Civil War southern whites thought of slaves as property, and now Tea Partiers think of, well, property as property. Or something:
The rhetoric in 1860, as now, was essentially about throwing off the burden of federal authority, getting rid of the tariffs and taxes Washington imposed, and protecting private property from the depredations of central government. There was one essential difference back then, of course: the private property in question in 1860 was human. But the fire-eaters of the Old South never put the emphasis on “human,” they always put it on “property,” and they pointed to their (white man’s) rights enshrined in Article I, Article IV, and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which declared no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Get it? The important connection here is property, and wanting not to be deprived of property is much like wanting not to be deprived of slaves -- isn't it obvious?

So what should Obama and the anti-slavery/property Democrats do about it? Why, take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln when faced with secession, of course -- call out the troops and crush the slaveproperty-owning Tea Party:
If, in the end, Lincoln did manage to hold the Union together, it was not because of the better angels of human nature, but because he finally found the killer angels among his generals who could, and did, and at enormous cost, crush the secessionists.
These basic facts about a moment of history that Obama obviously holds dear are worth going over again right now because, in fact, the secessionists of 1860 are the ideological forebears of the Tea Party movement today.
 Now, okay, this guy Christopher Dickey is no doubt just a goofy hack and no better than you can expect from a news magazine struggling to keep its head above water. But the problem is he's not alone -- try putting "eliminationist" into the search box at Instapundit (where I got the link to Dickey's little piece) and note the multiple links to left-lib death curses of one sort or another just on his blog alone. And the thuggish behavior isn't limited just to rhetoric, as a couple of recent incidents at Canadian universities illustrate. I'm not above a little link-baiting myself, but if we're going to get into historical comparisons, then comparing today's increasingly frustrated, resentful, and violence-spouting "progressive" left to the sort of liberal fascists Jonah Goldberg wrote a book about makes vastly greater sense than the laughable comparison of today's Tea Partiers to antebellum slave-owners.

Thanks to John at Verum Serum (via Instapundit).

9 comments:

  1. Dickey sounds a bit hyperbolic--his history's mostly correct, but the comparison's iffy--but you prove once again that you are a conservative (contra-your post below). Check 'em off: defend Tea Party. Say "left-lib" (Hillary's hardly leftist). Quote Instapundit and Goldberg approvingly. et al.

    Neo-confederates are not unknown, for that matter. Some of 'em hang at "Reason", the vegas-libertarian site you link to. (Or Volokh, Limbaugh, "Go Newt Gingrich").

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  2. I really don't care about labels that are used largely as epithets. For anyone interested in using labels descriptively, on the other hand, then my post below is just one indicator why "conservative" isn't accurate in my case. I am, however, right-wing, as that's currently understood in North America, and that means that I do defend the Tea Party for example, among other things, as well as oppose left-liberals. Hillary, I'll agree, appears more centrist than leftist -- though I'd say she's probably more opportunist than anything.

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. In other words, you don't attend sunday school, but you agree politically with the entire right-wing, capitalist, neo-con agenda: the Orthodox Church of Ayn Rand! (includes RA Heinlein, scientologists, Barry Goldwater, Kissingers etc). A is, indubitably, A.

    Secular conservatives are still conservatives though a few of them may outrank the usual yokels by a few IQ points . Im not sure the Randians or neo-cons (Greenspan quotes AR at times) are any more virtuous than Falwell sorts of nuts, however (perhaps less)--and really, at times even Miss Ayn waffled a bit (she voted for JFK, and was not impressed by Reagan).

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  5. You're a bit lost in the tangles of your own obsessions and phantoms, J -- your very own wax museum, so to speak. You sound comfortable though.

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  6. NO, you're lost and unaware of the actual history of yr own political heroes, and resorting to ad hominem, as per usual. And anyone who takes a loud, irrational poltroon such as Goldberg seriously shouldn't be taken seriously hisself.

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  7. Yo metamorf, one Byronius of New Worlds has now outdone Dickey on the Pathos-o-meter--Hitler, the teutonic Teabagger. And then some spam from Shirer's RAFOTTR, the flunky's favorite pop-history tome--(a joke anyway since Byronius attends sunday school, is WASP as Newt Gingrich, a Schwarzenegger supporter, and at least former repub, as well as mental patient-- )

    Which is to say, we might agree--slightly--with your criticism of unfounded liberal alarmism and hysteria--the sort of "blue eyes = nazis" multicultural BS (then, I doubt even Marx for all his flaws would agree with that). Cheap liberal pathos--like, Hitler is a Teabagger!-- deceives people, and keeps them from understanding authentic Evil--say that of neo-confederates, mafiosi, or religious zealots of all types.

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  8. Yeah, good catch. I think there's a fair chance the Tea Party will turn liberal atheists into believers, just so they can accuse it of being in league with the Devil.

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  9. Mo' from B-ron the blog-village idiot:

    It must be a Primate thing, the need to spin the narrative wheel so fast that it blurs, so that the Rage is absolute, the State Of Hostility so complete that there is no other thought, no reason, no dialogue. I’ve been caught up in it a few times myself during my long and eventful life, but never so much as these ’simple American folk’, who seem to be revving up for a new Civil War every single goddamned day.

    Heh heh. It's like Mitt Romney (B's LDS, or pals with 'em, at least when it needs to make a deal) attempting to scrawl some HS Thompson-style gonzo, but his Book of Mormon quasi-rhetoric keeps getting in the way, with a smattering of like RN 101 pop-science. Rage. Wow. Whose rage? I'm opposed to Rand Pauls (unlike B-ron and pals who accepted R-Paul, until the d-Kossacks nixed him), but Paul's hardly rage fueled, and seems somewhat reasonable (and unlike most Demos --or repubs--Paul called for decreasing the DoD budget). The DINO sentimentalist needs no focused target, however: he simply rants about straw men Hitlers, and impresses a few fellow psychotics.

    "A primate thing," yeah, whoa. Were that the case, pendejo, then who cares? River chimps killing desert chimps. Some of these DINOs can't even get the pop Darwinism correct--that's primate simpleton-ness, par exemple.

    HS Thompson'd would put down his cup of wild turkey, calmly pull out his .38, and smoke the phony punk.

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