The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Classic-Xer]

(07-20-2020, 11:47 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(07-20-2020, 11:33 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-20-2020, 02:38 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: You are defending the Confederates, which is racist. Stop denying that you are racist.

The Confederates were not Americans.

(North Americans though, I suppose, but not citizens of the USA)

Dude, there are no ex Confederates alive to defend these days. True, the Confederates weren't technically Americans during the Civil War years. You'll find that out and learn what it was like to be one of them soon enough as well. Like it or not, you are on the modern day version of the Confederate side today.

You admire the people who re-created the Confederate myth 105 years ago. That is when the Confederate statues started going up, fifty years after the end of the Civil War as the soldiers embarrassed and shamed by defeat were no longer around in large enough numbers to say no. 

1915 is also the year in which the second Ku Klux Klan was formed and when D. W. Griffith brought forth the movie spectacle The Birth of a Nation, the second half of which was a celebration of the eventual suppression of the Freedmen who had just been liberated from slavery and did what most Americans do when given a chance -- voting, running for public office, starting businesses, and getting formal education. Had Reconstruction succeeded the South might instead have become a rich land in which commerce and industry might have well served the agricultural economy. Blacks who had recently been slaves were forming banks and stores... which is about what most immigrant groups do. But free blacks had immigrated, so to speak, from enslavement to freedom and from feudal exploitation to capitalism. 

Let's not fool ourselves about the Second Klan. It had many of the characteristics -- violence, bigotry, cultural intolerance, and of course gaudy symbolism -- characteristic of fascist groups (including Mussolini's Blackshirts that would form later before such groups as the Nazi Party in Germany and Austria (and in German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia), the Ustase in Croatia, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, and the Iron Guard in Romania. Those groups were ugly in different ways, but -- yes, all politically monstrous. 

Unlike the others, the second KKK failed before it could become a national power. This said, the Klan was far closer to achieving national power in America than the Nazis were in Germany in the mid-1920's. Not for export? There were Klan groups in Canada, and had the Klan taken over in America the word for Anschluss  would be undeniably Anglo-Saxon in origin. There was a short-lived Klan group that formed in Germany in the late 1920's, and it disbanded; its members chose to become Nazis. 

We will never know what a Klan-dominated America would be like... but I have contemplated a novel about an Axis victory in which Germany remains a democracy and Japan's early steps toward democracy fulfilled themselves. A hint on such a world: "Alaska" becomes "Arasuka" Prefecture in 1959, and Churchill and Adenauer basically switch roles in history. Fascistic leaders start wars but usually end up losing them. 

...at one point I saw America becoming rifted like Spain in the 1930's, with the more liberal parts of Spain being about as progressive as New England at the time and parts holding a nostalgia for a medieval and feudal ethos. Or maybe Yugoslavia in the 1990's along regional lines that reflect quasi-national divides. A hint: Boston has more in common with San Francisco than with central Pennsylvania. 

That opportunity for rending America in a civil war is almost certainly over. Your side lost the cultural struggle.

Well, I see the bulk of the country remaining together as a few Democratic states (mainly cities) fight it out so to speak. We are seeing some signs of the cultural struggle that's occurring now. Your side of the Democratic spectrum appears be losing the cultural struggle. The Republican side hasn't committed and isn't directly involved yet and remains idle for the most part. By the way, the KKK failed because the northern Klan's viewed it more as social fraternity which were popular at the time than a political action group and they stopped being members when they found out what the Klan was doing to blacks in the South.