Abraham Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or “reactionary,” or worse, maybe some Southern redneck hick who hides his old Klan robe but keeps it at the ready.
During the past fifty or so years the old Southern Democratic Party has virtually disappeared, died out, as millions of conservative Southerners, many motivated by their sincere religious faith and resistance to radical and unnatural change, migrated to the Republican Party. The GOP, beginning in the Nixon years, employed what was called a “Southern strategy,” largely elaborated by consultant Kevin Phillips and spelled out most clearly in his volume, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969). GOP spokesman learned to speak a language and offer symbols that millions of Southerner found attractive, even compelling.
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As they say, rat-poison is full of tasty food, only that little bit at the end that kills you.
ReplyDeletePeople stopped looking to themselves for information, improvement, and gave themselves over to cheer-leaders to tell them what opinion to have. Opponents of conservative world view were more than happy to provide these idols. Rush Limbaugh and Fox are the prime examples. As if we needed a Lincoln or a negroe to look up to. If so, people deserve what they get.
The collected papers of Calhoun and others are available for anyone to purchase and read. Those texts that are not available, should be reprinted cheaply. Unfortunately that is not what allegedly conservative book-sellers did in the past 150 years.
Long time ago, people subscribed to the Record of Congress, and while it was in session, received (and read) the text of what was said in the Houses. It used to be that the speeches of leading figures were published in pamphlet form and read by the people.
President Jackson (in his final warning) called the attention of the people to the necessity of being vigilant, year after year; the necessity of constantly educating themselves ---and not waiting for others, for cheer-leaders and heroes, to do the informing and the vigilance for them; to do the preserving their rights for them.
In the 1830s, as side-effect of the bank agitation and the independent treasury debate, the citizens of the United States became better informed on money and banking than in any other period during the past 230 years; showing that in other decades the people did not keep up their vigilence and their self-education. In the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, the leading figures of the South and West did this work for the people, and prevented the restoration of the centralized banking system.
The Congress of the united States spent money and effort to record, to preserve, and to make available to everyone, the history of banking, but the citizens neglected exertion and perseverance. In 1-2 hour installments, learned and eloquent men read into the Record lectures on every side of the subject of money and banking, but the people refused to read these educational speeches. As the result, by the end of Andrew Jackson's century, those who became the people's cheer-leaders and heroes were either completely ignorant as to money, banking, and the history of money and banking, or they were outright enemy agents, leading the people in circles to nowhere.
Thank you for the good piece. Very informative.
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