Salon's Elias Esquith recently wrote this:
With the political world talking more about the tidal wave of anti-LGBT Jim Crow legislation popping up in conservative legislatures all over the country, it was only a matter of time before the patron saint of unreconstructed right-wing bigotry, Pat Buchanan, weighed in and set the new standard in the right’s effort to roll back civil liberties in America.
Well, the wait is over: Buchanan’s written a column and the standard has been set. Using the brouhaha over Arizona’s anti-gay law as a springboard, Buchanan argues that it’s time for America to get rid of civil rights laws — all of them.
Granting that it’s “a radical idea,” Buchanan writes, “Suppose we repealed the civil rights laws and fired all the bureaucrats enforcing these laws.”
“Does anyone think hotels, motels and restaurants across Dixie, from D.C. to Texas, would stop serving black customers?” he continues. “Does anyone think there would again be signs sprouting up reading ‘whites’ and ‘colored’ on drinking foundations and restrooms?”
Not only does Buchanan think the answer to these questions is a big fat NO, but he’s willing to go one step further: Not only are civil rights laws unnecessary, but they are, in fact, basically the same kind of tyranny that led to the American Revolution in the first place.
At this point, you might be wondering, If these civil protections are unnecessary, why have they endured? Pat’s got an answer: “They exist to validate the slander that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic country which would revert to massive discrimination were it not for heroic progressives standing guard.”
The argument cannot be about 'inequality.' Americans have always entertained the perverse hope to become filthy rich; that's why there cannot be a classic revolution. No one wants to be the proletariat here.
Fairness for the poor, humanitarian compassion --- these also cannot arouse a nervous public.
The best political argument must be pragmatic. Jobs are produced when sales go up. Redistribution of buying power will makeour economy robust. Infrastructure (from bridges to college) is essential for business success in a global market as well as preserving a basic sound quality of life.
Health insurance benefits cripple our small businesses- they cannot compete with companies around the world who do not have that fixed overhead.Therefore -Medicare should be expanded gradually to age 60, 55, 50 then become a national insurance option in the exchanges. Stop using 'single payer' as a term-- it never won hearts nor minds.Liberate business from the shackles of 1950 policy.
Tax carried interest, reset withholding cap, and add a penny a trade
to day traders' follies.
Democracy will fail if accumulated capital growing exponentially makes working hard, expertise and experience seem foolish
Safety, jobs,cost-saving insurance, infrastructure....pragmatics.
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Mr. Buchanan, I think people would gradually start to refuse serving people who aren't like them. There is every reason to think that without civil rights laws, there would be terrible regression. The move on the part of the GOP to deprive voters of rights they have had heretofore, the move in Arizona to allow denial of service to homosexuals on a religious basis, the rise in hate crimes, the Tea Party and the Birther movement, all suggest an underlying impulse on the part of many people to exercise as much prejudice as they possibly can.
And I think you know this but don't care, because the reduction in civil rights would allow you and your fellow conservatives more power at the expense of your opponents.
I don't know whether you are a bigot, as people suggest, or not-- but I do know that the effect of your proposals would be to spread bigotry, not to reduce it.
@commonwealth
Wonderful address. There's something terribly dysfunctional in his inability to admit what he is sane enough to have at some near conscious level recognized -- that many of the people he so wants to love, can go from being good ordinary Americans at one minute, actually very likeable and readily defensible, to crazed lunatics the next.
You go to Germans in the 1930s and show them at home, and they're reasonably good (though not amazing: none of them are products of loving childhoods) people … who do this switch, actually switch brain hemispheres -- to the right one, home of our traumas -- and disconnect the capacity to empathize, who'll go to the streets and if not cheer then (preferably) eagerly participate in kicking to death people they can only see as vermin. This is the key thing: everyone has a normal self; a lot of us though unfortunately have this other self (a parental alter we've internalized) it often doesn't require much of a nod to switch into. And it's a mask of angry hate for anyone guilty just for being vulnerable -- like children.
Buchanan will only let himself see the former, the somewhat sane, likeable side, in swaths of the American populace he needs to see as unpretentious and unjustly abused and whom we require progressives to keep their stiff rule on. America was formed from the most evolved -- the most left at the times, who went to the North -- and the least the world had to offer, who went to the South. Insufficiently differentiation-worthy descendants of the latter, would reinstitute slavery -- the institutionalized ability to repeat childhood abuses incurred upon oneself upon some corralled group -- in a heartbeat. The world has gotten that much out of control for them.
We're going to have to relentless, and even at some point press to apply some kind of widespread therapy to them, for their complete spiralling out was inevitable out of our ongoing progress and the nature of their unloved, "you're a spoiled shit who thinks only of yourself who I'll abandon every time you differentiate yourself from me," Bates-hotel, childhood origins.
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I personally don't know how much of a difference there is between Pat Buchanan and Chris Hedges -- and maybe Thomas Frank? They both believe America's actually least emotionally evolved are in fact it's bread and butter-- you forget about them, you're not taking the country forward but fin-de-siecle being oblique to its sustenance.
The urbanites who like that the feel of the nation, how it presents itself, is more under their determination -- "who gives a bleep about Kansas? -- are their worst enemy.
In truth, I think they all feel the regressive aspects of those they're defending -- but weren't their own parents a bit or a lot more regressed than they were, as well as less well situated, less wealthy? And maybe they can no longer take the emotional distance from them this means they've earned for themselves. Time to reshow loyalty to those they've spent much of their lives trying to improve upon, for the sense of aloneness, of apocalyptic punishment and abandonment, of dark things come home to roost, is palpable.
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