Understanding the threat of a confederate insurgency by Nancy LeTourneau of Horizons

Nancy LeTourneau over at Horizons has written an insightful post about something I've talked and thought about for a long time, but had not tackled in a post.

She posted the video below that explains how the modern GOP is slowly and surely dragging our country back to a modern version of Jim Crow:  James Crow, Esq., in order to suppress voting by minorities. 








That's just one point.

Read the whole post:



Understanding the threat of a confederate insurgency


The basic right wing message we've heard for the last six years has been to challenge this President's legitimacy. We've seen that in everything from the birther movement and charges that he's somehow "un-American" to criticisms of Barack Obama that have never been leveled against a United States President (i.e., how much golf he plays, the fact that he takes vacations and that he signs executive orders). 

Call me naive, but I don't believe that all white Republicans buy into this insurgency. But their leadership has used this message of illegitimacy to undermine President Obama and convinced too many people that he is somehow a threat to the country. To the extent that they (and the media) have bought into the lies, they have given credence to a movement that is dangerous to our democracy.

 I am reminded once again of something Derrick Jensen wrote in his book The Culture of Make Believe. 

From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with—and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with—the perceived entitlement...

Several times I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, "normal," chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized.

 Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remains underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred waits in the wings, ready to explode. Change to our "social order" is coming, whether we like it or not. The traditions, economics, religion that mask our entitlement are being stripped away and the hate is becoming more perceptible. As a result, the confederate insurgency is threatening to explode. 

 Black people are noticing. But too many white people are in denial about what's really going on (including a lot of Democrats/liberals). We need to wake the f*ck up!!! I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to support President Obama's policies. But what I am saying is that we all need to recognize the threat posed by this confederate insurgency...and take on the task of ushering in a third reconstruction.


NOTE:  I'm ready for the usual suspects to come to this blog and repeat the usual talking point that those confederates were DEMOCRATS.  Yes, that was the name of the party they belonged to, but they were first and foremost CONSERVATIVES.  

President Lincoln was a LIBERAL Republican.  His Secretary of State, William Seward, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, didn't think Lincoln was LIBERAL ENOUGH in support of abolition  as were they, and as was the LIBERAL position on slavery in that era.  In America at that time, the Republicans had a more PROGRESSIVE position on the question of slavery than did the southern CONSERVATIVE Democrats.   The southern Democrats wanted to CONSERVE/PRESERVE the institution of slavery.  The LIBERALS in the newly formed Republican Party were, for the most part, anti-slavery (although the Democrat/Republican parties were not a solid bloc of liberals and conservatives)  . The new Republican Party had northern conservatives in it and the southern Democratic Party had liberals in it as well.

Most people who use Democrat/Republican labels in discussions on this particular era in our history fail in understanding this.  As a liberal, I would have been a Lincoln Republican and would have fought against the conservative Democrats who wanted to preserve slavery.

Keep in mind that after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the traditionally Democratic southerners left the Democratic Party, and the Old Confederacy has been a solid conservative Republican voting bloc since then.  


More reading on the subject here:

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party