(no subject)

[noahgibbs]

I read Charley Reese's political column every now and again. He's an old-style conservative, not this "neo" flavor. So here's one more bit of random description of Howard Dean to add to the mess.

Dean does seem to do well among young people, but that's never won anybody an election yet. Young people aren't so good about turning up to vote.

Comments

[queen-elvis.livejournal.com]

"I prefer the world of Jefferson Davis"? Like, civil war?

I also thought it was weird that he called Vermont an obscure state. Delaware is an obscure state; Vermont is where hippies and maple syrup come from.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

"I prefer the world of Jefferson Davis"? Like, civil war?

Oddly enough, yes. He's got another article on that topic in the past couple of weeks. This most recent time I caught up on his stuff was the first time I ever heard him mention it, though.

I get nervous

[jd5p.livejournal.com]

I get nervous when people say "You can't do worse than ______"
It seems that the population in general takes that as a challenge to try to do worse than _____. You're right though, that is in interesting column.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I have to bring this up just once and I may never mention it again, but I nostalgia for the Confederacy strikes me as only slightly more acceptable than nostalgia for the Wehrmacht.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

He's not actually nostalgic for the Confederacy. It's more obvious if you read what he wrote. He does, however, respect some of the political opinions of Jefferson Davis.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

I've read Reese's hagiography of Davis, but it's not germane for me to dive into it right now (I'll write up and post a precis about it in my journal in a few days - suffice it that his article on Davis is a good example of a major illness in the current American story). His main article, Davis article aside, is still largely anecdotal.

One of the difficulties I have with the Dean campaign is that we're not sure how...real his organization is at this point. the problem with virtual organizations is that they generate an awful lot of heat without little concomitant light, and so far (we'll have another round of tests in the next 2 weeks), the Dean campaign has failed the only test that matters.

That said, I can say, anecdotally, that both Clark and Dean supporters seem to be actively energized through the use of meetups, dailykos and the like. However, of the two, Dean has a far more thoroughly articulated policy and several of the speeches that I've seen him make and have read have really resonated with me.

I think one of the things that Reese misses is that the press is fundamentally lazy. We haven't had a Senator make a non-laughable run for president since about 1964, but you'll notice that in each of the last 5 elections everyone focuses on the senators until they destroy themselves.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

No matter what one might think of Dean and Kerry, I think the key question is "Which can beat Bush?" The polling data, for what it's worth, seems to indicate that Kerry has a much better chance.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Which polling data are you thinking of? You mean in Iowa, or nationally?

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Hm. I hadn't actually seen the article ("A Truly Remarkable Man") that you're presumably referring to. I'll read it and get back to you.

But yes, the reality (or lack thereof) of Dean's campaign is very difficult to determine.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Hm. I've now read the aforementioned article on Davis. Aside from the fact that it reads like a high school book review, I don't find much specifically wrong with it. It consciously and carefully avoids the issue of him fighting for the Confederacy, and thus for slavery.

Other than that, it describes him as a person. Describes him in glowing terms, granted, but not in any way that seems deeply inappropriate. It could be summed up, more or less, as "he was very romantic. His life read like a novel. People liked him. He didn't feel he did anything wrong." I don't know much about his history, but I don't see any particular harm in writing that about him. Was he a complete monster and I just hadn't heard about it before? My history's far from perfect. I'd never heard anything especially awful about him, though, other than "president of the confederacy", which is still debatably awful without further supporting evidence.

[king-chiron.livejournal.com]

Nationally. Newsweek most recently came out with a poll that shows Kerry beating Bush. Even Fox news, whose poll of course showed Bush winning, put Kerry ahead of the other Democrats.

Kerry has grassroots support among among many Democrats. Unfortunately, you can't win an election simply by appealing to Democrats. Personally I don't believe Dean stands a chance with the independents necessary to win the presidency.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

Medium length statement - y'know how there's usually this gripe about the Japanese revising their role in WWII and kind of ignoring things like the Rape of Nanking? The U.S. does the same with the Civil War - the South seceded first and foremost for the preservation of slavery and "The White Race". Pretty much since Appomatox, however, there's been a concerted effort to rewrite the story of the civil war to one of noble chevaliers, brother vs. brother on the field of honor, etc. In addition, bogus arguments like economics and States' Rights are usually brought up, especially in the past 40 years. There's a very very nasty Harpers' cartoon from 1860 or so which deconstructs most of these arguments as they were espoused in the 1860 Democratic platform. Frederick Douglass spent a lot of time from the 1870's onward fighting this problem.

The thing is, this behavior is cyclical. A good judge for how a particular era is treating the conflict is John Brown - around 1920 or so, Brown was seen as a righteous figure, about the same as he was around the time of the War itself. When I was going to school, Brown was usually portrayed as a fruitcake.

The thing is, there's this strong strain in modern conservatism that really wants to rehabilitate the South. We see it primarily through hagiography - sure, the Confederacy was a backward medieval racist regime built on the blood and suffering of its disenfranchised masses, but Robert E. Lee was a noble son of Virginia! It fuels modern Jim Crow activities like the States' Rights movements, and other attempts to drag the human race back down into the mud.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

Any poll at this time is debatably useful - Kerry's victory stance may have more to do with name recognition than anything else. More of a concern is that his campaign is almost completely out of cash - the next nine states are where the real action is, and I don't think he has enough income to make a serious dent in any of them.

I don't see why Dean can't win with independents; his general anti-gun-control stance is something that's important in Reagan Democrat areas like Western PA, for example. Besides, any Democrat is going to be painted by the Bush administration as the second coming of Che Guevara.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

True. Though so far, the right has been pretty successful in projecting the image that Dean is too elitist to really care about the rights of 'ordinary joes'. The fact that this is literally true of essentially every politician in the race is neither here nor there.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

there's this strong strain in modern conservatism that really wants to rehabilitate the South

Okay, I can see your point there. I think making a point of tarnishing the image of everybody that fought for the South is a trifle unfair anyway, but I'm definitely of fan of, say, Stonewall Jackson.

It fuels modern Jim Crow activities like the States' Rights movements

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong States' Rights issues, but I'm generally a fan of moving more of the power out of federal government. On the one hand, I agree, that means that less-progressive areas will tend to be nastier to live in, and can impose worse laws. On the other hand, it severely limits the size of mistake that can be made all in one go, including limiting the effects of bribery somewhat -- or at least, making it a more expensive undertaking.

We're a very provincial lot here in the states, and we tend to ignore the examples of other countries. For instance, when we talk about drug penalties, you simply don't hear the example of the netherlands brought up in public forums, usually not by either side. It's not considered relevant. Similarly, Canadian health care is brought up only Democrats, and rarely even by them. That's because it's automatically stigmatized in the American mind... "Oh, it's Canadian..."

One nice thing about letting more progressive areas be more progressive and backward areas be backward is that you get homegrown American examples of things being legalized without destroying all Christendom -- look at gambling in Nevada. Prostitution seems to be slowly doing the same (also basically legal in Nevada, if heavily constrained), although more slowly since it makes less money for the areas involved. In general, if you show people more-progressive and less-progressive choices, it tends to be good for the progressive choices, especially since that makes it quite possible to *move* to somewhere more progressive without having to leave the country. Vermont *does* get brought up as an example of gay marriage, as does Massachusetts, and those hold a lot more weight in the American mind than does Canada. And I know gay people that are considering moving, or just heading up long enough to get married. A fine example of the fiscal benefits of being more progressive. And fiscal benefits tend to turn conservative heads better than arguments of equality and fraternity.

I can see your point about not letting conservatives rehabilitate the South in the American mind, and thus choosing to tar all the major Southern figures with a broad brush. I'm as thoroughly against that, though, as I am against any other form of painting everything in absolutes. Hitler, contemptible though he was as a human being, deserves respect for his tactical and logistical abilities -- you don't stage a nearly-successful conquest of Europe without doing *something* right tactically. Bush, lousy politician and corrupt toady that he is, has a folksy charm that Democrats would do well to pay more attention to, because it plays well with the *same people who will ignore you selling them up the river*. Take those away, and where would the Republicans be? Left trying to make a majority of votes out of the richest 10% of the country, which is a difficult job :-) Mussolini was an incompetent fascist dictator, but if he had a lovely singing voice, I'd still say we should admit it. A wide variety of basically bad human beings still have good qualities, and I'm against pretending otherwise.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

One of the great achievements of the Southern Strategy has been to get southerners to vote against their own economic best interests for the last thirty years. Republican populism is truly a marvel to behold.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

I'm a few hours before ya, so I'm going to have to hold off a full response till later, but I can cover States' Rights before I go to bed. Historically, "States' Rights", despite the lovely libertopian overtones of the term, has been a specific euphemism for racist policies. The best example of this is the Dixiecrat party in the 40's (Strom Thurmond's presidential run), whose official name was the States' Rights party. Similarly, George Wallace relied heavily on States' Rights rhetoric throughout his career.

[queen-elvis.livejournal.com]

In addition, bogus arguments like economics and States' Rights are usually brought up

I'm not sure if one can truly differentiate between slavery, economics and (to a lesser extent) states' rights. After all, the reason they wanted to keep slavery was because it was the foundation of their economy. And slavery then became a springboard for states' rights conflicts.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

The economic interpretation is the classic whitewash, but economics is at the core of everything. A better description of the reasons for Secession as stated by the VP of the Confederacy in 1861, is,
quotha:

"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our never Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. "

There was economics involved, sure - the ownership of human beings. There were states' rights, yes - the rights of states to designate human beings as cattle (let's not forget that Texas seceded from Mexico because the 1830 Mexican Constitution outlawed slavery). Slavery was the casus belli, and everything else is a function of that.

[queen-elvis.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not saying slavery wasn't the ultimate motivation for the civil war. I'm just saying it wouldn't have been if it hadn't been immensely profitable.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

The problem with your broad brush argument, I think, is that I see the opposite happening. When we lionize Davis, Lee and the like (and honestly, apart from that unpleasant business about high treason, what authentically bad thing have you heard about Robert E. Lee? Especially compared to Ulysses Grant?), then we ask ourselves why these wonderful, noble pure and saintly human beings were associated with something so bad. Eventually, you start to get the "maybe it wasn't so bad" argument, after all, they were for States' Rights, a Constitutional government!

Bloom argues that when we discuss Christianity, we don't really agree with it on its merits, but rather because of Jesus portrayed in the Gospel of Mark. Hagiography is a powerful tool for rationalization, and what I see justified here is unconscionable.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized the extent to which slavery was unique (well, okay, uncommon) to the Confederacy at that point. Certainly there were areas of the Union that still possessed slaves, if far fewer. But I'd forgotten that most of Europe had already abolished slavery by then.

However, Alexander Stephens' phrase, "our peculiar institution" for slavery would suggest that they did consider it to be pretty specific to themselves, and that that was the perception at the time.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

I tend to personally think of it as "they had reasonable views for the time, even though we now consider that barbaric." Jackson, who I mentioned earlier, was pretty apathetic about the whole slavery thing, but wasn't about to fight against Virginia. While he certainly wasn't saintly, he *did* seem to be a basically decent person. I suppose we could find some reason to call him awful, but it seems silly from my point of view. "Yes, but he tolerated the intolerable institution of slavery." "You mean, like hundreds of generations of Greeks and Romans did?" "Yes, and they were all simply awful human beings."

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

It's a unique American euphemism. I think partly because of the overt recist elements - if you read a lot of Southern material from the era, they view themselves as taking on a hard burden of civilizing a community of savages.

But yes, Slavery had been systematically dying out in the world for about 40 years by the time of the civil war, and a good amount of credit for that has to go to the British Anti-Slavery society. It's interesting that when you look at early confederacy material, they play up a bit more of the states rights stuff partly as a propaganda move. Ensuring that Britain was on their side was essential to the Confederacy's survival. When the Emancipation Proclamation was released, it drove a stake through the heart of European support for the Confederacy, and you got some nasty stuff. In particular, there's address by Davis stating that after 2/23/1863, all free blacks in the South were to be reenslaved in perpetuity.

[astralagos.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that's entirely viable. These were modern human beings - as you pointed out yourself, slavery was an odd duck. And it's not like these were the only people who made the choice. Sherman defected from Louisiana (although he was born in Ohio). Interesting to note, incidentally, that Sherman's army was about 23,000 stronger by the time he reached the sea than when he started - Confederate defectors and freed blacks.

Actually, if you can find it, read Sherman's letter to Atlanta. It's a very succinct discussion of the era. Sherman was ahead of his time in recognizing the machinery and impact of total war.