12.05.14
Pariah state
The new Confederacy, much like the old.
Frank at Pine View Farm points to an honest but devastating analysis of the problem of WhiteManistan.
Excerpted from Racial Divide: The Tragedy of America’s first black President, from Der Spiegel:
The American problem has many different facets, but it is accurate to say that it is mostly white men who shoot young African-Americans in the service of the state.
The [Republican Party’s] most radical supporters viewed Obama’s speeches and proposed legislation as nothing more than a black man’s attempt to exact revenge against the country’s white majority. Even if they don’t always say so, Obama’s opponents have always felt that his actions represent a threat to white people, whether he launched a federal investment programs aimed at economic stimulus or proposed making the healthcare system a little fairer.
You’ll notice the map from Der Spiegel showing a majority of African Americans still living in the old Confederacy.
And that is where they have now been virtually completely eliminated from power. They have elected representation but that representation is minority, for practical purposes, banned from legislating or having any say in government in 2014. That’s an apartheid state within the state.
That poison, the toxin of old Dixie is spread throughout the country. No state, not even California, is totally free of it.
What Der Spiegel does not mention is that the party of Abe Lincoln is the party that has inflamed the white tribe against the first African-American president, the agency that has concentrated and focused the belief that it is American white people who have been victimized by the president, that it is they who have been subjected to a systemic racism.
This goes back to the end of the Civil War. The armies of the south were defeated, its territory overrun, its agriculture and trade in ruins. And it engendered a burning resentment, a sense of victimization that could not be erased.
This is well described in this bit from the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Lincoln was assassinated and Reconstruction slowly failed.
Today, the Republican Party is, whether broadly recognized or not, the party of John Wilkes Booth.
George Smith said,
December 5, 2014 at 11:00 am
Mirroring what I said above is this longer piece in a blog at the Times.
It dances around the racist resentment delineated in Der Spiegel’s piece but it accurately describes the flip of the old Confederacy and its white citizen animosity toward social issues which are advancing in the rest of the country. This is attributed to “religiosity” and a deep rejection of “liberalism.” What it actually is — intolerance. The old solid South is deeply intolerant.
Plus there’s the structural problem of representation, summarized:
The young, nonwhite and urban voters who have allowed Democrats to win in presidential elections are inefficiently concentrated in dense urban areas, where they are naturally drawn into overwhelmingly Democratic districts by congressional mapmakers. They are also concentrated in populous states, like California and New York, which get the same number of senators as Alabama or Mississippi.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/upshot/demise-of-the-southern-democrat-is-now-nearly-compete.html