Say again?

Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people

Sam Tanenhaus says the Republicans are the party of white people and his magazine, the New Republic, calls that “original sin.”

Me?

I wonder if Sam – or the people who write his headlines, anyway – is telling us that white people who know what’s good for them should be voting Republican.

I wonder if the New Republic is saying it’s a sin for white people, though not others, to be concerned about what’s good for them.

Having voted for Obama twice and being pretty sure no un-rich American of any race with an ounce of sense and a glimmer what’s good for him will ever vote Republican for any office during the rest of my lifetime, I find all this confusing.

Being white myself, I mean.

Am I perhaps the one making a terrible mistake?

Sam, like liberals generally, by far prefers to cast the central contemporary opposition between the Republicans and the Democrats as a clash of races, or rather as a clash of one race against all the others and a clash between whites who deny and others who comprise and celebrate American diversity.

Like liberals generally, he has abandoned the other vision of that opposition that cast the Democrats as the party of the people, of the common man, of the vast American majority and the Republicans as the party of the rich.

He prefers to narrate American history as a racial conflict and even thus to exacerbate it for political gain, though that narrative slanders and maligns and even alienates the tens of millions of whites who voted for Obama and without whom the Democrats still cannot win, and will not be able to win for many decades to come, if ever.

And it slanders as well the millions of whites who vote Republican because they are rich and want to keep what they have laid hands on by hook or by crook, because they accept the moral and political vision of the libertarian bumper-sticker that says “socialism is fine until you run out of other people’s money,” or because they are devout Christians who reject the contemptuous and grossly immoral secularism they see as dominant among Democrats.

And he does all that just as a majority of the professional white left has done since the race riots of the sixties and 70’s when they virtually guaranteed the success of the “southern strategy” by repeatedly siding, at least rhetorically, with the likes of Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and the Panthers against the whites who feared them and the police who fought them.

Not to mention the black rioters who, in those days and in city after city, slaughtered whites whenever they could as the professional left told America whites had it coming and the rioters were exacting moral and racial justice.

Oh.

Many conservatives over the last 60 or 70 years have lionized Edmund Burke, a champion of monarchy and aristocracy against the brilliant revolutionary republicanism of the French on the continent.

Considerably fewer over all that time have ever had a clue who Calhoun was, and he nearly disappeared from conservative propaganda altogether between the civil rights era and the recent emergence of neo-confederate thought that has lionized pre-Civil War nullificationists and secessionists of the South like Jefferson and Madison and of the North like Webster, Stevens, and most of the abolitionists.

All the same, a history lesson is a good thing, once in a while.

Even if the liberal bias of the thing is so pronounced.

Get rid of the 2nd Amendment

It was intended in the 18^th Century to defend republican institutions against resurgent monarchy and aristocracy and to prevent the great and rich from trampling the rights of the people.

In our time it has become a public safety disaster, a weapon of the unscrupulous plutocracy, and a threat to republicanism and democracy.

I posted the below in answer to this post of BooMan’s with which I mostly agree. 

Indeed, much of what I write repeats what he writes.

But not all, and we don't agree on quite everything.

Talking the Second Amendment

Considerable research has been done on the intentions behind the Bill of Rights as a whole and the 2nd Amendment in particular, mirrored in the constitutions of several other states at the time and since.

The generally accepted conclusion has been that protection of an individual right was intended and that the reasons it was thought necessary to protect that right were three: the need for self-defense in a frontier society, the need to hunt for food, and a popular – not an upper class – concern to enable resistance to tyranny at a time when the American synonyms for "tyranny" were “monarchy” and “aristocracy” rather than “socialism” or “Marxism.”

Madison and the men of Philadelphia had not included a Bill of Rights in the Constitution and he thought it both unwise and unnecessary to do so.

But, under pressure from many others including Jefferson, Madison drafted a list of amendments the then congress boiled down to the familiar ten.

When he did so he included in what became the second as a reason for its importance an allusion to the republican notion of the time that “a well-regulated militia” – as opposed to such a dangerous tool of tyranny, again meaning monarchy and aristocracy, as a standing army – is the “best security for a free state.”

At the time, a militia was just a somewhat drilled, trained, armed, and disciplined body of ordinary people.

Just the kind of thing the people could, it was felt, spontaneously organize among themselves to resist threatened impositions of monarchy or aristocracy if they owned their own weapons, though such spontaneously self-organized rebellion did not do well against George Washington’s troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.

All the same, that political reason was not the only reason for writing directly into the Constitution a guarantee of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Something like the above understanding first became the conservative theory of the 2nd Amendment some decades ago.

It was accepted as early as 2008 by Barack Obama and has since through decisions of the Supremes been incorporated in the reigning jurisprudence of the land.

It is worth emphasizing, I think, that the tyranny this right was intended to enable the people to resist was embodied in monarchy and aristocracy, the then nearly universal forms of tyranny that America had just thrown off and that Ben Franklin alluded to in his famous statement of what sort of government the Constitution set up, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

And these forms of tyranny, of course, were emphatically defended by that modern conservative hero and vigorous enemy of republicanism and revolution, Edmund Burke, in his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a book of such infamous and black reaction that had it been written in America during our own revolution it would have been the deepest treason and well worth a hanging.

And it is also worth noting that the threat of a monarchist counterrevolution is past while nowadays having too many weapons in the wrong hands has become a major threat to public safety and itself dangerously subversive of our republican and constitutional government owing to the rise and spread of right wing political violence and intimidation.

And last, it is also worth noting, I suppose, that hunting is no longer one of life’s necessities for the majority of Americans and that any legitimate concerns for self-defense are addressed by small capacity pistols and shotguns.

So it’s time to repeal the 2nd Amendment.

Don’t you think?

Sorry, I should have included that it was felt when the Bill of Rights was adopted that the militia could defend the states and the Union against attack and invasion by another country while an army was organized and that this was preferable to reliance on a standing army because the latter could easily be used against the people and their liberties by the great and the powerful while the former could not and could even enable the people to deter, if not overcome, such attempts.

Of course, Washington's easy success against the Whiskey Rebellion made mincemeat of that idea, too.

Update.

And then there was that war of 1812 in which the Brits used regulars and the Americans mostly used militia on short term enlistments.

The Brits cleaned our clocks.