Tea Party = Confederate Party

Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party

Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.

By Doug Muder[T]he enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

That was the victory plan of Reconstruction. Black equality under the law was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But in the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand.

In the 20th century, the Confederate pattern of resistance was repeated against the Civil Rights movement. And though we like to claim that Martin Luther King won, in many ways he did not. School desegregation, for example, was never viewed as legitimate, and was resisted at every level. And it has been overcome. By most measures, schools are as segregated as ever, and the opportunities in white schools still far exceed the opportunities in non-white schools.

Today, ObamaCare cannot be accepted. No matter that it was passed by Congress, signed by the President, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, and ratified by the people when they re-elected President Obama. It cannot be allowed to stand, and so the tactics for destroying it get ever more extreme. The point of violence has not yet been reached, but the resistance is still young.

Violence is a key component of the present-day strategy against abortion rights, as Judge Myron Thompson’s recent ruling makes clear. Legal, political, social, economic, and violent methods of resistance mesh seamlessly. The Alabama legislature cannot ban abortion clinics directly, so it creates reasonable-sounding regulations the clinics cannot satisfy, like the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at local hospitals. Why can’t they fulfill that requirement? Because hospitals impose the reasonable-sounding rule that their doctors live and practice nearby, while many Alabama abortionists live out of state. The clinics can’t replace them with local doctors, because protesters will harass the those doctors’ non-abortion patients and drive the doctors out of any business but abortion. A doctor who chooses that path will face threats to his/her home and family. And doctors who ignore such threats have been murdered.

Legislators, of course, express horror at the murder of doctors, just as the pillars of 1960s Mississippi society expressed horror at the Mississippi Burning murders, and the planter aristocrats shook their heads sadly at the brutality of the KKK and the White Leagues. But the strategy is all of a piece and always has been. Change cannot stand, no matter what documents it is based on or who votes for them. If violence is necessary, so be it.‘Hatriots’ in Action: Conservatives Push for Armed Rebellion if Obama is Not Impeached

By Josh KilburnIt’s easy to prove that the political right-wing hates the United States; every action that they’ve taken has been the antithesis of what they’ve claimed. They may swear by democracy, and claim loyalty to the Constitution with one breath, while with the other, despise the very foundation of this country, the Constitution, and the multiculturalism that makes this country so strong.

Remember that in 2012, a Virginia Republican Committee newsletter openly called for armed rebellion if President Obama was re-elected. This is not how you support democracy. Over the last week, the Republicans have been pushing hard to impeach or sue Obama for doing his job when the Republicans in congress refused to do theirs—this is not how you support democracy.

Tom Tancredo, former Republican Congressman, warned that if “Republicans are too afraid to challenge presumptuous dictatorial behavior, then the war is already lost and we should stock up our ammunition shelves and join a militia.”

Last month, one such right-winger, Mike Vanderbogh, stood before a crowd of fellow terrorist militia members and declared “This administration, this regime, seems to operate ever more increasingly as a lawless gang than not on the rule of law but rather on the rule of men—which is to say the law of the jungle, enforced by the iron fist of government power,” and that “We will vote with our guns.” It’s gotten so bad that there is almost no way to tell the difference between the right wingers and the jihadists in the Middle East.Comment:  or more on conservative racism, see Right-Wing Terrorism Worse Than Jihadism and Conservatives Want a Race War.