I recently reviewed an article which I think lays out (very well) some of the differences Americans tend to fight over between the Left and Right. We're a relatively-young society and I think the things related in the linked article STILL affect us in many significant ways (anti-union, anti-minority, anti-woman's rights... is stuff that tends to stem from the Right). While I'm certain that no human beings are perfect, we do tend to be better-off as WE WORK TOGETHER. Please consider the following excerpt from the article mentioned above:
Very interesting article - I have Albion's seed on my reading list, this only encourages me more to make sure I get to it. I think I began to get an understanding for the South after the BP oil spill. Many Southern States were screaming about the intrusion of the federal government - but the first thing out of their mouths was "Washington needs to do something / do more." Then after the aid supplied for Katrina, many attempted to vote down help for the Sandy victims. Unfortunately it is not enough to understand something is broken. Got to figure out a way to fix it.
In the 1700s southerners were horrified by the spectacle of the New England town meeting, where every citizen had the right to express their views and decisions were decided by a public vote right then and there. They were so afraid of this type of popular voting that they got it outlawed for all new states, made a property ownership requirement for voters and made the Senate and President indirectly elected. They were deathly afraid, and rightly so because New England style governance would have quickly dispossessed them of their aristocratic prerogatives because their tenant farmers would have gained political power. Over time the northerners more egalitarian views have made some progress but the old arguments of the southerners, couched in carefully chosen words about defending rights, have never gone away and the same carefully crafted wordings are still used today to deprive others of their rights.
In Russel Shorto's book Island at the center of the world. He argues that the seeming liberalism found in the north east was caused more by the influence of the Dutch settlers in the area than the English. He further strengthens this point with his observations about the post Spanish political systems the Dutch created, and their resemblance to many elements of the US constitution
When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule. The above taken from the OP. This is so complete a misunderstanding of modern American Conservatism and who is the a party of what that it is amazingly difficult to decide whether any amount education will accomplish much in the way of blasting such a peculiar combination of arrogance and ignorance. 1st the modern republican party is, increasingly the party of the mom and pop store, the small businessman or woman working 18 hours a day trying to grow his business in spite of mountains of red tape the government throws in his way damn near hourly. The democrats are the party of big money, big labor, big corporations, big government, hell big everything. They dispise the little guy and his garage business because he, in their eyes, needlessly complicates their self righteous and self given task of running every thing. Big is easy. It's right there, you can't miss it. You know which way it will jump in advance because it is so large that it takes a while to overcome it's own inertia. the little guy, though he is unpredictable you can never be sure what he is going to do next. And yeah we have a knew elite but he isn't a conservative he is an unelected unaccountable bureaucrat, the expert, the technocrat who knows everything and who, if you listen to the Democrats, can solve all your problems from health care to how much you ought to be paid to what kind of car you should be allowed to drive. The problem is neither he nor his political servants are omniscient or omnipresent. About the only thing omni they are is annoying.
Naw, it's pretty accurate. They just learned to frame it different to get more support for it. But it's pretty balls-on accurate. If you don't agree, then you're looking at the framing, but practical application of southern conservatives are very much about oppression. However, now since direct oppression isn't very sexy, it comes by way of economic oppression, education suppression, and even lawful oppression (for instance privatized prisons using the war on drugs as an excuse to imprison black people to an extremely disproportionate ration in order to get cheap labor from them despite whites and blacks doing drugs by percentage equally, which would actually result, if law applied equally, in a population of prisoners mimicking that of actual proportional population of the two races). I hate to say people are just wrong, but unfortunately, the southern strategy is in full swing today and scarily people aren't seeing it as oppression of opportunities to everyone but as 'freedom', which will ultimately alienate most poor supporters of the movement if actually implemented as written.
Sorry but you are wrong, Hseiken. I sent ten years living in the South. Right smack dab in the heart of Dixie. Every racist I knew was still a yellow Dog Democrat or a populist. I met Damn few that you could call a conservative of any sort. The real dyed in the wool racists have no problem with large governments. In fact, to do their God awful damn agenda you need big intrusive government. The real dfference between the North and the South is that in the south major corporations are a fairly recent develpement and most of the people are still not real comfortable with them. It is however the land of the mom and pop store. The good ones thrive inspite of the umbiquitious WalMart because they find niches to fill that Walmart doesn't address and there's plenty of them if you care to look. Real oppression isn't paying some one five bucks an hour to do something you'd do your self if you had to pay ten, real oppression is when you tie a family man to a job by using his families health insurance as a rope.
Actually, much of the northeast's liberalism seems to have come from intimate contact with the local natives in the early days of settlement when the line between colonist and native communities was extremely blurry and often non-existent. The natives had long established principles of individual rights, limited power of elected leaders, and decision making through public discourse. The early colonists adopted these principles because they were eminently reasonable methods of governance and conflict resolution where authority was lacking. New Hampshire was reported to be particularly "lawless" by early 1700s visitors who found an appalling intermingling of colonists with natives in all aspects of life, intermingling was common and most towns and villages were populated by both races equally and without discrimination. The adoption of native ways concerning governance was rampant. Towns and villages held their lands in common and made decisions by public meetings at which everyone, native, colonist, man or woman was allowed to speak and decisions were made by a show of hands. It was much the same across much of the New England frontier in the early days. The colonists farmers already had the idea of common decision making, coming from old England, where many village's fields, though apportioned to deed holders, had been traditionally managed in common through public consensus. Nevertheless, neither the English or Dutch colonists brought with them the idea that simply being a human gave one rights of any kind, that was something unique to native American culture in the 1600s. The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, adopted sometime around 1100AD had a great influence in all the tribes of the northeastern US and Canada, especially its notions of individual rights and democratic government. It is entirely probable that European contact with American culture is what brought the concept of human rights to western thought since early explorers reported extensively on the social economic and political structures of the tribes in these areas throughout the 15-1600s. It is extremely doubtful that the thinkers of the enlightenment were not influenced by these reports.
