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Edited on Wed Jan-12-11 10:00 PM by The Magistrate
There are some similarities that come to mind between our present pass and periods of our country's history. The 'tea-baggers' are reminiscent of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the period after the Great War. The extent of that, from its Southern homeland into areas like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana, is instructive. It is clear that it appealed to a similar slice of the people, and did so in a similar way. One hall-mark of the time was resurgence of nativist feeling, a sense that the 'old stock' was being swamped by 'others' who did not and could not share 'American' values. The immigrants were southern and eastern Europeans and Jews, many Catholic, who were considered not quite white in the view of people who considered themselves of Anglo-Saxon stock. It was also a time in which wealth was concentrating quickly at the top, with people working harder but getting no more for it, and clear indications monied interests had a stranglehold on government, and some spectacular corruption in consequence. Though the over-lap is hardly perfect, you can see some congruence in features. Basically, while the wealthiest are stealing the family silver, a great distraction compounded of racism and faux patriotism arises and busies the people losing the most. It should be noted, too, we were lucky to get out of that spasm so well as we did. What amounted to a sex murder by a leading Klansman broke its spell, and that kind of thing is purely contingent; it cannot be counted on to occur, and cannot be viewed as inevitable in some form.
That said, there is something new in the present situation. Most of the safety valves are out of commission; we are no longer a rising power, social mobility is far more constricted; there is very little social capital of community and family, owing to the erosions of market exploitations of labor. The racial question is very much to the fore, and carries an element of backlash, of attempt to restore a lost age, that was absent from the earlier national burgeoning of the Ku Klux. The marching banner of the Klan was 'This Will Stay A White Man's Country'; the 'tea-baggers' rally under a banner reading 'This used to be a white man's country'. Nor is the left of the present day anything like the left of the earlier period. The left of the present is not a fighting body, it is largely divorced from the working people and even matters economic in the minds of most people. This is very different from the condition of the twenties and thirties of the last century. It is also more difficult to hew to the view that this is a democracy in any meaningful sense, that the will of the majority of people expressed at the polls will guide, and determine, the policy of the government. People did not get what they voted for in 2008; what they wanted was put off till a rump electorate, carefully constructed for the purpose by monied interests exploiting racial chasms and economic distress, could be brought to bear to pretend something else was desired by 'the people', even though many millions fewer voted in the subsequent election than in the prior.
Part of this crafting has been the cultivation of violence by hyperbolic rhetoric and dehumanization and demonization of Democrats, liberals, and anyone who is not a southern or rural white person in general outline. This 'trolling for assassins' is having an effect; there have already been numerous instances of hard right types, mostly semi-sane, cooking off as the heat rises in murderous violence, or serious planning for same. This is going to continue, and must, in the nature of things, increase in frequency so long as it is not addressed as a principal threat to the country by federal and local police authorities. Unfortunately, these agencies are themselves shot-through with rightists, and with people on whom the demonization of the left has worked very well indeed. It is an open question whether they can be trusted to deal properly with rightist political killers, even though these very often target law enforcement personnel deliberately.
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