The very existence of opposition gnaws at radical leftists. They particularly despise Southerners because the South’s resilient culture is a major impediment to their agenda. Culture is an organic and tireless organizing force, and therefore a threat to far-left schemes that would dismantle society and put the left in charge. Just look at how traditional culture overthrew the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, and how it’s challenging overgrown governments around the world today.
So it’s no surprise to see yet another slam against the South by the tag team of Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Ed Sebesta. Their latest hit piece, entitled “Why the Confederacy Lives,” neatly and blindly dismisses Southern heritage, the rise of self-government, and growing distrust of social reengineering as — drum roll, please — racist.
What, again?
Yes, again. It’s an entirely predictable article. As Hague and company see it, there is no reason for distrusting big government other than blind, irrational racial hatred. Here’s just one example they cite:
In more public venues, the SCV’s dog-whistle politics come into play. Casting an eye over recent events in Ferguson and elsewhere, although never explicitly stating this, SCV deputy commander-in-chief Thomas V. Strain Jr. recently decried the “young men with no guidance attacking law-abiding citizens and law enforcement officers,” officers who, when they “remedy the situation and protect the innocent … are called murderers.”
Of course, it’s not just “neo-Confederates,” as Hague & Co. call their various targets, who now realize that government welfare and other programs have undermined traditional family formation and unleashed a mostly black underclass of rootless, anti-social young people. Just last month, Nicholas Kristof, hardly a pro-Southern pundit, said this of failed federal programs that have done more harm than good:
Fifty years ago this month, Democrats made a historic mistake.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the time a federal official, wrote a famous report in March 1965 on family breakdown among African-Americans. He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.
“The fundamental problem,” Moynihan wrote, is family breakdown. In a follow-up, he explained: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families … never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”
Liberals brutally denounced Moynihan as a racist.
Kristof concluded that tossing the word “racist” at every study of black dysfunction is counter-productive:
Growing up with just one biological parent reduces the chance that a child will graduate from high school by 40 percent, according to an essay by Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard. They point to the likely mechanism: “A father’s absence increases antisocial behavior, such as aggression, rule-breaking, delinquency and illegal drug use.” These effects are greater on boys than on girls.
Read the Hague hit piece and you’ll see no mention of how the resurgence of smaller, more responsive political units are in direct response to the horrendous history of big governments. Post-Lincoln America has a bloody record of launching wars of aggression, and will continue its policy of perpetual war as long as it exists. The central government in DC is the greatest threat to our safety and liberty. That’s not hype — that’s fact. Yet, Hague sees what he calls “Confederate ideology” as the real problem.
If you’re looking for dangerous ideologies, look no further than Mr. Hague himself. He’s a Marxist, an adherent of the most anti-human, murderous ideology the world has ever seen. Hague’s Marxist allegiance is documented here and at the World Socialist Web Site.
This isn’t the first time the SPLC has played footsie with Marxists. And seeing as how communism has re-branded itself as “anti-racism,” it probably won’t be the last.
Thanks to Gail for the heads-up!
