The Grand Illusion
The other day I got a couple of spam-type political emails, claiming that “The Left Hates Thanksgiving.” And before long, it will doubtless be “The Left Hates Christmas,” because that also occurs every year.
Both of which are follow-ons to a whole slew of far-right initiatives to portray both centrists and liberals as the evilest people in the United States. The right also engages in far greater personal attacks with virtually no regard for the truth. All the vicious right-wing rhetoric about liberals eating babies and running child porn operations from beneath pizza parlors [that don’t even have basements] is fairly indicative of the disregard that the far right has for the truth.
For years, the right has claimed that the left wants to take away the right’s guns, but the left only wants to get rid of military style mass-killing weapons, and they couldn’t outlaw all guns if they wanted to, not without a Constitutional amendment, which isn’t politically possible now and never will be.
The left certainly has no love of the far right, but for the most part, the left tends to attack individuals for their policies and for trying to take away personal freedoms. There’s a huge difference between minorities who’ve been oppressed for centuries wanting fairer treatment under law and right-wing nutjobs who attack the Capitol because they don’t want to accept an election that didn’t turn out the way they wanted.
All across the country, election officials have been threatened, and politicians who have pointed out the illegality of the January 6th insurrection have had their lives and those of their families threatened, hundreds of times.
I’ve been in and around politics for almost fifty years, and I can only recall four instances where possible “leftists” targeted Republican officeholders with armed attacks and/or violent threats. While there are likely a few others as well, the numbers of officeholders threatened by the far-right is in the hundreds, if not the thousands, and includes Republicans whose actions the far-right doesn’t like, all of which strongly suggests that the Republican Party is not only the Party of No, but also the Party of Hate.
And what’s even worse, none of the GOP leaders even seem to care that some of their officeholders and far too many of their supporters are lying hate-mongers.
I know some of your readers may think you’re indulging in hyperbole, but I’m not so sure.
I read a book years ago that made a pretty good case for apartheid being a response to economics – the Afrikaners were trying to ensure they weren’t the group at the bottom after the British came out on top.
And another book arguing that Yugoslavia’s disintegration was the result of economics as well; ethnic tensions rising as a result of the country no longer being able to play the West against the East.
When people fear losing their status, especially economic, they don’t react well. You can make a case for that being the South’s motivation in the Civil War. Washington had a terrible time keeping Mount Vernon afloat, and Jefferson ran up massive debts. It took a lot of slave labor to let people live the plantation life.
P.S. Love your books…why did it take me so long to go looking for your site?
I wish I were engaging in hyperbole, but when you have a mob demanding to hang Mile Pence, men plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, a man breaking into the Speaker’s house and attacking her husband with a hammer, hate crimes against people who are gender-different, a former President courting white supremacists, a good look at reality suggests that, if anything, I’m understating the gravity of the problem.
I don’t think “Hate” needs to be in quotes for the title of your essay.
There’s no shortage of extremism on the fringes of both sides. But there certainly ARE leftists that want to undermine anything they view as competing with them for authority or influence, including but not limited to: religion, western culture, capitalism, the Bill of Rights, etc.
Remember Obama’s people “who cling to their guns and bibles” or Hillary’s “deplorables”? Those people are mostly NOT haters, just people that want to be left alone…and with one or two hot-button topic exceptions, would be quite willing to return the favor.
Your posts always tell me a lot about yourself and nothing about the real world.
The real world has crazies that are right, left, and neither. That’s obvious enough that it shouldn’t need to be told.
However, leftism is defective to the core. Consider the most powerful and failed experiment at leftism, the USSR. When the secret police weren’t listening, the slogan was “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Telling people they should be required to share ever more regardless of whether they produce more or less, is contrary to human nature, economics, and maybe even the conservation laws of physics. There is NO magic free stuff machine, to give to one means taking from another, unless it’s a voluntary act (something some of us actually do participate in at a scale sometimes exceeding mere theft via government from us, i.e. taxation; if there’s some cause you think so very worthy, try supporting it yourself some time). But NO cause other than basic law and order is so worthy that everyone must be forced to support it. Climate change for example includes opportunities as well as challenges, and when the cold hard economics and technology are there, no coercion will be needed; and until they are, no coercion will be effective. Apply that to most causes of whatever degree of worth, and privatize as much as possible.
“… Those people are mostly NOT haters, just people that want to be left alone …”
It is difficult to have one’s cake and eat it and still have one’s cake. It also seems impossible for people to understand that in order to continue to have the benefits of social groups one has to conform to the groups rules and norms of those groups (at least in public).
If one wants to be alone, find and stay at that lovely tropical island in the sun or some other isolated spot on earth. Any contact with any living organism be it microbe or human means one has to adjust one’s way of living (or get rid of the other organism).
Happy Holidays.
Minimal accomodation is necessary, but should not intrude on every aspect of life and thought and discourse (and resources). If it does, those who desire such intrusion must be resisted, and not gently.
Well, as Hilary said, a certain percentage of the rightwing extremists, either within the Republican party or loudly proclaiming their devotion to Trump as the Republican party leader, have in fact proven themselves to be deplorable, by behaving deplorably: storming the Capitol and fouling it, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” while doing so, trying to kidnap a state governor, threatening state officials and policemen doing tgeir duty, spouting white supemacist and fascist ideas and memes on social mefia, and for the most extreme of them even giving the Nazi salute. What else would you call that, if not deplorable?
If those clinging to their guns and bibles would be content to just do so for themselves, on their own properties, or in their own church, shooting range, or hunting area, that wouldn’t be much of a problem.
There are no Democratic attempts at laws that would force people to give up their religion, or necessitate them to hide their church affiliation, or change the way they worship in their own homes and churches.
There is an attempt at push-back, when religious people try to get laws passed that would force everybody, regardless of their own faith or lack of it, to adhere to some of the tenets of Evangelical Christianity (not all of them, just the ones that rile up their political base at the moment – I don’t think anyone has tried to write a law banning the eating of shellfish, or forcing pregnant wives suspected of adultery to drink concoctions made by the priest from the temple-floor sweepings, so she will abort the baby if it’s not her husband’s – and both are in the Bible!), even when those tenets contravene the tenets of someone else’s religion.
The limits to the freedom to keep your own religion in your own way, ends when that freedom impacts others, unless those others consent – would you like to be forced to eat no meat on Friday and never use birth control, avoid all pork products and alcohol, eschew all beef, or become a vegetarian? Allowing Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish or Muslim religious tenets (and some Catholic ones) to be incorporated into the laws that govern Christians would be unthinkable to most Christian US citizens. So expecting the opposite to be accepted unopposed, even though the founding fathers took great pains to put the separation between church and state into your founding documents, is very disingenious.
There is also pushback against the *very* extreme interpretation of the second amendment of the last decades, when that puts assault-rifle style weapons of war in the hands of stalkers, domestic violence perpetrators, and mentally unstable 18 year olds.
Before tge NRA lobbyists got such a foothold in politics, it used to be interpreted in a much more limited way, focused on handguns, with weapons of war like cannon being excluded; and the clause about a *well regulated* militia was given more weight, indicating as it does that regulation is an important part of the right to bear arms.
No Depocratic lawmaker has ever attempted to bring a law that would take all guns from every civilian; they have only attempted to rein in the most extreme excesses that are the reason why so many US citizens are killed by guns.
Clinging to the idea that *any* limit placed on the strong (in this case gun-owners) in order to protect the weak (in this case, unarmed children, churchgoers, shoppers, battered wives and their families, etc.) is illegal and unamerican is a very R.Hamilton sort of idea. It is not a positive for the society of citizens of the USA, and vilifying any politician for daring to try and protect his constituents is not a balanced reaction.
I guess this contribution truly deserves some applause. Much respect.
Nobody needs to be weak, arm everyone, kids, crazies, crooks, well-trained responsible people, you name it. Open season until the survivors are well-behaved.
Not a good idea? Ok. Then do the hard part and fix parenting and schooling and whatever else is broken that has people wanting to shoot up schools and otherwise do crazy violent things. Which is NOT guns (mass murder with vehicles, knives, and poison is also quite possible, but none of the objects acted on their own). And is also NOT politics, BTW. And probably not poverty, either; there are LOTS of poor people that do NOT do those things.
An AR-15 is just another rifle (albeit one familiar in handling and cleaning to those trained on its big brother in the service, and one that’s quite modular and customizable), and the usual version in a caliber for small game, at that. Yes, one CAN put a 30 round mag in there, so what? One CAN kill about the same number of people running a truck through a crowd, and some that are fast and have vulnerable victims gathered close together have come close to those numbers with just a knife. The rifle didn’t do it, the truck didn’t do it, and neither did the knife; the person did it. BTW, there are rifles that LOOK very boring and conventional that are EXACTLY as dangerous as an AR-15; think a Ruger Mini-14 with a nice innocent looking wood stock that reminds you of what grandpa used to have…until you put a big mag in it or take a bunch of smaller ones, and go somewhere and shoot up people with it. The obsession with the horror of any particular firearm or other object used as a weapon is strictly a measure of ignorance. The ONLY difference if there is one is that maybe some crazies are attracted to something that’s widely viewed as Scary Black Rifle. That again is a PEOPLE problem. Sometimes it’s not even a problem, if the person isn’t crazy, and hopes to never shoot anything but paper targets, but wants an intimidating deterrent in the hopes that when it comes down to the moment, they will not HAVE to pull the trigger to survive; and if there’s no need, keeps it clean and safe and out of sight when not at the range or being transported. Some of us even have a bayonet (impractical thing that it is, except as a very heavy-duty knife and together with the scabbard, barbed wire cutter) to make the point (pun intended), not that I’d ever go to the rifle range with that hazard to handling on there. 🙂
But in the long run, once we have kicked the commies out of education and jailed some parents for letting their kids run wild, maybe we SHOULD revist my first paragraph, once we’re ready to handle that without total carnage. That would be just one of many examples of liberty that when people have been restored to remembering that liberty goes hand-in-hand with responsibility, could turn out to be surprisingly harmless.
Until then, yeah, I’m mean old me, because I don’t freaking care about the body count as much as about moving back to where liberty is more important than outcomes. Let the crazies do what crazies do, none of us will get out of life alive either way.