WP - Red, Blue and . . . So 17th Century

[Burma Jones]

Well well well,

The 17th Century friction between the Roundheads and Cavaliers is being replayed. I think the US was primarily settled by Roundheads....I know both sides of my family came here as a result of the conflict in England....Are we in store for another migration???


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28755-2004Mar27.html

Red, Blue and . . . So 17th Century

By Joel Kotkin


-snip-
The political division has grown wider in recent years. Now a clear geographic and cultural divide is emerging as well. Demographic trends suggest that Republicans and Democrats are less likely to live next door to each other, attend the same churches or subscribe to the same media.
-snip-

[xchrom]

1. all i know is that i want nothing

to do with even moderate republicans -- or free marketers.
this current age we are living in has made the best case yet for socialism.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. I don't know

I know Republicans and Independents, Libertarians and Greens. I get along with all of them.

[ixion]

6. Yeah, me too...

I tend not to get along to well with hardcore repugs, though. Moderates are okay, but I really want nothing to do with neocon fundie repugs. However, that doesn't mean I don't think they're not entitled to their own opinion. What I object to is having their opinions shoved down my throat as fact.

We live in a plurality ( or we did ) and the sooner that everyone realizes that and repects others for their right to hold their own opinions, the better off we will be.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

3. Wasn't Cromwell pro-separation of church and state?

I found Joel Kotkin's comparison ill-suited at best. At worst, it was just plain bullshit.

I'd love to hear a historian's take on this.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. You'll get lots of opinions

but here's one from a BBC history site:

Cromwell was not averse to monarchy - he had wanted to replace Charles I by one of his sons, even at the time of the Regicide - and he had discussed the restoration of the House of Stuarts with colleagues in 1651 and 1652, but he shrank from taking the title himself. And so he was installed with most of the powers that the Instrument had assigned to monarchy but with the title Lord Protector. He was constrained to work with and through a Council of State and to meet Parliament regularly. He was most committed to a wide measure of religious liberty - there was a state church under Cromwell, but no-one was required to attend it, and almost everyone, Catholics and Jews included, was allowed to worship privately in the light of conscience. Membership of the state church was not a qualification (as it was to be before 1649 and from 1660 until the nineteenth century) for entry to the universities, the professions, public office. Those who abused liberty to disturb the liberty of others (Quakers), as a front for political ambition (Catholics), or who promoted beliefs against the Creeds (especially those who denied that Jesus Christ was God) were subject to regulation, but otherwise this was a remarkable period of religious freedom. Cromwell wanted to build a godly commonwealth, and he rode roughshod over those who got in his way - raising taxation without consent, overriding a law he has helped to make in 1651 which protected ex-royalists from further penalty, imprisoning without trial those he believed to be planning subversion of his regime.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/monarchs_leaders/cromwell_04.shtml

It might be fair to say he favoured freedom of worship (which was liberal in those days), but wanted his religious ideas to control the government. This could be said for all but the most extreme right-wingers today - but you'd hope they would have progressed beyond this in 350 years.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

7. Thanks for the info!

"you'd hope they would have progressed beyond this in 350 years."

This is the trouble with those who oppose the teaching of Darwin. The Theory of Evolution is appalling to them; because they don't wish to evolve themselves.

[Democat]

4. The author is a right wing activist - the article was posted previously

Joel Kotkin, often cited as "an urban policy expert" in articles...

He is now a research fellow at the Reason Foundation, a right-wing libertarian think tank, as well as a senior fellow at the conservative Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy. Kotkin recently argued in American Enterprise magazine that "an increasingly left-wing AFL-CIO" was "bringing class-warfare politics" to Los Angeles.

The heirs of "the totalitarian left," he concluded, are threatening the city of LA.


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=19990222&c=2&s=wiener