Six and a half years ago, I wrote this blog entry following the coronation of Duhbya, the Idiot King, the strutting fool, the faux Texun. Now, it turns out the Confederates are masquerading as tea partiers.
mjh’s blog — The Real Inaugural Address
Greetings from Richmond, Virginia, the Capital of the Confederacy. My name is Jefferson Davis and I am here to accept my mandate — the people have spoken! It was never red versus blue states; it was always Blue versus Gray. [keep reading after you finish the current entry]
mjh’s blog — The Real Inaugural Address
The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism – War Room – Salon.com
From the earliest years of the American republic, white Southern conservatives when they have lost elections and found themselves in the political minority have sought to extort concession from national majorities by paralyzing or threatening to destroy the United States. …
As white Southerners, upset with the Democratic Party’s racial and social liberalism, migrated into the post-Goldwater GOP, they brought their Dixiecrat attitudes into the party of Lincoln. The Kemp-Roth tax bill of 1981, which inaugurated the policy of creating permanent deficits by slashing taxes without cutting spending, had its strongest support among Southern and Western members of Congress and the least support in the fiscally conservative Northeast.
The Republican Party’s attempted government shutdown of 1995 marked the new domination of the Republican Party by Southerners like Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. The impeachment of their fellow Southerner Bill Clinton was an attempted coup d’état by the Southern white minority in the United States, which, as in 1860, was frustrated because its candidate lost the presidential election.
The debt ceiling crisis is the latest case in which the radical right in the South has held America hostage until its demands are met. Presidents Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln refused to appease the Southern fanatics. Unfortunately, President Obama and the Democrats in Congress chose not to follow their example and instead gave in. In doing so, they have encouraged the neo-Confederate minority in Congress to find yet another opportunity in the near future to extort concessions from America’s majority by sabotaging America’s government.
Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation
[hat tip to dangerousmeta or NewMexiKen, I can’t remember which]
The Tea Party, the debt ceiling, and white Southern extremism – War Room – Salon.com
And a counterpoint:
The Tea Party is bigger than the South – War Room – Salon.com
Michael Lind is a very smart and wonderfully erudite writer with a bit of an obsession. His understanding of the deeper cultural wellsprings of American history and politics has left him, as a sort of side effect, with an abiding fearful hostility toward a particular group of people, the "Anglo-Celtic" Southerner. Lind sees them everywhere in our politics as a baleful, disturbing presence spreading bacilli of violence, bigotry and religious fanaticism. And in his recent Salon essay arguing that the Tea Party movement is an essentially Southern phenomenon, his prejudices blind him to a rather important and unprecedented phenomenon: the virtual disappearance of geography as a significant factor in the ideological character of the Republican Party.
The Tea Party is bigger than the South – War Room – Salon.com