When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America.This reminds me of the bit in Costa-Gavras' Z in which a fascist general, under prosecution for the murder of a leftist politician, is asked by a reporter if he feels himself to be a new Dreyfus. "Dreyfus was guilty!" cries the general.
Monday, October 21, 2013
THE GULL CAN'T HELP IT.
Midway through Charles C.W. Cooke's latest jet of froth (short version: People hate the Tea Party only because liberals are mean) comes this gem:
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... historians will almost certainly come to see the rise of the Tea Party as the super rich rolling up their sleeves and manually scooping out the wormy bits at the bottom of the shit bucket to try and hang on to a low marginal tax rate, comparisons to brownshirts and blackshirts be damned.
ReplyDeletehistorians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria represented by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that many of those those who were scared by the Tea Party rhetoric actually became neo-Confederate traitors in America.
ReplyDeleteThere, fixed.
Man, that formulation is pretty flexible:
ReplyDelete'When the history of this period in American life comes to be written,
historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by
race card liberalism as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s —
except, that is, that there were actual lazy niggers in America.'
Witlessly aping the argot of ostensibly detached science-is-settled utilitarians, he insisted that “all the metrics point to Neoconfederates showing themselves.”
ReplyDeleteWhere'd that crazy idea come from?
"Given that these people are more committed than they are creative, you will notice that their preferred epithets for the Tea Party are the ones that they throw at everybody. Hence “racist,” “greedy,” and “stupid.”"
ReplyDeleteWell, not everybody. We tend to save those epithets for people who are racist, greedy, and stupid. If we were to get creative like they do on Fox News, we might call them "fair-minded," "generous," and "intelligent," but those wouldn't be accurate descriptors of the people in question. Then again, I'm pretty sure Cooke finds any accurate description of his ilk objectionable. The solution that that, Chuck, is not to insist that everyone else lie about what they think of you; it's to stop being a racist greedy stupid asshole, so that people won't have to make a choice between telling a lie or calling you a racist greedy stupid asshole.
I think they're missing the point. People don't hate the tea party because they are mean, people hate the tea party because they spew hate at everyone who is not exactly like them. Unless you're a thin-skinned white racist douchebag who likes to play with guns, you aren't invited to their party, and they aren't shy about letting you know. To me, it's an indictment of American society that 27% or so buy into that philosophy.
ReplyDeleteI take it "jet of froth" is an amused euphemism for "explosive diarrhea."
ReplyDeleteCooke seems unable to do much else.
I think Mr. Cooke might be on to something. The Tea Party needs a cuddlier, more friendly image. Hello Kitty with an AR-15 and a Hoveround might do it.
ReplyDeleteAnd they already got 'em a anthem:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLaQWFJTPG0
historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by
ReplyDeletethe rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s —
except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America.
Whereas there is no Tea Party? Or is he saying the "Red Scare" now seems historically justified? In which case the historians will come to see what, exactly?
"Witlessly aping the argot of ostensibly detached science-is-settled utilitarians"
ReplyDeletechrist this dude is really paid money to write things? is it a sliding scale based on how much of a try-hard he looks like?
I don't think teabaggers are greedy. Stupid - yes. Racist - fucking duh (leaving aside that racist isn't an epithet so much as an accurate descriptor they insist on being diaper babies about). But greedy - I mean I guess wanting other people to make a ton of money at your expense is sort of like greed-by-proxy, but... still not the real thing.
ReplyDeleteThe more I read from him the more I'm convinced that CW Cooke was hired to make Jonah less uneasy about his own intellectual shortcomings. Dude does not seem to have a grip on any American history before the invention of charizard.
ReplyDeleteI think he just compared Obamacare to Imperial Japan. Does this mean we will see the rise of the "Greater North America Lower Co-Payment Sphere?"
ReplyDeleteThis is NR. They invented the "Red Scare," and have been taxidancing with Joe McCarthy's drunken corpse since.
ReplyDeleteShhhh. Don't tell them about "Comfort guys".
ReplyDeleteYou see, being hysterical about the Tea Party is just like thinking there's a Red Scare, which was not actually hysteria, because it was real, so the Tea Party is real too, and you can't be hysterical about something that's real. QED.
ReplyDeleteRemember how we established in a prior thread that Ted Cruz is basically Joe McCarthy with better hair and less decency? I suspect that insufficiently-careful historians will simply end up deeply confused: "Wait, wasn't this guy trying to root out enemies of the United States? Why is he openly trying to destroy its government?"
ReplyDeleteprepare for primary election trouble! (if you voted for obamacare, make it double!)
ReplyDeleteto protect the white race from devastation! to unite all god-fearing americans within our nation!
government shutdown at the speed of light! open up the wwii monument, or prepare to fight!
Poor Ted Cruz has been the victim of a witch hunt, which is a terrible thing unless you're hunting actual witches. I heard Goody Bachmann say she seen Elizabeth Warren fly over the Federal Reserve on a broomstick!
ReplyDelete...have you looked at the specimens of maleness available in this country nowadays? Between the pharmaceuticals, the preservative-laden diets, and the heavy metals in their tattoo ink, I'd have second thoughts about using them as fertilizer.
ReplyDeleteHistorians will really never find out what actually happened in the past. The past will always be hidden somehow.
ReplyDelete_____________________-
Tuition Assignments
"Selfish" might be a better word. Greed takes more ambition.
ReplyDeleteHistory will almost certainly not be written by the teabaggers. I mean to write history you must be able to write and the National Review is evidence that they can't write.
ReplyDeleteHm, do you call someone who is greedy for things she or he can't ever attain or things which wholly fictional to begin with?
ReplyDeleteThis is only on topic for the previous post, but I am genuinely confused and hoping the alicurati can help show me the light.
ReplyDeleteWhy is there a wingnut conspiracy theory/scandal that the Obama Administration was prepared for the shutdown? Of course they were. It's been on the horizon for months. There were policies and official contingency plans developed. Anything less would have been outrageously irresponsible.
Normally I can twist around my mind enough to understand the logic behind a right-wing scandal, but I can't even figure out where to begin with this one.
Man, Spongebob done got dark.
ReplyDelete(I actually had a great uncle named "Early" who probably talked a lot like the squidbillies before he died in a bicycle wreck.)
Basically, they just speak on whatever distorted activity may be occurring within their cranium. It doesn't have to make any sense, and frequently does not.
ReplyDeleteIf Obama knew the shutdown was coming, he ought to have been able to avert it! Just like Japan averted the tidal-wave.
ReplyDeleteOf course they were. It's been on the horizon for months.
ReplyDeleteWell, yeah. But despite their repeated public statements, publicly-posted web documents detailing plans to force a shutdown and how to spin it, and a ceaselessly-declared vomitous hatred for government and democracy, the 'bagger contingent immediately pivoted to how they were so completely shocked by Obama shutting the government down like a big ol' meanie once it was clear that the American public overwhelmingly thought it was shitty behavior. Ted Cruz even bloviated all over Monica Crowley about how saddened he was by Obama's surprising insistence on shutting down the government instead of compromising in good faith. Whereupon, once the shutdown was over, it had all been engineered by Obama from the beginning to make Republicans look bad. Proof? They were ready for the shutdown. Pay no attention to Ted Cruz' subsequent refusal to rule out forcing another Obamacare showdown in a few months.
Yes, this is pretty much the epitome of sociopathic asshole reasoning. Yes, it requires one to be either a complete dumbshit (Gohmert, Yoho, Bachmann) or cynically convinced that the American electorate are all complete dumbshits (Cruz, Rove). Welcome to the modern GOP.
We know what he means, but it's very close to something that would also be correct: "historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the Tea Party as akin to the Red Scare of the 1950's — when at least there were actual Communists in the world."
ReplyDeleteSoooo close!
I've got relatives who still talk pretty much like that, although a linguist could probably point out the differences between western GA and piedmont NC.
ReplyDeleteI thought I'd lost my accent by the time I went to college, until the kids of one of my friends told me "You talk like an old-timer!"
It's all the commas in my speech.
Pretzels, anyone?
ReplyDeleteAnd while there are actual Teabaggers, they aren't traitors? Just dumbshits?
ReplyDeleteI'll give Cooke his modest point about the positive correlation between education level and Tea Party support, as summed up by Dan Kahan. Cooke seems to think this invalidates all the negative publicity about the Tea Baggers, but it does not. There is clearly a neoconfederate strain in the Tea Party, just as there are libertarian strains and neoconservative strains. The Tea Baggers issue statements that sound pretty close to classic Fascist statements. And their worldview does seem pretty damn illogical.
ReplyDeleteIf anything, the Tea Baggers appear to be the "conservative movement" wearing 17th-century costumes. Richer people tend to vote more conservative on average, and also be more educated on average. So if you think about it it's not that surprising that Tea Party support would modestly correlate with income level.
They are rebranded Republicans. That is all...
ReplyDelete~
I love Z and was just recommending it over at Balloon Juice. It is a movie that is so spare, so dark, so brutal, so planed down to its component parts that you can watch it again and again and sink down into despair, rise up again, and fall again with the same intensity as the first time.
ReplyDeleteYou jest, but I'm sure somewhere out there in the various quantum worlds, there's a Jonah column floating around about how Pokemon is truly conservative. We must prevent it from reaching our reality at all costs.
ReplyDeleteI think they believe, deep down, that the pie is too small for sharing and that anything that is shared with someone else means less for them. It runs the gamut from sharing the country (citizenship) to sharing the taxes (infrastructure spending), to sharing schools (anti integration and anti public schools) to sharing the vote (anti other voters, pro limiting voting rights). So, yes, greedy. We can't get away from the word just because they are stupid fucks.
ReplyDeleteBut they deny that. That is: if you were to assert that the tea party is largely made up of old, angry, white, republicans they would tell you about the time they saw a black guy, or a woman (ok, not a young woman with tatts and a couple of abortions under her belt but still), or a guy who said he was half Apache or something.
ReplyDeleteThey're the rebranded GOP extreme conservative base. In 2008-09 they tried to use the costumes to convince people they were bipartisan, but given the lack of TP'ers primarying Dems, they've given that game up now.
ReplyDeleteClue, Ted Cruz version: Elizabeth Warren, with a broomstick, in the Senate cloakroom
ReplyDeleteWhat everyone else said, and: the conspiracy theory was patched together after the GOP could no longer deny that the shutdown was hugely unpopular and they'd taken a major hit in the polls. Since the GOP is, obviously, the heart and soul of real America and conservatism can't fail it can only be failed, etc., something unpopular and nationally loathed obviously wasn't their idea, it was forced on them by a sinister conspirator.
ReplyDeleteAnd it should go without saying that no one in the GOP ever thought it would be unpopular before it started. I think most of them truly believed the American public would praise them and fete them as liberators and champions of the common man. Bachmann probably still does. That's the sort of thing that happens when you willfully shut out any news that doesn't already tell you what you want to hear.
What was that? My mind, it is boggled.
ReplyDeleteJust a minute while I try to get loose to reach for one.
ReplyDeleteI'd also like to point out that "Really went to Harvard Law" is obviously kind of trumped by "Taught at Harvard Law." The stare down in the Senate cloakroom must have been, well, socratic.
ReplyDeleteNah, Hello Kitty is so last decade. My Little Pony is where it's at.
ReplyDelete(You'd think that there wouldn't be people out there who can simultaneously talk about their love of guns and violent revolution and their fears of the gay agenda and political correctness and profess their love for My Little Pony. You would, in fact, be wrong.)
States rights and low taxes to the federal government, as well as low return on citizen investment in justice and regulation from the federal government, are the free floating signifiers of the modern confederacy. You don't have to share any history or culture with the actual confederacy, and you only loosely have to be a christian sectarian (like the Mormons and some evangelical groups) or a stone racist to want to limit and even destroy the federal government. I mean: the federal state has only ever been a problem for people who wanted slavery instead of abolition and later people who wanted jim crow instead of civil rights--oh, and people who wanted free rein to exploit and degrade the economy and ecology of particular states, oh, and people who want cheap labor and no worker's rights, oh, and people who are against a national right to health...
ReplyDeleteoh, fuck, lets just admit it. Thats a lot of assholes, whether they grasp that they are neo confederates because of the racism or because of the devolution of power to local elites.
*cracks knuckles*
ReplyDeleteWell let's see:
- enrages liberal eco-fascists by portraying a happy symbiosis between humans and the pokemon they exploit for energy and labor
- gym leader system shows how in a well-functioning meritocracy, the most deserving and hard-working will quickly ascend to the top
- debunks multiculturalism by depicting a society where people happily sort themselves into rigidly homogeneous communities based on shared thematic interests
Because everything the federal government does is both stumbling, fumbling incompetence and brilliant seizure and manipulation of white people's taxes. In their world. Which means that these contradictory ideas should scare be shared with America. Like I said to my wife--we're both feds--"This is the hill they want to die on, but they want the rest of us to die too."
ReplyDeletegym leader system shows how in a well-functioning meritocracy, the most
ReplyDeletedeserving and hard-working will quickly ascend to the top
Well-functioning? All you need to beat the first few are like one strong grass-type. And you left out the fact that the only way to make money is by beating other trainers and winning it from them, but there's never any new money coming into the system. Pyramid scheme! Of course, in a truly conservative game, most of your winnings would go to Pokemart tycoon Sam Walton, who would promise you better pokeballs and potions at a cheaper price in exchange for licensing rights for any Pokemon trained using his products.
Sadly, I think the fact that you can heal your Pokemon as often as you need to, for free, kills the dream of Pokemon as the True Conservative video game. I bet you could convince Gen Y of the ACA's benefits by making a Pokemon mod where all the centers charge you more to heal the more injured your Pokemon are and charge you extra if you've been taking on trainers at higher levels than yours. Because how will they turn a profit otherwise? I'm only half kidding here, by the way.
The results of a prolonged ethnographic study.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's a relief. I was worried that the can of sardines I had for lunch had gone really off.
ReplyDeleteSadly, I think the fact that you can heal your Pokemon as often as you need to, for free, kills the dream of Pokemon as the True Conservative video game.
ReplyDeleteAh, but that just reinforces my first point. If libs, would stop irrationally stifling exploitation of our clearly overabundant resources, think of all the things we could have! This works even better if we're talking about the cartoon, where healing is handled by teams of chanseys instead of the machines.
Is there more than one of those dudes or is it just White Liberation Brony or whatever he calls himself?
ReplyDeleteAnd to think I've always loved octopi.
ReplyDeleteOr, "Really went to Harvard Law" < "President of Harvard Law Review"
ReplyDeleteAre they the morlocks?
ReplyDeleteYou know, they managed to make me forget about that. Of course that is the hidden factor in the right wing enthusiasm about Ted Cruz--on their side Harvard Law and Princeton are symbols of meritocracy while when it comes to the President they are clearly the result of affirmative action hobgoblins.
ReplyDeleteDuring the Red Scare in the 1950s:
ReplyDelete1.) Private citizens were criminally prosecuted simply for being leaders of the Communist Party. No allegations of violence or planned violence were involved.
2.) Legal residents were deported for leftist views they had, once had in the past or were suspected of having. Even US citizens were de-naturalized based upon spurious grounds.
3.) Thousands of dedicated and competent civil servants were summarily dismissed en mass with little due process based on vague allegations of "disloyalty."
4.) The Post Office was tasked with seizing "foreign communist propaganda" it found in the mail in order to keep people from reading it.
My great uncle defended a lot of these people--and a lot of them were little people, people like an elevator operator. The way people were pilloried and sought out, made examples of and fired/blacklisted is way closer to the ideal right wing theocratic state expressed in the way gays are hunted and fired in right wing universities and religious colleges. Thats the right parallel. The teabaggers are not seen as the enemy within, like the commies and the gays. The teabaggers are treated like a difficult, recalcitrant, political party with stupid and dangerous policy prescriptions. No one has been hunted, or spied on or fired because of tea party membership. I'm sure some of them get shunned because they are agressive assholes but thats all fair in a country that guarantees you the right to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
ReplyDeleteYes. For some reason, the Teahadist/GOP vision of being a true patriot is to despise the United States government and work for its downfall while actively trying to undermine the very precepts of democracy.
ReplyDeleteYeah I think it's kind of like believing in the End Times. I mean it's the same kind of susceptibility that takes its resistance to overwhelming counterevidence as proof of the strength of its faith. And then goes looking for "evidence" anyway for pitching at unbelievers and the uncommitted, and because it gets its feelings hurt when people say it's irrational and mean.
ReplyDeleteThe teabaggers are not seen as the enemy within
ReplyDeleteAnd they're trying so hard, too!
Oh, c'mon, everybody can see that they're super-patriots. They dress up like patriots, they wave the Constitution like patriots, they wear teabags on their hats like, umm, well, wait a minute. Did they have teabags in 1773? No? Well, it's the thought that counts--it's a symbol, you see, about tyranny and... and... huh? British East India Company? It was a revolt about the British government in collusion with a corporation? No, no, that's not possible, corporations are behind us all the way. They believe in us. They believe in American free enterprise and so do we. Why do I say that? Mister, they told us so at our last Tea Party meeting. Hey, why are you laughing? STOP LAUGHING AT US! STOP THAT! YOU'RE JUST A... A... YOU'RE A PINKO LIBERAL!
ReplyDeleteGood point. I guess I was thinking that the generational and regional divide between the southern revanchist tea party and the rest of us means that relatively few people have the experience of having a loved child turn into a tea partier--they aren't the enemy within your own family, they aren't (as it were) a silent but deadly force stealing in the window like peter pan and taking the children away which is very much the tea party/republican party model for gays, communists, atheists and educated people. These are all "isms" that can attack your child when they are out of your control at school or in the park and which drive a wedge into your family.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen them eating any Elois, so far..
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how they get it so ass-backwards.
ReplyDeleteOh, I have. And what makes it even more outrageous is they chew with their mouths open.
ReplyDeleteYes, this is right. I think it adds to their peevishness that they believe the pie was all theirs in the glorious golden age of America and all these latecomers are the vultures - or more appropriately, crows - picking at it.
ReplyDeleteUnknown Hinson's playing Louisville on Friday and Huntington, WV, on Saturday. Halloween? Athens, Georgia. I feel way too distant from his greatness. Was going to get a t-shirt to get closer, but his online store is closed due to "serious technical difficulties." Think he sells Obamacare on the side or something?
ReplyDeleteBut we can dream.
ReplyDeleteLord of the damn underworld if you ask me.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8akgrZcU0aY
OT but I must applaud you for the correct spelling of "free rein" since even alleged pro journalists go with "free reign" on MSM websites.
ReplyDeleteYes, agreed, and it's a weird contradiction: America is the best country and we can do anything we set our minds to! But also: America is too weak and small to survive a 3% hike on the top tax bracket, or put immigrants on a path to citizenship, or let all these dang gays marry -- well, make your own list of all the things we can't do without destroying ourselves. There's no shortage of policy choices capable of unraveling the Greatest Nation On Earth.TM
ReplyDeleteMuch as the muddled reference to the Red Scare amuses, I find the central thesis (as our host aptly and succinctly puts it, "People hate the Tea Party only because liberals are mean") to be even more laughable. I mean, really? That's your argument? Your preferred political faction is unpopular only because its opponents criticize it, and, according to your lights, that criticism is unfounded or unfair?
ReplyDeleteIsn't that kinda like saying, "Well the New York Giants don't really stink, its just that the other teams are constantly taking advantage of their weaknesses on offense, defense and special teams"? I mean, I think even at the NRO they realize that not every single negative thing that is said about President Obama and Democrats and liberals is really, truly, Scouts honor true, much less scrupulously fair. In national politics, as in the NFL, opposition, even relentless opposition, is sorta taken for granted, no?
Oh come on that's just waaaaaaay too sensible :)
ReplyDeleteSadly, I think the fact that you can heal your Pokemon as often as you need to, for free, kills the dream of Pokemon as the True Conservative video game.
ReplyDeleteGasp they have socialized medicine - COMMIES!
And don't forget teh reformed, converted gays!
ReplyDeleteInteresting Aimai. I guess that from the perspective of liberals, the worry is more that one's parents could be stolen and transformed into right wing ogres.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started. Nobody can spell anymore.
ReplyDeleteAnd now you have tea bagging assholes like Dennis Miller telling business owners to fire any democratic party voters that are working for them. He's encouraging people to spy on their fellow workers and out any Democrats so they can be fired. - http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/10/20/dennis-miller-fire-obamacare/
ReplyDeleteThe second faction consists of the genuinely dangerous Americans who do
ReplyDeletenot grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political
opposition in a free republic. These are the people who, willfully or
not, orchestrated and cheered on the IRS’s disgusting singling out of
tea-party groups.
Unwilling cheering is this thing I do.
Loosers.
ReplyDeleteSo, it's about bad parenting then.
ReplyDeleteYep. These are precisely the people who won the election for W in '04.
ReplyDeleteI know. That and "toe the line" are the things I'm most proud of in my misbegotten life. However the truth is at this point I think that free reign is probably just as good. I mean, at least it makes sense unlike the wide variety of "good enough" style malapropisms like "Cough it up" instead of "chalk it up" or "mind bottling" instead of mind boggling or my personal least favorite "retched" instead of "wretched."
ReplyDeleteIs it so obvious? Yeah. Thats basically what I've come down to believing. I used to think it was just a joke that it might all come down to potty training--but now I really think that. I'm working on a tediously long piece about exactly this issue in childrearing in Albion's Seed and how it plays out in our modern notions of citizenship, liberty, and action.
ReplyDeleteYes. I don't see a lot of liberal anxiety that your kids are going to join an evangelical church--or not the same level of anxiety that I remember people worrying about the Moonies or the Hare Krishnas. I'm sure it does happen but I'm not seeing it. And generationally although there is always some slippage backwards younger americans are basically mostly (mostly) less racist, less homophobic, and less conservative than their older relatives.
ReplyDeleteNow that's some fine Jonah-style.
ReplyDeleteYou spelled it right!
ReplyDeleteWell, its also kind of...limp. People were referencing the Dinsdale Monty python sketch in the last thread but its apposite here, too. I mean, look, if Obama is a combination of Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot is that really the worst thing they can think of that he's done to the Tea Party--that he used litotes and maybe a bit of parody?
ReplyDeleteIn the end their main grievance, the one they went to the mattresses over (before all their other retrospective crusades) was that the President doesn't respect them and doesn't make them feel really good about themselves.
This was discussed ad nauseum on the blogs and people on the right all agreed that the worst thing the president did was "not negotiate" and "not be nice" and "not respectful" to congress and blah blah blah. On the left people kept saying rather plaintively, like it was so obvious it ought not to need to be said, "respect is earned and congress hasn't earned it. I mean just look at those morons?"
What we have here is a failure to communicate because (I'm going to argue this any daywhen I stop being so sick) of the different cultural histories behind ideas of manhood, authority, and deference. The tea party can never get enough deference from Obama because he is the wrong skin color and the wrong party to occupy such a high status position. He simply can't give them enough deference because it would involve probably resigning from the office and also admitting he's an abject failure. Meanwhile they don't understand the concept of earning respect from someone of lower rank than themselves. Respect and deference are simply due people by virtue of their status, their status pre-exists the negotiations or the success or failure of their gestures. It comes to you with age, gender, and race in the context of other relationships. Such relationships are only negotiable when they are among equals--like Cruz battlign it out with other white republican senators--and as between the republican party and democrats it is non negotiable. It preexists, structures, and supercedes the actual interaction.
OK, wandering off now.
I saw that movie when it was first released in 1969. It was stunning. And as we left the theater, I was ready to lead a violent revolution against those bastards.
ReplyDeleteOr that perennial freshman comp favorite, "defiantly" for "definitely." Though that's really just the spell-check automatically "correcting" "definately."
ReplyDeleteSorry, I know all that. What I meant is that the existence of a federal state and territories which were larger and distinct from the purely slave owning states created a situation in which slavery/abolition was fought out through the federal state and its laws. Even though that Federal state, its presidents and SCOTUS were controlled by the slave owners for long periods ante-bellum the existence of non slave states/territories and the possibility of negotiations over the property state of slaves at all made the federal state a potential liability for the South. And thats sort of what ends up happening--the South pushes too far and decides it can no longer safely leave its slave holding interests in the hands of the US under Lincoln and rebels.
ReplyDeleteIts like some law of gravity and energy, only they are just theories so who knows? The theory of explosive bile? Is it related to phlogiston?
ReplyDeleteWell, Liberty and Bob Jones and the rest have pretty small enrollments. I think it's more important to remember that one can get a college degree fairly easily without being particularly studious, and most of the teabaggers I meet on the internet or IRL are dumb as fuck.
ReplyDeleteIt's the only way to defeat tribalism!
ReplyDeleteI was sort of arguing with a moron on a message board about the tea party when he insisted that 40% of tea party members are black. And that ended the conversation, because, holy shit that is stupid.
ReplyDeleteNot much related to phlogiston, which was a real scientific theory of sorts. It wasn't just some blather about a mysterious something that accounts for the mystery of fire; it actually gave a reasonable account of oxidation-reduction reactions in general, which was a step forward.
ReplyDeleteTurned out to be backwards, of course, but that beats being not even wrong.
Plus, when they say "negotiate", they really mean "surrender". He had the audacity to say no to them! Letting them hold their breaths until they turned blue is no different than strangling them with his own hands, don't you know?
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started on "anymore".
ReplyDeleteThe theory of explosive bile?
ReplyDeleteIt's the opposite of the Luminiferous Aether.
Well so much for my commemorative Hiss-Cruz tea cozies.
ReplyDeleteAnd "retched" pronounced "reached" at that.
ReplyDeleteThis was likely the same strategy Miller attempted to advance himself in the comedy business, and is probably why he's a has-been today.
ReplyDeleteReally, he was advocating McCarthyist tactics before? I don't remember that, but then I haven't paid much attention to him for a while.
ReplyDeleteOh, I was thinking mostly about his declining ability to get mainstream gigs, and was imagining that he tried to pull the same shit on Letterman ("don't put on that Robin Williams guy--he's a liberal!").
ReplyDeleteA lot of people said that he became this way after 9/11 (as if he were more than marginally funny before 9/11), but, as with other scoundrels, as Ambrose Bierce would say, patriotism is the first refuge of the ambitious hack.
Well, I dare say that the NY Giants understand their playbook, even if they don't execute it very well.
ReplyDeleteThe Tea Partiers wave around the Constitution as if that were a satisfactory substitute for understanding it.
A while back I heard part of an interview with Neil Gaiman, and he observed that there were three qualities that editors used to judge writers:
ReplyDelete1. They could produce brilliant prose.
2. They could be really easy to get along with.
3. They could turn their work in on time.
He'd realized that to be a successful writer you needed to do at least two of those. I can't imagine the field of comedy is that much different. I also refuse to believe that September 11 turned Miller into a dick; he was probably always a dick. Who wants to work with dicks, especially when you can book someone just as funny who isn't a dick?
I'm pretty goddamned sure that the guy that said, "The second faction consists of the genuinely dangerous Americans who do
ReplyDeletenot grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political
opposition in a free republic" was not singing the same hymn when there were anti-war protesters in the streets, or Occupy WS demonstrations in the parks, or volunteers out trying to elect progressives to government, or blocking bulldozers installing the XL pipeline. (Not least because he's outright lying about the IRS-Tea Party brouhaha concocted by Congress' foremost car thief.)
What Cooke is demanding is unqualified respect for bad ideas, shoddy thinking, closeted racism and the amorphous threat of violence if a marginal minority doesn't get exactly what it wants--even if those desires run counter to those of the broader citizenry. All that would be enough to reject Tea Party demands out of hand, let alone that the movement is bankrolled by and guided by crackpot billionaires with their own private agenda driven by an obsession with the accretion of political power and influence in the furtherance of wealth accumulation.
Cooke would have us confuse the right of dissent with respect for the goals promoted precisely because of his affinity for the goals, a trait of kneejerk authoritarians and reactionaries so common that it, in the past, was hardly worth noting.
Except that the Federal Territories, right from the beginning, provided, areas of expansion for slavery. Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc were carved out of Federal Territory. The Louisiana Purchase provided more Territories for slavery (Arkansas, Missouri), and so on. The existence of large Federal territories was an opportunity for slavery expansion, not something the "slaveocracy" feared. Indeed, the slave owners wanted even more land added to the US than was actually achieved (Cuba was eyed as a prize for decades). And then a whole, enormous State, Texas, was added to the USA directly, which was also the result of the work of slave owners and very much to their purpose.
ReplyDeleteThe Federal Governments was the slave owners' vehicle, not their nemesis. It provided them with the room for growth that they never would have had if the Slave States were on their own. As to this: "the possibility of negotiations over the property state of slaves," while I suppose it did exist, (anything is possible, after all), it was incredibly remote. Indeed, as I mentioned before, the Republicans in 1860 had no plans whatsoever to forcibly end slavery in the Slave States. At most, they were toying with long, long term regimes of compensated emancipation. The Federal Constitution simply did not empower the Federal Government to declare, by fiat, that the property rights in slavers were null and void. Which was yet another reason why the South loved the Fed....it protected slavery in a way that a truly National government never would. In France and Great Britain, the national legislatures simply declared a regime of emancipation, through ordinary, simple majority, law making procedures, and that was that. Such a thing could not happen under the Federal Constitution.
"And thats sort of what ends up happening--the South pushes too far and decides it can no longer safely leave its slave holding interests in the hands of the US under Lincoln and rebels."
Yeah, the South pushed too far, and that got them Lincoln and a Congress full of Republicans. Then they decided to leave the Union because, perhaps falling victim to their own rhetoric (much like the Republican conservatives today?) that Lincoln and the Republicans were the extremist abolitionists that they, the planter class, had said they were. They might have thought, erroneously, that slavery was under attack even in the Slave States. Or, another way of looking at it is that the Slave States, and slave owners, were so damned used to getting their way, and were getting it more and more and more until 1860, that they were stunned by their crushing defeat and over reacted. Or, their vaunted "honor" fixation would simply not allow them to be told, "You know what, you pushed things too far and so your opponents now hold the cards in DC, and even though your 'peculiar institution' is not under any real threat in your States, still, you are not going to be able to ride roughshod anymore over the Northern, Free States, or get your way in the Territories," and take it. So they secceeded, and, again, they pushed too far/overreacted/let their "honor code" get the better of them, actually firing on the flag at Fort Sumter, rather than just patiently waiting for the remaining US forts and other facilities to fall into their hands.
"the existence of a federal state and territories which were larger and distinct from the purely slave owning states created a situation in which slavery/abolition was fought out through the federal state and its laws"
ReplyDeleteBut it (slavery/abolition) was NOT fought out through Federal law. Slavery expansion was, but not slavery in the Slave States, not slavery per se. It took a Civil War to abolish slavery, and everyone knew at the time that that is what it would take. The Federal Constitution simply did not empower the Federal Government to abolish slavery in the Slave States, and no amendment could possibly be passed to change that. Rather, at most (and even this was contested, and actually reversed in Dred Scott, so strong was the "Slave Power,") the Federal government had control over slavery in the Territories.
Yes, but...no. The point I'm making is different from the one you think I'm making. It should be obvious that since the inception of a federal government the slave states were attempting to game the structure of our democracy to prevent non-slave owners from outnumbering them and seizing control of the federal government for their own purposes. Thats what the original 3/5ths compromise was about. Maybe this is too high falutin' for you, and I salute your detailed historical points, but the fact remains that at base the slave states were aware that reliance on a federal government could be a two edged sword. Sure: they used it and controlled it when they could but as soon as the push began to make some territories "free" the lines were drawn and only one version of the US would survive--could survive. At any rate my original point referred to the post bellum period. Are you still going to argue it? Reconstruction and civil rights (with an interregnum for post reconstruction failures of the national state) set the tone for hostility to the federal state and the use of states rights as a way of pushing back against a new, potentially democratic, social and political compact.
ReplyDelete"Look what you made me do" the cry of the three year old who has broken the vase.
ReplyDeleteEven a not-so-strict civil libertarian would say your shorter is acceptable, constitutionally. However, Cooke is not asserting a right, but, rather, is making a veiled demand for agreement under the guise of a First Amendment appeal.
ReplyDeleteThis is closely akin to what we've heard repeatedly, in one form or another, from the Tea Party's doyenne and head clown, Sarah Palin. Whenever she's offered up word salad and has been laughed at for doing so, she has equated disagreement with or derision of her pronouncements with a denial of her rights to free speech, i.e., criticism of any kind is impermissible as a violation of her rights. This is exactly the sort of defense one would expect from a cotton-headed moron with an inexcusably shallow grasp of the concept, but it's also a pretty lame attempt to misuse respect for free speech in order to quash other points of view, which is not an afforded right. It's also a classic tactic of reactionaries, whose ideas and expressions often cannot bear even casual scrutiny.
Yes, but would you take it as a means of evading all other coursework in the humanities? Of course not.
ReplyDelete"At any rate my original point referred to the post bellum period. Are you still going to argue it?"
ReplyDeletePost bellum I have no problem with your point, certainly when it comes to Jim Crow.
But, in your original post, you said, " I mean: the federal state has only ever been a problem for people who wanted slavery instead of abolition and later people who wanted jim crow instead of civil rights," and I took the first part of that, the part that was not "later" and that was about abolition and slavery, not unjustly, I think, to refer to the ante bellum period. as there was no slavery in the post bellum period (slavery was de facto dead by the end of the war, and de jure within another year). And there is the use of the word "ever" too.
And, in your second post, you said, "What I meant is that the existence of a federal state and territories which were larger and distinct from the purely slave owning states created a situation in which slavery/abolition was fought out through the federal state and its laws," which, again, IMHO, appears to relate to the ante bellum period (as there were no slave holding States post bellum).
And, even in your latest post, you still seem to be talking about the ante bellum period right up until the last couple of sentences. With all due respect, I think I do understand the point you have been trying to make, it is not too "high fallutin'" for me, and, while I appreciate your salute to my historical recitation, in my view, that recitation pretty much refutes your point, with respect to the ante bellum period. No, the Federal government was not a "two edged sword," it was an almost wholly unalloyed good for the Slave States. It allowed them to use the manpower, industrial power, organizational efficiency, educational institutions, and so on and so forth, of the North in service of the maintenance and expansion of their own Slave Empire. Wars were fought against the Native Americans and the Mexicans using Northern know how, logistics, industrial capacity for weapons and ammunition, shipping, money, financial institutions, and so on, to gain new territory for slavery. Nor is it at all clear that the Slave South could not have survived, in the Federal Union with the North, if it hadn't pushed the envelope so damn hard. Lincoln said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, but that was in the context of Dred Scott, Kansas Nebraska, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and so on.
My point is that, contrary to what seems to be a popular belief in the left-liberal camp, it is simply not true that the Federal government has ALWAYS been on the side of the angels, even when it comes to race and slavery. Nor has the opposite always been true, ie that those arguing for State autonomy have always done so from a reactionary POV, even in the field of race and slavery (with the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, including the State Personal Liberty Laws, as a good example).
Again, no. Post the A of C, rather than there being a "zero sum game," what there was instead was a wildly successful country growing at the expense of all its neighbors (colonial France and Spain, successor states like Mexico, Native Americans). And that new territory became the locus for the expanding slave empire. The territories were not something that hurt the South, rather they provided new lands for slavery. And, to the extent that slavery was to be cabined off from at least some of those lands, those efforts were checked by the Dred Scott decision and the Kansas fiasco. And no limits were seen on the possible growth...to repeat, Cuba was in the South's gun sight, as were other Caribbean and Central American territories, and perhaps more of Mexico too.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, without the North, without the Federal structure, the South would have been much, much weaker. Look at the Confederacy itself. Take a look at the work of Stephanie McCurry and Bruce Levine, among others. The South was a weak polity, it was divided against itself, not just on the obvious racial lines, but on gender, class, and regional lines as well. Being part of the Federal Union, having access to the assets of the North, helped maintain and expand the "Cotton Kingdom." Shoot, it was a Yankee, Eli Whitney, who invented the damn machine that made cotton profitable outside of a few coastal areas.
As for national citizenship and rights, they really only come about as a result of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and, down the road, the Progressive Era. Folks in 1860 still routinely referred to their State as their "country." The US was still called "these United States" not "the United States." The addition of new territories really didn't change that, because the territories soon became States, and, as such, entered the Union as fully equal to the existing States.
But to the extent that there were "national rights," they were precisely the opposite of what you are suggesting. What was upheld in Dred Scott was a "national" right, a right under the Fifth Amendment to hold property subject only to the "due process of law," and, SCOTUS held, a Federal statute (the Missouri Compromise law) applicable to the Territories (where the Federal government had plenary, police powers) that purported to disallow slavery did not satisfy that requirement. In other words, a slaveholder had the "right," under the Federal Constitution, to take his slaves into what was putatively "free," Federal Territory, and retain those slaves. And it was the rights of slaveholders that were vindicated by the Federal Fugitive Slave Act too.
"The South and the states with the most southern/elite/exploitative/extractive economies have preferred the pre-national period of the articles of confederation rather than the post national period of the actual constitution..."
That is true post bellum, but pre bellum the Southern States most definitely did NOT prefer the A of C to the Constitution. The Constitution worked just fine in not only upholding their interests, but promoting them much further than they could have gone on their own.
"... and, in fact, it is more or less a return to this earlier compact that the supreme court is talking about when it creates the spurious notion of some kind of state-equality in sovereignty."
That I agree with.
. I think it's more important to remember that one can get a college degree fairly easily without being particularly studious
ReplyDeleteSee also: MBA
Names aside, you do pretty well yourself, when it comes to arguing!
ReplyDeleteNot only that, but you've been doing some back pedaling and ground shifting too. As I mentioned, your first couple of posts seemed to include the ante bellum period. Then, in your third post, you said your "original" claim was only about the post bellum period, even though you continued to talk about the ante bellum period, which you also continue to talk about in your latest post.
It seems to me you could, instead of all that, if you were perhaps a bit less argumentative, just admit that the one sentence I pulled out of your lengthy original post (almost all of which I agree with, by the way), was not correct.
Or siblings.
ReplyDelete"For all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes."
ReplyDeleteIt was how I grew up, how I was raised. Everybody else got the good stuff except us. Nobody gained anything without having stolen it from what should have been our share. Naturally it was partly our fault because we were too "good" and "responsible", i.e., we were suckers (but OMG not really; we were just too noble for our own good). Rich people got richer, poor people got handouts, and we got nothin'. We had resentment and hurt feelings for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Eventually I choked on it. My whole childhood and adolescence was like a rehearsal for Tea Partyism. How 'bout them family values.
ReplyDeleteOh. Wow. What a powerful piece of testimony. I'm choking a bit just reading it. Thank you for sharing it. My in laws come from that kind of squeezed place, having risen out of extreme poverty and abandonment to a middle class existence. They are very zero sum and kind of generally a bit bitter but, mercifully, they never took the turn for racism and anti-poor speak that leads to the tea party. I never really gave them the credit that they deserve for that.
ReplyDeleteI love that site! I'd totally forgotten about Egg Corns and that blog. Thanks for reminding me. I definitely need to go re-read it.
ReplyDeleteMy daughters remind me that there is a Leverage episode where the gang goes to liberate a small island that seems to be a mashup of places like Argentina and something something caribbean and the island is named Costa Gavras. It includes a political assasination. Its a lovely little hommage.
ReplyDeleteYeah, there's a lot of sibling splittism in this country, and I suppose there always has been. I'd love to see a sociological study done on red state/blue state family styles which explored how different siblings turn out thanks to choices made (or foisted on them) by educational and religious differences. In my voyeuristic opinion there is a big difference between an immigrant family mentality in which the family is seen as a clan which pushes all its members forward and a nativist/white/midwestern/borderer perspective which sees children as full adults at 18 who are "not entitled" to family support after that. Sometimes its because the family is raising more, younger kids and can't afford to support a 19 year old--that's a special kind of parental non investment strategy. Sometimes its seen as a principle that distinguishes good families from bad.
ReplyDeleteOne of my current favorites is "wallah!"when the word actually in mind is "voila".
ReplyDelete"Viola" is also amusing.
ReplyDeleteThe Tea Partiers wave around the Constitution like pom-poms. All this analysis of the logical substance of right-wing combat rhetoric
ReplyDeleteseems a little off the point. These guys aren't debating, not at all; they're
cheerleading. Even after they get in office, the legislation they make itself is less substance than shout-fest - I mean, a bill called the "U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act"! "Rah rah Republican Right! Republicans rule, Dumbocrats drool! Gee! Oh! Pee!"
What a powerful piece of testimony. I'm choking a bit just reading it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing it. My in laws come from that kind of squeezed
place, having risen out of extreme poverty and abandonment to a liposuccion precios middle
class existence. They are very zero sum and kind of generally a bit
bitter