The Rise of the New Confederacy: How America-Hating Right-Wingers Took Over the GOP

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/153369/the_rise_of_the_new_confederacy%3A_how_america-hating_right-wingers_took_over_the_gop/

December 8, 2011 |

What is America, and what is an American? If anything binds us together across space and time, it is our ideals and the stories we tell about our pursuit of them. From the beginning, we set ourselves against Europe’s hierarchies. We exalted democratic government, equality of opportunity and individual freedom. We conceived of our experiment as “the last best hope of earth,” in Lincoln’s words.

But ideals don’t live in a vacuum; they take root in the soil of institutions. Beginning with our first experiments in self-government, the dissonance between our ideals and our institutional practices–especially the tolerance and extension of slavery–created tensions that finally tore us apart.

The South’s alternative vision of the good society was defeated in the Civil War, and our 20th-century history can be told as a narrative of halting progress toward greater tolerance and equality. The major plot points include regulations on corporations in the early 1900s; women’s suffrage in 1920; a social safety net in the New Deal; the Supreme Court’s rejection of Jim Crow laws in 1954; the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s; the gay rights victories since the 1970s.

[Bogart]

1. "The Confederacy’s obsession with “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution..."

Evidently, someone misinterpreted this "originalist" interpretation.

Section 10 - Powers prohibited of States

No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation;...

No State shall, without the Consent of Congress,...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.

[Demeter]

2. Are Confederate-Sympathetic Southerners Americans?

I don't think they are, not in their own minds. They are passive resisters--if not active domestic terrorists. Their weapons are lies, emotion, Newt Gingrich, etc.

[Enthusiast]

3. Kicked and recommended!

This is an excellent article and correct in every particular.

[Uncle Joe]

4. I believe this analysis is spot on.

Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, xchrom.

[Marnie]

5. The more non Southerners spew their intolerance of the

South the longer it will take for "Reconstruction" to finally be accomplished as the rest of the nation continues to define the south as some how less worthy of being considered truly American, including the huge Black and Hispanic populations that live there.

Isn't it time after more than 100 years for the rest of the nation to give up their whipping boy and accept the south back into the not yet Reunited States of America?

And since the North kept their slaves, who is really the one cast the first stone? And since race riots engulfed the entire US on several occasions, who is really the one to cast the first stone?

[Uncle Joe]

6. This column is not just about the South as a monolith it tracks splits in both progressive and

religious thought, not to mention higher education.

The gist of the analysis doesn't base its' concerns or criticism so much on region as it does on the relying divergence between reason and faith.

Two out of the three Republicans mentioned aren't even Southerners.

The deeper truth is disquieting. The rhetoric of Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and Rick Perry about the “real America” is not imagined: They and those who oppose them live in different Americas, embodying different ideals and meaning different things to their loyalists.

[Doctor_J]

7. Check the electoral map and state legislature profiles and then try to

refute the author's premise.

[classysassy]

9. Do you defend Nazi Germany too?

Southern mentality has not changed down through the years,some if not most southerners are still hateful bigots and they have allies all over the country.

[Jefferson23]

8. K&R