Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party

[Fumesucker]

I've thought for a long time that the Union blew Reconstruction after the Civil War but I had no idea how badly until I read this piece.

Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.


http://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/

<snip>

If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place. [2]

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

<snip>

[RadicalGeek]

1. Or is Fascism A Better Anology

A 'Corporate State', the creation of 'Outgroups', an effective propaganda machine.

Of course, I see a lot of proto-fascist elements in the Confederacy.

[VanillaRhapsody]

2. to this very day....many many people in the South....consider themselves superiors and seperate

from the other states....no shit! If you aren't lily White and weren't born there....you are not nor will you ever be "a member of their club".

[Fumesucker]

3. Oddly enough I'm a "lily white" Southerner and I'm not a member of the club either..

However it's not just the South these days, Tea Partiers are everywhere.

A little more from the article..

During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

[VanillaRhapsody]

4. yeah if your not a fan of Ronnie Raygun....that disqualifies you from the club too silly!

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Tea Party = the "Constitution Party" -- aka the American Taliban