I'm Holding My Sunday Post Hoping You'll Read This Article

Robert Parry has written an excellent short history of how the United States has had to struggle against the financial enemies of democracy and justice all through our history,  The Four Eras of the American Right.

Surprising to many will be his naming of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henrey, George Mason and, in his later life, James Madison as the founders of the problem.  But, as I've read more of them and more of what they did instead of what their hagiographies cover up, it's a view of American history which I've come to share.  Later crooks and thugs named will come as little to no surprise.  It's only those of the "founding" generation that we're required to genuflect to, slave owning, self-interested subverters of democracy and justice, every one of them.  That the more genteel modern right is tied to them is a point proven by what should be an infamous quote by the perfumed northerner, William F. Buckley, the brother of James Buckley of Buckley vs. Valeo

On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”

In my comment to the post, I said that he'd gotten almost the whole thing said, leaving out things like the topic of yesterday's post, the liberalish-libertarians who, somehow, begin by asserting civil rights but who, somehow, always seem to end up enabling the super-rich and their political allies in the ideological right.  I said:

Excellent article, showing the ties among today’s conservatives and those of the slave owning past. And in mentioning the Ayn Rand influence you almost get the whole way. The frightening truth is that there is a large faction of the functional right which is commonly mistaken as some species of liberal or leftist who are, actually, motivated primarily by a primitive libertarianism. A good example of that is the ACLU lawyer Joel Gora and his like who are engaged in aiding and abetting the wounding, if not murder of informed self-government through exactly the language of “free speech”. Of course what they and the Supreme Court have done is make “speech” anything but free by embedding monetary value in it. That gives the millionaires and billionaires, the heirs of the slave power and the robber barons, the kind of political power that their ancestors less often had. Until real liberals, the real left gets over the ridiculous scruple that turns “free speech”, for it what the “second amendment” is for gun nuts and the paranoid right that feeds and sustains them, liberals are their suckers.

Dumping the ACLU for its enabling of this could be a way to start. A more realistic analysis, based in the political reality of what the rulings under the Buckley vs. Valeo line of rulings and the broadcast-cable libertarian dogma, and the line of truly awful presidents and congresses that we’ve had under them is necessary before any progress is made. The infantile notion of free speech absolutism turns out to be a danger when corporations are people and money is speech. Who could have guessed that would happen except anyone with a working mind and the slightest experience of the world as it really is and not in some law class what if.