Not everything AOC says is absurd; sometimes, she can even be the voice of reason given how wildly her party has drifted left. This post isn't intended as an attack on her. I wonder if she is aware, though, that what she is recommending has in fact been the normal condition of America since before the Civil War? Northern intervention in Southern politics has been so ordinary an exercise of political and cultural power that I can't recall a time when it was not a significant factor: certainly there hasn't been such a time in my lifetime, unless we are finally entering one today. The Voting Rights Act, for example, is why the North is already nearly completely gerrymandered but the South wasn't allowed to be until now: Southern states were placed under the special scrutiny of the Federal courts when redrawing their maps and forced to create districts that favored her party's interests, while Northern states were allowed to draw maps blatantly exercising her party's interests.
In what I think was a tongue-in-cheek post yesterday, one commenter suggested the the Civil War was fought over gay marriage.
The argument is heavily strained, of course, but there is a core he or she brings out in the replies:
I have on my bookshelf a work called Poetry of the Civil War (ed. John Boyes). Reading it I was struck by how intensely religious the Northern poetry of the time was, contrasted with the Southern poetry which was often Arthurian or otherwise chivalric. Mark Twain complained that Ivanhoe had been responsible for the Civil War: "Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government[.]" Yet there was an opposing force in the North, which was writing Battle Hymns to justify the largest slaughter of Americans in any war in history still to this day.
Perhaps the slaughter was justified, as Lincoln mused in his Second Inaugural: "if God wills that [the bloodshed] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Perhaps; chattel slavery is a great wrong, and the South is well off for having been purged of it. I do not disagree about that.
Yet it has been the normal condition of the American North to crusade against the American South, rather than something whose time has come, as AOC suggests. As we listen to the wilder rhetoric from her party, as we observe the increase in assassination attempts and indeed assassinations, we should wonder if another Crusade is truly needed -- especially those of us who would be the objects of it.
3 comments:
Lincoln's greatness of heart and extraordinary powers of expression are constantly moderating my resentment of the North, because chattel slavery truly was an abomination we're well rid of. But there's a reason we called it the War of Northern Aggression. In any case, speaking from my 21st century perspective, my tolerance for the Democratic Party's recent fanatical embrace of racism sits at exactly zero these days. I would cheerfully see the party extirpated from American politics, and all its fellow-travelers with it.
Ironically (or not) James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) was fanatical about gerrymandering "race" into Southern districts. You will find him intervening with the AG's office to make certain that racist districts were protected. Perhaps Jim had overwhelming religious beliefs......
"religious fanatic Quakers" was not on my bingo card for political rhetoric today. Are there irreligious fanatic Quakers? Are these pacifists genuinely fanatical? Were Quakers ever a real menace to the Southern way of life? How many brigades did they field in the Civil War?
The key is Progress, though. Progress in this world. It can be part of a religious worldview, but as the Communists have shown, it can be entirely atheist and secular. The point is, it's the sense of a moral duty to make the world a better place, to move the world toward its necessary eschatological utopian end, even if that means killing a lot of people who seem to stand in the way.
That said, Progressives have no monopoly on the idea that killing a lot of people may be the answer to our problems. It seems a widespread belief these days.
Post a Comment