Re: Will the Right's Fake History Prevail?

"The right fake history", indeed!
Does a true history exist anywhere? While much of Parry's history
rings true, is that because I agree with it?

Carl Jarvis

On 11/2/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Parry writes: "If most polls are correct and voters elect a
> Republican-controlled Congress on Tuesday, a principal reason is that many
> Americans have been sold on a false recounting of the nation's Founding
> Narrative. They have bought the Right's made-up storyline about the
> Constitution's Framers detesting a strong federal government and favoring
> states' rights."
>
> Strom Thurmond during a 1957 filibuster against civil rights legislation.
> (photo: AP)
>
>
> Will the Right's Fake History Prevail?
> By Robert Parry, Consortium News
> 02 November 14
>
> If most polls are correct and voters elect a Republican-controlled Congress
> on Tuesday, a principal reason is that many Americans have been sold on a
> false recounting of the nation's Founding Narrative. They have bought the
> Right's made-up storyline about the Constitution's Framers detesting a
> strong federal government and favoring states' rights.
> This notion of the Framers as enemies of an activist national government is
> untrue but has become a popular meme as promoted through the vast
> right-wing
> media and accepted by the timid mainstream press, which is unwilling to
> fight for an accurate portrayal of what the Federalists who wrote the
> Constitution intended.
> So, without much pushback from those who know better, the Tea Partiers,
> Libertarians and many Republicans have successfully walled off much of the
> U.S. population from the actual history, which would reveal the American
> Right to be arguably the opposite of true patriots in its disdain for the
> assertive national governance devised in 1787.
> Plus, the Right's fake interpretation of the Constitution cannot be
> disentangled from the disgraceful history of slavery, segregation and
> today's renewed efforts to prevent black and brown Americans from voting.
> Indeed, race has always been an intrinsic element in the American Right's
> history, which can be roughly divided into four eras: the pre-Confederate
> period from 1787 to 1860 when slave owners first opposed and then sought to
> constrain the Constitution, viewing it as a threat to slavery; the actual
> Confederacy from 1861 to 1865 when the South took up arms against the
> Constitution in defense of slavery; the post-Confederate era from 1866 to
> the 1960s when white racists violently thwarted constitutional protections
> for blacks; and the neo-Confederate era from 1969 to today when these
> racists jumped to the Republican Party in an attempt to extend white
> supremacy behind various code words and subterfuges.
> It is true that the racist Right has often moved in tandem with the
> wealthy-elite Right, which has regarded the regulatory powers of the
> federal
> government as a threat to the ability of rich industrialists to operate
> corporations and to control the economy without regard to the larger public
> good.
> But the historical reality is that both the white supremacists and the
> anti-regulatory corporatists viewed the Constitution as a threat to their
> interests because of its creation of a powerful central government that was
> given a mandate to "promote the general Welfare." The Constitution was far
> from perfect and its authors did not always have the noblest of motives,
> but
> it created a structure that could reflect the popular will and be used for
> the nation's good.
> The key Framers of the Constitution - the likes of George Washington, James
> Madison (who then was a protégé of Washington) Alexander Hamilton and
> Gouverneur Morris (who wrote the famous Preamble) - were what might be
> called "pragmatic nationalists" determined to do what was necessary to
> protect the nation's fragile independence and to advance the country's
> economic development.
> In 1787, the Framers' principal concern was that the existing government
> structure - the Articles of Confederation - was unworkable because it
> embraced a system of strong states, deemed "sovereign" and "independent,"
> and a weak central government called simply a "league of friendship" among
> the states.
> The Constitution flipped that relationship, making federal law supreme and
> seeking to make the states "subordinately useful," in Madison's evocative
> phrase. Though the Constitution did make implicit concessions to slavery in
> order to persuade southern delegates to sign on, the shift toward federal
> dominance was immediately perceived as an eventual threat to slavery.
> Fearing for Slavery
> Key Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia's Patrick Henry and George Mason,
> argued that over time the more industrial North would grow dominant and
> insist on the elimination of slavery. And, it was known that a number of
> key
> participants at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, including
> Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, were strongly opposed to slavery
> and that Washington was troubled by human bondage though a slaveholder
> himself.
> So, Henry and Mason cited the threat to slavery as their hot-button
> argument
> against ratification. In 1788, Henry warned his fellow Virginians that if
> they approved the Constitution, it would put their massive capital
> investment in slaves in jeopardy. Imagining the possibility of a federal
> tax
> on slaveholding, Henry declared, "They'll free your niggers!"
> It is a testament to how we have whitewashed U.S. history on the evils of
> slavery that Patrick Henry is far better known for his declaration before
> the Revolution, "Give me liberty or give me death!" than his equally pithy
> warning, "They'll free your niggers!"
> Similarly, George Mason, Henry's collaborator in trying to scare Virginia's
> slaveholders into opposing the Constitution, is recalled as an instigator
> of
> the Bill of Rights, rather than as a defender of slavery. A key "freedom"
> that Henry and Mason fretted about was the "freedom" of plantation owners
> to
> possess other human beings as property.
> As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book,
> Madison and Jefferson, Henry and Mason argued that "slavery, the source of
> Virginia's tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected." Besides the
> worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was
> the fear that the President - as commander in chief - might "federalize"
> the
> state militias and emancipate the slaves.
> Though the Anti-Federalists lost the struggle to block ratification, they
> soon shifted into a strategy of redefining the federal powers contained in
> the Constitution, with the goal of minimizing them and thus preventing a
> strong federal government from emerging as a threat to slavery.
> In this early stage of the pre-Confederacy era, the worried slave owners
> turned to one of their own, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the
> Declaration of Independence and a charismatic politician who had been in
> France during the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and
> enactment of the Bill of Rights.
> Though Jefferson had criticized the new governing document especially over
> its broad executive powers, he was not an outright opponent and thus was a
> perfect vehicle for seeking to limit the Constitution's reach. Even as
> Washington's Secretary of State, Jefferson began organizing against the
> formation of the new government as it was being designed by the
> Federalists,
> especially Washington's energetic Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
> The Federalists, who were the principal Framers, understood the
> Constitution
> to grant the central government all necessary powers to "provide for the
> common Defense and general Welfare of the United States." However,
> Jefferson
> and his fellow Southern slaveholders were determined to limit those powers
> by reinterpreting what the Constitution allowed much more narrowly. [See
> Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up Constitution."]
> Partisan Warfare
> Through the 1790s, Jefferson and his Southern-based faction engaged in
> fierce partisan warfare against the Federalists, particularly Alexander
> Hamilton but also John Adams and implicitly George Washington. Jefferson
> opposed the Federalist program that sought to promote the country's
> development through everything from a national bank to a professional
> military to a system of roads and canals to support for manufacturing.
> As Jefferson's faction gained strength, it also pulled in James Madison
> who,
> for reasons of political survival and personal finances, embraced the slave
> interests of his fellow Virginians. Madison essentially moved from under
> Washington's wing to under Jefferson's. Then, with Madison's acquiescence,
> Jefferson developed the extra-constitutional theories of state
> "nullification" of federal law and even the principle of secession.
> Historians Burstein and Isenberg wrote in Madison and Jefferson that these
> two important Founders must be understood as, first and foremost,
> politicians representing the interests of Virginia where the two men lived
> nearby each other on plantations worked by African-American slaves,
> Jefferson at Monticello and Madison at Montpelier.
> "It is hard for most to think of Madison and Jefferson and admit that they
> were Virginians first, Americans second," Burstein and Isenberg said. "But
> this fact seems beyond dispute. Virginians felt they had to act to protect
> the interests of the Old Dominion, or else, before long, they would become
> marginalized by a northern-dominated economy.
> "Virginians who thought in terms of the profit to be reaped in land were
> often reluctant to invest in manufacturing enterprises. The real tragedy is
> that they chose to speculate in slaves rather than in textile factories and
> iron works. ... And so as Virginians tied their fortunes to the land, they
> failed to extricate themselves from a way of life that was limited in
> outlook and produced only resistance to economic development."
> Because of political mistakes by the Federalists and Jefferson's success in
> portraying himself as an advocate of simple farmers (when he was really the
> avatar for the plantation owners), Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans
> prevailed in the election of 1800, clearing the way for a more constrained
> interpretation of the Constitution and a 24-year Virginia Dynasty over the
> White House with Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe, all slaveholders.
> By the time the Virginia Dynasty ended, slavery had spread to newer states
> to the west and was more deeply entrenched than ever before. Indeed, not
> only was Virginia's agriculture tied to the institution of slavery but
> after
> the Constitution banned the importation of slaves in 1808, Virginia
> developed a new industry, the breeding of slaves for sale to new states in
> the west. Jefferson even wanted all the new states from the Louisiana
> Territories to be slave states. [For details on this history, see
> Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison" and "Thomas
> Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath."]
> Toward Civil War
> Thus, America's course to the Civil War was set. Ironically the warnings of
> Patrick Henry and George Mason proved prescient as the growing industrial
> strength of the North gave momentum to a movement for abolishing slavery.
> When Abraham Lincoln, the presidential candidate for the new anti-slavery
> Republican Party, won the 1860 election, southern slave states seceded from
> the Union, claiming they were defending the principle of states' rights but
> really they were protecting the economic interests of slave owners.
> The South's bloody defeat in the Civil War finally ended slavery and the
> North sought for several years to "reconstruct" the South as a place that
> would respect the rights of freed slaves. But the traditional white power
> structure reasserted itself, employing violence against blacks and the
> so-called "carpetbaggers" from the North.
> As white Southerners organized politically under the banner of the
> Democratic Party, which had defended slavery since its origins in
> Jefferson's plantation-based political faction, the North and the
> Republicans grew weary of trying to police the South. Soon, southern whites
> were pushing blacks into a form of crypto-slavery through a combination of
> Jim Crow laws, white supremacist ideology and Ku Klux Klan terror.
> Thus, the century after the Civil War could be designated the
> post-Confederate era of the American Right. This restoration of the South's
> white power structure also coincided with the emergence of the North's
> Robber Barons - the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D.
> Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan - who amassed extraordinary wealth and used it
> to achieve political clout in favor of laissez-faire economics.
> In that sense, the interests of the northern industrialists and the
> southern
> aristocracy dovetailed in a common opposition to any federal authority that
> might reflect the interests of the common man, either the white industrial
> workers of the North or the black sharecroppers of the South.
> However, amid recurring financial calamities on Wall Street that drove many
> Americans into abject poverty and with the disgraceful treatment of
> African-Americans in the South, reform movements began to emerge in the
> early Twentieth Century, reviving the founding ideal that the federal
> government should "promote the general Welfare."
> With the Great Depression of the 1930s, the grip of the aging Robber Barons
> and their descendants began to slip. Despite fierce opposition from the
> political Right, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted a series of reforms
> that increased regulation of the financial sector, protected the rights of
> unions and created programs to lift millions of Americans out of poverty.
> After World War II, the federal government went even further, helping
> veterans get educated through the GI Bill, making mortgages affordable for
> new homes, connecting the nation through a system of modern highways, and
> investing in scientific research. Through these various reforms, the
> federal
> government not only advanced the "general Welfare" but, in effect, invented
> the Great American Middle Class.
> Civil Rights
> As the nation's prosperity surged, attention also turned to addressing the
> shame of racial segregation. The civil rights movement - led by remarkable
> leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and eventually embraced by
> Democratic
> Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - rallied popular support and
> the
> federal government finally moved against segregation across the South.
> Yet, reflecting the old-time pro-slavery concerns of Patrick Henry and
> George Mason, southern white political leaders fumed at this latest
> intrusion by the federal government against the principle of "states'
> rights," i.e. the rights of the whites in southern states to treat "their
> coloreds" as they saw fit.
> This white backlash to the federal activism against segregation became the
> energy driving the modern Republican Party, which abandoned its honorable
> legacy as the party that ended slavery. Instead, it became home for
> Americans who feared social change and resented policies that
> disproportionately helped racial minorities. The smartest right-wingers
> understood this reality.
> On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative
> William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that "the white community in the South
> is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically
> and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically."
> Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, who wrote the influential manifesto
> Conscience of a Conservative, realized in 1961 that for Republicans to gain
> national power, they would have to pick off southern segregationists. Or as
> Goldwater put it, the Republican Party had to "go hunting where the ducks
> are."
> Then, there was Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" of using coded language
> to appeal to southern whites and Ronald Reagan's launching of his 1980
> national presidential campaign with a states' rights speech in
> Philadelphia,
> Mississippi, the notorious site of the murders of three civil rights
> workers. The two strands of historic conservatism -- white supremacy and
> "small government" ideology -- were again wound together.
> In New York magazine, Frank Rich summed up this political history while
> noting how today's right-wing revisionists have tried to reposition their
> heroes by saying they opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 simply out of
> high-minded "small-government principles." But Rich wrote:
> "The primacy of [Strom] Thurmond in the GOP's racial realignment is the
> most
> incriminating truth the right keeps trying to cover up. That's why the
> George W. Bush White House shoved the Mississippi senator Trent Lott out of
> his post as Senate majority leader in 2002 once news spread that Lott had
> told Thurmond's 100th-birthday gathering that America 'wouldn't have had
> all
> these problems' if the old Dixiecrat had been elected president in 1948.
> "Lott, it soon became clear, had also lavished praise on [the Confederacy's
> president] Jefferson Davis and associated for decades with other far-right
> groups in thrall to the old Confederate cause. But the GOP elites didn't
> seem to mind until he committed the truly unpardonable sin of reminding
> America, if only for a moment, of the exact history his party most wanted
> and needed to suppress. Then he had to be shut down at once."
> Unholy Alliance
> This unholy alliance between the racists and the corporatists continues to
> this day with Republicans understanding that the votes of blacks,
> Hispanics,
> Asians and other minorities must be suppressed if the twin goals of the two
> principal elements of the Right are to control the future. That was the
> significance of the 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority
> to gut the Voting Rights Act. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Supreme Court's
> War
> on Democracy."]
> Only if the votes of whites can be proportionately enhanced and the votes
> of
> minorities minimized can the Republican Party overcome the country's
> demographic changes and retain government power that will both advance the
> interests of the racists and the free-marketeers.
> That's why Republican-controlled statehouses engaged in aggressive
> gerrymandering of congressional districts in 2010 and tried to impose
> "ballot security" measures across the country in 2012 and 2014. The crudity
> of those efforts, clumsily justified as needed to prevent the virtually
> non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud, was embarrassing to watch.
> As Frank Rich noted, "Everyone knows these laws are in response to the rise
> of Barack Obama. It is also no coincidence that many of them were conceived
> and promoted by the American Legal Exchange Council, an activist outfit
> funded by heavy-hitting right-wing donors like Charles and David Koch.
> "In another coincidence that the GOP would like to flush down the memory
> hole, the Kochs' father, Fred, a founder of the radical John Birch Society
> in the fifties, was an advocate for the impeachment of Chief Justice Warren
> in the aftermath of Brown [v. Board of Education] Fred Koch wrote a screed
> of his own accusing communists of inspiring the civil-rights movement."
> Blaming the Democratic Party for ending segregation - and coyly invited by
> opportunistic Republicans like Nixon and Reagan to switch party allegiances
> - racist whites signed up with the Republican Party in droves. Thus, the
> Democratic Party, which since the days of Jefferson had been the party of
> slavery and segregation, lost its southern base, ceding it to the new
> Republican Party.
> A Flip of Allegiance
> This flip in the allegiance of America's white supremacists - from Democrat
> to Republican - also put them in the same political structure as the
> anti-regulatory business interests which had dominated the Republican Party
> from the days of the Robber Barons. These two groups again found themselves
> sharing a common interest, the desire to constrain the federal government's
> commitment to providing for "the general Welfare."
> To the corporate Republicans this meant slashing taxes, eliminating
> regulations and paring back social programs for the poor or - in Ayn Rand
> vernacular - the moochers. To the racist Republicans this meant giving the
> states greater leeway to suppress the votes of minorities and gutting
> programs that were seen as especially benefiting black and brown Americans,
> such as food stamps and health-care reform.
> Thus, in today's neo-Confederate era, the American Right is coalescing
> around two parallel ideological motives: continued racial resentment
> (against black and brown people getting welfare to the presence of a black
> family in the White House) and resistance to government regulations (from
> efforts to control Wall Street excesses to restrictions on global-warming
> emissions).
> Though the white racist element of this coalition might typically be
> expected to proudly adopt the Stars and Bars of the Old Confederacy as its
> symbol, the modern Right is too media-savvy to get boxed into that
> distasteful imagery of slavery.
> So, instead the Right has opted for a rebranding as Revolutionary War-era
> patriots - calling themselves Tea Partiers, donning tri-corner hats and
> waving yellow banners with a coiled snake declaring "don't tread on me."
> Instead of overtly defending the Confederacy, the Right proclaims its
> commitment to the Founding Principles found in the Constitution.
> But this sly transformation required the Right to rewrite the Founding
> Narrative, to blot out the initial interpretation of the Constitution by
> the
> Federalists who, after all, were the ones who primarily crafted the
> document, and to pretend that Jefferson's revisionist view - representing
> the pre-Confederate position of the southern plantation owners - was the
> original one. [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up
> Constitution."]
> Now this doctored history - accepted by millions of Americans as true - has
> become the driving force for what many pundits predict will be a "wave
> election" for the Republicans and the Right.
>
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Strom Thurmond during a 1957 filibuster against civil rights legislation.
> (photo: AP)
> http://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/01/will-the-rights-fake-history-prevail/ht
> tp://consortiumnews.com/2014/11/01/will-the-rights-fake-history-prevail/
> Will the Right's Fake History Prevail?
> By Robert Parry, Consortium News
> 02 November 14
> f most polls are correct and voters elect a Republican-controlled Congress
> on Tuesday, a principal reason is that many Americans have been sold on a
> false recounting of the nation's Founding Narrative. They have bought the
> Right's made-up storyline about the Constitution's Framers detesting a
> strong federal government and favoring states' rights.
> This notion of the Framers as enemies of an activist national government is
> untrue but has become a popular meme as promoted through the vast
> right-wing
> media and accepted by the timid mainstream press, which is unwilling to
> fight for an accurate portrayal of what the Federalists who wrote the
> Constitution intended.
> So, without much pushback from those who know better, the Tea Partiers,
> Libertarians and many Republicans have successfully walled off much of the
> U.S. population from the actual history, which would reveal the American
> Right to be arguably the opposite of true patriots in its disdain for the
> assertive national governance devised in 1787.
> Plus, the Right's fake interpretation of the Constitution cannot be
> disentangled from the disgraceful history of slavery, segregation and
> today's renewed efforts to prevent black and brown Americans from voting.
> Indeed, race has always been an intrinsic element in the American Right's
> history, which can be roughly divided into four eras: the pre-Confederate
> period from 1787 to 1860 when slave owners first opposed and then sought to
> constrain the Constitution, viewing it as a threat to slavery; the actual
> Confederacy from 1861 to 1865 when the South took up arms against the
> Constitution in defense of slavery; the post-Confederate era from 1866 to
> the 1960s when white racists violently thwarted constitutional protections
> for blacks; and the neo-Confederate era from 1969 to today when these
> racists jumped to the Republican Party in an attempt to extend white
> supremacy behind various code words and subterfuges.
> It is true that the racist Right has often moved in tandem with the
> wealthy-elite Right, which has regarded the regulatory powers of the
> federal
> government as a threat to the ability of rich industrialists to operate
> corporations and to control the economy without regard to the larger public
> good.
> But the historical reality is that both the white supremacists and the
> anti-regulatory corporatists viewed the Constitution as a threat to their
> interests because of its creation of a powerful central government that was
> given a mandate to "promote the general Welfare." The Constitution was far
> from perfect and its authors did not always have the noblest of motives,
> but
> it created a structure that could reflect the popular will and be used for
> the nation's good.
> The key Framers of the Constitution - the likes of George Washington, James
> Madison (who then was a protégé of Washington) Alexander Hamilton and
> Gouverneur Morris (who wrote the famous Preamble) - were what might be
> called "pragmatic nationalists" determined to do what was necessary to
> protect the nation's fragile independence and to advance the country's
> economic development.
> In 1787, the Framers' principal concern was that the existing government
> structure - the Articles of Confederation - was unworkable because it
> embraced a system of strong states, deemed "sovereign" and "independent,"
> and a weak central government called simply a "league of friendship" among
> the states.
> The Constitution flipped that relationship, making federal law supreme and
> seeking to make the states "subordinately useful," in Madison's evocative
> phrase. Though the Constitution did make implicit concessions to slavery in
> order to persuade southern delegates to sign on, the shift toward federal
> dominance was immediately perceived as an eventual threat to slavery.
> Fearing for Slavery
> Key Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia's Patrick Henry and George Mason,
> argued that over time the more industrial North would grow dominant and
> insist on the elimination of slavery. And, it was known that a number of
> key
> participants at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, including
> Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, were strongly opposed to slavery
> and that Washington was troubled by human bondage though a slaveholder
> himself.
> So, Henry and Mason cited the threat to slavery as their hot-button
> argument
> against ratification. In 1788, Henry warned his fellow Virginians that if
> they approved the Constitution, it would put their massive capital
> investment in slaves in jeopardy. Imagining the possibility of a federal
> tax
> on slaveholding, Henry declared, "They'll free your niggers!"
> It is a testament to how we have whitewashed U.S. history on the evils of
> slavery that Patrick Henry is far better known for his declaration before
> the Revolution, "Give me liberty or give me death!" than his equally pithy
> warning, "They'll free your niggers!"
> Similarly, George Mason, Henry's collaborator in trying to scare Virginia's
> slaveholders into opposing the Constitution, is recalled as an instigator
> of
> the Bill of Rights, rather than as a defender of slavery. A key "freedom"
> that Henry and Mason fretted about was the "freedom" of plantation owners
> to
> possess other human beings as property.
> As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book,
> Madison and Jefferson, Henry and Mason argued that "slavery, the source of
> Virginia's tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected." Besides the
> worry about how the federal government might tax slave-ownership, there was
> the fear that the President - as commander in chief - might "federalize"
> the
> state militias and emancipate the slaves.
> Though the Anti-Federalists lost the struggle to block ratification, they
> soon shifted into a strategy of redefining the federal powers contained in
> the Constitution, with the goal of minimizing them and thus preventing a
> strong federal government from emerging as a threat to slavery.
> In this early stage of the pre-Confederacy era, the worried slave owners
> turned to one of their own, Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the
> Declaration of Independence and a charismatic politician who had been in
> France during the drafting and ratification of the Constitution and
> enactment of the Bill of Rights.
> Though Jefferson had criticized the new governing document especially over
> its broad executive powers, he was not an outright opponent and thus was a
> perfect vehicle for seeking to limit the Constitution's reach. Even as
> Washington's Secretary of State, Jefferson began organizing against the
> formation of the new government as it was being designed by the
> Federalists,
> especially Washington's energetic Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton.
> The Federalists, who were the principal Framers, understood the
> Constitution
> to grant the central government all necessary powers to "provide for the
> common Defense and general Welfare of the United States." However,
> Jefferson
> and his fellow Southern slaveholders were determined to limit those powers
> by reinterpreting what the Constitution allowed much more narrowly. [See
> Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up Constitution."]
> Partisan Warfare
> Through the 1790s, Jefferson and his Southern-based faction engaged in
> fierce partisan warfare against the Federalists, particularly Alexander
> Hamilton but also John Adams and implicitly George Washington. Jefferson
> opposed the Federalist program that sought to promote the country's
> development through everything from a national bank to a professional
> military to a system of roads and canals to support for manufacturing.
> As Jefferson's faction gained strength, it also pulled in James Madison
> who,
> for reasons of political survival and personal finances, embraced the slave
> interests of his fellow Virginians. Madison essentially moved from under
> Washington's wing to under Jefferson's. Then, with Madison's acquiescence,
> Jefferson developed the extra-constitutional theories of state
> "nullification" of federal law and even the principle of secession.
> Historians Burstein and Isenberg wrote in Madison and Jefferson that these
> two important Founders must be understood as, first and foremost,
> politicians representing the interests of Virginia where the two men lived
> nearby each other on plantations worked by African-American slaves,
> Jefferson at Monticello and Madison at Montpelier.
> "It is hard for most to think of Madison and Jefferson and admit that they
> were Virginians first, Americans second," Burstein and Isenberg said. "But
> this fact seems beyond dispute. Virginians felt they had to act to protect
> the interests of the Old Dominion, or else, before long, they would become
> marginalized by a northern-dominated economy.
> "Virginians who thought in terms of the profit to be reaped in land were
> often reluctant to invest in manufacturing enterprises. The real tragedy is
> that they chose to speculate in slaves rather than in textile factories and
> iron works. ... And so as Virginians tied their fortunes to the land, they
> failed to extricate themselves from a way of life that was limited in
> outlook and produced only resistance to economic development."
> Because of political mistakes by the Federalists and Jefferson's success in
> portraying himself as an advocate of simple farmers (when he was really the
> avatar for the plantation owners), Jefferson and his Democratic-Republicans
> prevailed in the election of 1800, clearing the way for a more constrained
> interpretation of the Constitution and a 24-year Virginia Dynasty over the
> White House with Jefferson, Madison and James Monroe, all slaveholders.
> By the time the Virginia Dynasty ended, slavery had spread to newer states
> to the west and was more deeply entrenched than ever before. Indeed, not
> only was Virginia's agriculture tied to the institution of slavery but
> after
> the Constitution banned the importation of slaves in 1808, Virginia
> developed a new industry, the breeding of slaves for sale to new states in
> the west. Jefferson even wanted all the new states from the Louisiana
> Territories to be slave states. [For details on this history, see
> Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Dubious Claim to Madison" and "Thomas
> Jefferson: America's Founding Sociopath."]
> Toward Civil War
> Thus, America's course to the Civil War was set. Ironically the warnings of
> Patrick Henry and George Mason proved prescient as the growing industrial
> strength of the North gave momentum to a movement for abolishing slavery.
> When Abraham Lincoln, the presidential candidate for the new anti-slavery
> Republican Party, won the 1860 election, southern slave states seceded from
> the Union, claiming they were defending the principle of states' rights but
> really they were protecting the economic interests of slave owners.
> The South's bloody defeat in the Civil War finally ended slavery and the
> North sought for several years to "reconstruct" the South as a place that
> would respect the rights of freed slaves. But the traditional white power
> structure reasserted itself, employing violence against blacks and the
> so-called "carpetbaggers" from the North.
> As white Southerners organized politically under the banner of the
> Democratic Party, which had defended slavery since its origins in
> Jefferson's plantation-based political faction, the North and the
> Republicans grew weary of trying to police the South. Soon, southern whites
> were pushing blacks into a form of crypto-slavery through a combination of
> Jim Crow laws, white supremacist ideology and Ku Klux Klan terror.
> Thus, the century after the Civil War could be designated the
> post-Confederate era of the American Right. This restoration of the South's
> white power structure also coincided with the emergence of the North's
> Robber Barons - the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D.
> Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan - who amassed extraordinary wealth and used it
> to achieve political clout in favor of laissez-faire economics.
> In that sense, the interests of the northern industrialists and the
> southern
> aristocracy dovetailed in a common opposition to any federal authority that
> might reflect the interests of the common man, either the white industrial
> workers of the North or the black sharecroppers of the South.
> However, amid recurring financial calamities on Wall Street that drove many
> Americans into abject poverty and with the disgraceful treatment of
> African-Americans in the South, reform movements began to emerge in the
> early Twentieth Century, reviving the founding ideal that the federal
> government should "promote the general Welfare."
> With the Great Depression of the 1930s, the grip of the aging Robber Barons
> and their descendants began to slip. Despite fierce opposition from the
> political Right, President Franklin Roosevelt enacted a series of reforms
> that increased regulation of the financial sector, protected the rights of
> unions and created programs to lift millions of Americans out of poverty.
> After World War II, the federal government went even further, helping
> veterans get educated through the GI Bill, making mortgages affordable for
> new homes, connecting the nation through a system of modern highways, and
> investing in scientific research. Through these various reforms, the
> federal
> government not only advanced the "general Welfare" but, in effect, invented
> the Great American Middle Class.
> Civil Rights
> As the nation's prosperity surged, attention also turned to addressing the
> shame of racial segregation. The civil rights movement - led by remarkable
> leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and eventually embraced by
> Democratic
> Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - rallied popular support and
> the
> federal government finally moved against segregation across the South.
> Yet, reflecting the old-time pro-slavery concerns of Patrick Henry and
> George Mason, southern white political leaders fumed at this latest
> intrusion by the federal government against the principle of "states'
> rights," i.e. the rights of the whites in southern states to treat "their
> coloreds" as they saw fit.
> This white backlash to the federal activism against segregation became the
> energy driving the modern Republican Party, which abandoned its honorable
> legacy as the party that ended slavery. Instead, it became home for
> Americans who feared social change and resented policies that
> disproportionately helped racial minorities. The smartest right-wingers
> understood this reality.
> On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative
> William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that "the white community in the South
> is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically
> and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically."
> Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, who wrote the influential manifesto
> Conscience of a Conservative, realized in 1961 that for Republicans to gain
> national power, they would have to pick off southern segregationists. Or as
> Goldwater put it, the Republican Party had to "go hunting where the ducks
> are."
> Then, there was Richard Nixon's "southern strategy" of using coded language
> to appeal to southern whites and Ronald Reagan's launching of his 1980
> national presidential campaign with a states' rights speech in
> Philadelphia,
> Mississippi, the notorious site of the murders of three civil rights
> workers. The two strands of historic conservatism -- white supremacy and
> "small government" ideology -- were again wound together.
> In New York magazine, Frank Rich summed up this political history while
> noting how today's right-wing revisionists have tried to reposition their
> heroes by saying they opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 simply out of
> high-minded "small-government principles." But Rich wrote:
> "The primacy of [Strom] Thurmond in the GOP's racial realignment is the
> most
> incriminating truth the right keeps trying to cover up. That's why the
> George W. Bush White House shoved the Mississippi senator Trent Lott out of
> his post as Senate majority leader in 2002 once news spread that Lott had
> told Thurmond's 100th-birthday gathering that America 'wouldn't have had
> all
> these problems' if the old Dixiecrat had been elected president in 1948.
> "Lott, it soon became clear, had also lavished praise on [the Confederacy's
> president] Jefferson Davis and associated for decades with other far-right
> groups in thrall to the old Confederate cause. But the GOP elites didn't
> seem to mind until he committed the truly unpardonable sin of reminding
> America, if only for a moment, of the exact history his party most wanted
> and needed to suppress. Then he had to be shut down at once."
> Unholy Alliance
> This unholy alliance between the racists and the corporatists continues to
> this day with Republicans understanding that the votes of blacks,
> Hispanics,
> Asians and other minorities must be suppressed if the twin goals of the two
> principal elements of the Right are to control the future. That was the
> significance of the 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court's right-wing majority
> to gut the Voting Rights Act. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Supreme Court's
> War
> on Democracy."]
> Only if the votes of whites can be proportionately enhanced and the votes
> of
> minorities minimized can the Republican Party overcome the country's
> demographic changes and retain government power that will both advance the
> interests of the racists and the free-marketeers.
> That's why Republican-controlled statehouses engaged in aggressive
> gerrymandering of congressional districts in 2010 and tried to impose
> "ballot security" measures across the country in 2012 and 2014. The crudity
> of those efforts, clumsily justified as needed to prevent the virtually
> non-existent problem of in-person voter fraud, was embarrassing to watch.
> As Frank Rich noted, "Everyone knows these laws are in response to the rise
> of Barack Obama. It is also no coincidence that many of them were conceived
> and promoted by the American Legal Exchange Council, an activist outfit
> funded by heavy-hitting right-wing donors like Charles and David Koch.
> "In another coincidence that the GOP would like to flush down the memory
> hole, the Kochs' father, Fred, a founder of the radical John Birch Society
> in the fifties, was an advocate for the impeachment of Chief Justice Warren
> in the aftermath of Brown [v. Board of Education] Fred Koch wrote a screed
> of his own accusing communists of inspiring the civil-rights movement."
> Blaming the Democratic Party for ending segregation - and coyly invited by
> opportunistic Republicans like Nixon and Reagan to switch party allegiances
> - racist whites signed up with the Republican Party in droves. Thus, the
> Democratic Party, which since the days of Jefferson had been the party of
> slavery and segregation, lost its southern base, ceding it to the new
> Republican Party.
> A Flip of Allegiance
> This flip in the allegiance of America's white supremacists - from Democrat
> to Republican - also put them in the same political structure as the
> anti-regulatory business interests which had dominated the Republican Party
> from the days of the Robber Barons. These two groups again found themselves
> sharing a common interest, the desire to constrain the federal government's
> commitment to providing for "the general Welfare."
> To the corporate Republicans this meant slashing taxes, eliminating
> regulations and paring back social programs for the poor or - in Ayn Rand
> vernacular - the moochers. To the racist Republicans this meant giving the
> states greater leeway to suppress the votes of minorities and gutting
> programs that were seen as especially benefiting black and brown Americans,
> such as food stamps and health-care reform.
> Thus, in today's neo-Confederate era, the American Right is coalescing
> around two parallel ideological motives: continued racial resentment
> (against black and brown people getting welfare to the presence of a black
> family in the White House) and resistance to government regulations (from
> efforts to control Wall Street excesses to restrictions on global-warming
> emissions).
> Though the white racist element of this coalition might typically be
> expected to proudly adopt the Stars and Bars of the Old Confederacy as its
> symbol, the modern Right is too media-savvy to get boxed into that
> distasteful imagery of slavery.
> So, instead the Right has opted for a rebranding as Revolutionary War-era
> patriots - calling themselves Tea Partiers, donning tri-corner hats and
> waving yellow banners with a coiled snake declaring "don't tread on me."
> Instead of overtly defending the Confederacy, the Right proclaims its
> commitment to the Founding Principles found in the Constitution.
> But this sly transformation required the Right to rewrite the Founding
> Narrative, to blot out the initial interpretation of the Constitution by
> the
> Federalists who, after all, were the ones who primarily crafted the
> document, and to pretend that Jefferson's revisionist view - representing
> the pre-Confederate position of the southern plantation owners - was the
> original one. [For more, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Right's Made-Up
> Constitution."]
> Now this doctored history - accepted by millions of Americans as true - has
> become the driving force for what many pundits predict will be a "wave
> election" for the Republicans and the Right.
>
>
>
>
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