Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Right = Wrong

Conservatives on the Wrong Side of History on Mandela, Most Other Things
We've known it for years.

When has the American right ever — ever — been on the right side of history?

The answer is almost never.
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Consider the great political earthquakes throughout history and imagine the contemporaneous—not retrospective, as we are seeing in these phony paeans to Mandela, but in-the-moment—conservative posture. The conservative position was wrong nearly every time — not just wrong, but often morally shocking from our later perspective.
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Do you support the American Revolution? I should hope so. You would not have, however, had you been a conservative in 1785. American Loyalists, perhaps 20 percent of the white population of the day, were devoted to king and crown for mostly the usual reasons: They were older, better established, had more money, were scared of change.

How about the abolition of slavery? I reckon you’re on board with that. Well, Lord knows you wouldn’t have been if you’d been among the 1860 conservatives who started a war over it (and whose apologists today insist the Civil War was not about slavery).

In terms of domestic politics, few polemical tasks are easier than demonstrating how wrong conservatism has been about pretty much everything in all of American history.
Sadly, a tradition that continues. Much more. Read on.

4 comments:

Grung_e_Gene said...

But, they win arguments by yelling and win elections by cheating and gerrymandering so it makes up for being wrong about everything.

Gordon said...

I hope there will come a point - and pretty soon - where that crap will work against them. They need a few years in the wilderness to gaze at their navels and rethink everything they've convinced their sheeple to believe in.

wkmaier said...

Great column. Tomasky is a "must read".

Anonymous said...

The right wing politicians used fear of the commies to scare us to death so we'd vote for their favorite expensive war toy projects, to prepare for Armageddon. And so they couldn't admit to us, or themselves, that one of those totally anti-commie, capitalist, English speaking, owned by white guys places was an oppressive, brutal racist regime. Especially if they were buying some of our expensive war stuff.