Pro-Trump crowds stormed the Capitol demanding to cancel an election and award the victory to Trump to maintain him in office.
That really happened. It is a fact, a true thing.
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| January 6, prior to storming the Capitol |
Most people born today grew up knowing the South is Republican and Christian. The fact that the South was in the Democratic Party before 1965 is not an experience most Southern Republicans can believe. The Civil Rights Act made that change happen at lightning speed as Dixiecrats (as they were called) switched immediately to the Republican Party resulting in Johnson's famous quote "We've [Democrats] lost the South for a generation."
You can draw a straight line from white resentment towards desegregation being "forced" on them at the point of a bayonet when desegregating Ol' Miss to the present discontent. Unfulfilled promises of Reconstruction and everything after 1867 set in motion long memories of little slights upon little slight. As environmental and land use laws and regulations impacted rural America a new group grew up facing their loss of privilege to farm, ranch and mine as their family had for years before. Then globalization impacted the price of their products and markets driving many families from their family land as bankruptcies skyrocketed.
Suddenly the Southern Republicans and the Sagebrush Rebellion joined forces as a natural fit. Heritage denied. In Wyoming, a Native American said to me; "Well, now you know how we felt being denied our ways." One protestor, in fur and buffalo horns brought that image into the Capitol Building.
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| John Flenniken |
The votes for Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, then the votes for George Wallace in 1968, demonstrated the backlash that had formed. Wallace did well among blue collar Americans in traditionally Democratic areas in the North, an early indicator of what was called the "Archie Bunker" vote, the "Reagan Democrat" vote, and now the blue-collar Trump-Republican vote, a bedrock part of the populist GOP base.
John Flenniken noted the convergence of Southern resistance and Western resistance to outsider, do-gooder, moral and legal compulsion. Yesterday's blog post quoted Fox anchors voicing this: they were under attack, they said. They were being tread upon by liberals and diverse people and unwelcome modern values.
I observed the backlash personally in the resistance in the 1970's and 1980's in my home community of Jackson County, Oregon, including when I was an elected County Commissioner. Oregonians passed an innovative, progressive, comprehensive "good government" reform in the form of statewide land use planning, designed to protect farm and forest land from development. It created strong opposition in semi-rural Jackson County, where a higher proportion of people discovered the new laws sharply constrained their ability to develop or sell rural lands. To many residents here, the state rules--made possible in large part because of votes from liberal, metropolitan Portland, were a bitter foretaste of pressure by "coastal elites" who jam outsider values and laws onto areas of the country that thought they were doing just fine the old way.
Resistance--whether to neighborhood and school racial integration in Boston or to limits on rural land development in Oregon--resulted in rebellious agitation that had a similar look to today's demonstrations: Angry people with signs and banners and voters ready to throw out incumbents Congressmen, Senators, and a Vice President. It is anti-government.
In one sense this is same-old, same-old. People don't want to be told what to do by outsiders, especially when it is big-city outsiders telling rural people, or the powerful and elite versus the common man. We have seen this before. Maybe we can all just relax.
But one thing is different. This was not the public agitating against the incumbent and spokesman for government power. This was the chief executive agitating for the public to overthrow an election that would remove him. There are two shocking things about this. One is that a president would openly say he would not abide by an election if he were to lose, then did exactly that when he lost. The other is so many members of his political party are willing to support him in doing so.
If a group of Muslim extremists stormed the Capitol, we would understand it to be an attack on our democracy. It would be dangerous. When normal-regular-American-Republicans do it, it is more dangerous. They might get away with it.
5 comments:
You guys are dancing around the issue, and on MLK day too!
Kids, we have white nationalists attacking the Capital, statehouses and "liberal"
churches and synagogues, with the support of millions, over the election loss of the most racist president since Jackson.
What more evidence do you friggin' need?
What I think is being lost in all of this is the significance of the election of Kamala Harris. This is giant step forward after the two steps back of the Trump era. It should be noted that her candidacy was considered imperative to this election, and whether Democrats are happy with Biden or not, they should be thrilled with this choice and what it means for the country going forward as a repudiation of the hate and division of the Republicans.
Rick's first post on this subject enunciated my feelings exactly, and the WaPo guest Editorial today about all these R politicians and other apologists about "Healing, and Unification" requiring letting Drumpf walk off stage Scot free strengthens my opinion that all these whiners advocating appeasement as "healing" can kiss my grits.
Resistance--whether to neighborhood and school racial integration in Boston ...
I was a kid in the 1950s, growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Many of my relatives lived in the next neighborhood over, Brownsville.
Early on, Brownsville was a lower middle-class Jewish neighborhood. My grandparents lived there. But sometime in the mid-1950s, blacks started moving into the neighborhood and the neighborhood started to change. Some of those changes were a marked increase in street crime, and chaos in the schools. As a result of these changes, most of the white people, including my relatives, moved out.
Many of us in my neighborhood knew people who taught in those schools, and we heard chapter and verse about what was going on in them. So when the bureaucrats running the New York City Board of Education decided to bus us from our neighborhood school into Brownsville, my very Democratic liberal Jewish neighborhood rose up and killed that plan. I can still remember my dad standing on the steps of our local synagogue and saying to everyone, “We all believe in desegregation, but there is no way we are going to sacrifice the education of our children by busing them into Brownsville.“
Our parents knew damned well that none of those bureaucrats were going to be sending their children to Brownsville. Our parents weren’t about to sacrifice their children to someone else’s ideology.
During the early 1970s, when I saw the same issues playing out in Boston, I knew what I was seeing and I had a lot of sympathy for the white people in Dorchester who refused to bus their children into Roxbury at the command of limousine liberal elites whose own children were not going to be on those buses. Some of them may have crossed the line into overt racism, but they had valid reasons to oppose that plan.
Liberal elites typically react to events like this by irresponsibly flinging the term “racism” around. All they accomplish by doing this is to infuriate the potential victims of their hypocritical policies. Like the Tea Party demonstration sign used to say,
“It doesn’t matter what this sign says, because you’ll call it racist anyway.”
Profanity is deleted so I paraphrase Chris Rock; [ I don't want to have a beer with whites at a bar I just want equality. ] Equal treatment under the law would make a difference in perceptions of intolerance, injustice and mistreatment. South Africa formed it a truth and reconciliation committee to examine the past. The intent was to understand and punish the blatant crimes and educate the nation.
Currently, wounds of the past are now open but not all are exposed. Talk of "unity" and "working together" would have the effect of closing the wound with the pathogen of the past sealed in the body politic to fester but not heal. Out of sight, hidden within, an injustice poisons us all. Powerful forces of human nature would like us to just move on and go back to "normal". No one has to atone. Moving on in effect allows no one to look at their behavior and modify or change. Racism is a big part of the problem but it isn't the all of it. Whether the arc of history bends toward justice at this moment is in our hands to demand it do so now. There is an urgency to do so.
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