Her complaint starts with American flags flying from the backs of pickup trucks, and later expands to dozens and dozens of American flags flying per se. I remembered later how, in 2003, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean sparked a minor furor by saying that he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," adding that he only thought they could win by appealing "to a broad cross-section of Democrats." It's true that Clinton and Gore had run using Confederate flag campaign memorabilia, and that Jimmy Carter was often seen with Confederate flags. For that matter, here's JFK being presented with one, though like Dean he was a non-Southerner who had no plausible heritage-based reasons to associate with it.
Both of those Democratic campaigns had carried Georgia, and therefore the White House. However, by 1996 Zell Miller as Governor of Georgia was trying to remove the Confederate flag from the state flag, which his successor succeeded in doing; by 2003, Dean was the last person to think that guys with Confederate flags flying from the backs of their pickup trucks were good people whose votes he wanted.
I can understand the way that Democrats decided to stop chasing white Southerners of proud Confederate heritage as voters. The Democrats' own history there is extremely embarrassing -- being the party of the Confederacy, the KKK, and Jim Crow -- and the story they'd like to tell of themselves was the Civil Rights story they've come to prefer. Republicans somehow allowed themselves to become painted as the heritage party of racism and all that, even though they had historically been a major force in opposition. This is similar to how nobody remembers the NRA's role in providing arms and training to black Freedmen, nor for that matter the NRA's role in helping arm the UK against Nazi invasion in World War II. Both organizations had every right to stand on their history and fight for it, but somehow both groups got stuck with the worst labels.
What is happening now, as this reporter shows, is that 'men who fly flags from their pickup trucks' is becoming an undesirable part of the story the Democratic Party wants to tell about itself. Indeed, it is 'men who fly American flags at all.' They are, she says, a minority who should be "marginalized"; also a threat to be taken seriously, worried about, monitored, any force of government that can be marshalled by her side brought to bear against them.
These are the people she thinks are dangerous to democracy: them, not herself. These are the people that she thinks are dangerous to America: the ones who fly American flags.
It's madness, a collective madness that she and those interviewing her share (the lady at the end says she 'agrees totally'). Embedded within it is that preferred Democratic story about our history that puts these people on the wrong side of racism, now called 'Whiteness.' She does not know whose ancestors fought against slavery or armed the English against the Nazis. This is Long Island, home of the Creedmore Rifle Range founded in 1872 by the NRA and the state legislature of New York; the whole point was to train the citizens of New York City in riflemanship, to mitigate the advantages of the rural South if another fight were needed.
She has no idea how wildly wrong she is, and neither do any of them; but they think they are the educated ones, just as they think they are the democratic ones. Their madness is a drumbeat driving our nation to ruin; but they believe they are its only saviors.
5 comments:
The shifting nature of symbols is part of the game. Many progressives want you to be prisoners of this week's news and fashions, with no connection to any history before last Tuesday. Discerning that American flags are no longer in and responding accordingly reassures them that they are ultimately in control of you, because you dare not stray too far from the current fashion.
Brits flew their flag proudly until after the war, when it became progressively less fashionable and they eventually looked down on the Americans for flying theirs. As a New England liberal heading to school in the south I started with contempt for the Confederate flag, and only in my last year did I learn from a few friends that it wasn't that simple. Similarly, I was part of that initial 60s fashion of disdaining those who "worshiped" the flag.
Yet at no point did I remotely consider discouraging other people to have whatever symbols they wanted, because this this is America, dammit. If I was offended by someone's swastika or hammer & sickle, that was my problem.
I think Howard Dean hoped to ride his good pro-gun record and genuine respect for Vermont hard work and responsibility to override his uninterrupted liberalism on everything else. "I'm from Vermont, where even liberals own two or three guns." It might have worked had he ever made it to November, but that was completely unacceptable to the powers in the Democratic Party.
Republicans somehow allowed themselves to become painted as the heritage party of racism and all that, even though they had historically been a major force in opposition.
Steve Hayward and his sidekick Lucretia did a 3 Whiskey Happy Hour inspired by an op-ed that repeated the mistaken impression the Brown v Board decision which overturned Plessy v Ferguson was inspired by Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy. If you look at the reasoning in Brown, you see that even as early as the mid-1950s what we're now calling 'Diversity, Inclusion, Equity' language was working its way into civil rights efforts. Brown did not adopt Harlan's reasoning that the Constitution required the law to be color-blind, in favor of a more limited ruling that 'separate but equal' was not permissible in situations where it caused feelings of inferiority, as well as limiting the decision to education. This left open the possibility that racial discrimination could be legal in other areas or in other situations where it did not create feelings of inferiority.
I think this is where Republicans started to get off the broader civil rights bus as the effort shifted from addressing overt and mandated discrimination such as Jim Crow in a color-blind manner to attempting to redress more diffuse discrimination in personal associations. Barry Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill might have been principled but it was probably a tactical error that furthered the impression the GOP was abandoning its prior support of civil rights efforts. If you look at LBJ's infamous voting prediction in this light, I think you see the Republicans holding firm to an ideal of no legalized discrimination while the Democrats adopt an approach that is the root of their current 'anti-racism' agenda.
I also think it's highly likely that as blacks secured voting rights in areas where they had previously been denied effective representation they, and sympathetic whites, somewhat naturally took over the existing governing machinery which was largely of the Democrat Party. This probably then fed back to shifting black support to the Democrats in other areas to maximize their political effectiveness, with the effect that a racial element was added to the usual jostling between the two parties.
Way too much pearl-clutching. This flag nonsense started quite soon after 9/11, when college students ostensibly felt excluded or threatened by a display of American flags.
"Disturbing American Flags"
She better not disturb any American flags around me. That's all I'm saying.
There is great irony in this "harrowing experience." Granted, the Confederate Battle Flag has been embraced over the years by the KuKlux; but it has actually grown into a symbol of opposition to or rebellion against a progressive, overreaching, bureaucratic Federal Government. Particularly in regard to the 2nd Amendment. For decades, when I have seen a Confederate flag, this is how I have interperted it, not as a racist symbol, but as a radical political statement designed to get attention in the face of creeping infringement.
Now, however, as many of us "bitter clingers" look to the Constitution to protect our individual rights and heritage of freedom from an admitedly Socialist regieme, we are flying the American flag. And the same collectivist political machine, determined to destroy our heritage of freedom and individual rights, is now deriding the American Flag the same way they demonized the Confederate Battle Flag: as a "disturbing" symbol of racism and oppression. So be prepared for the American Flag to be the new Confederate Flag as they strive to put down the "insurrection."
The American Revolution was an insurrection.
SH
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