Congressional Radical Right-Wingers Relive Confederacy Fantasies

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/federal-shutdown-driven-gop-secessionists



The House-led federal government shutdown is more than maddening, but nobody should be surprised by the Republican confederacy behind it. Nor should anyone underestimate this century's secessionists.

This fight has been seeping inward from the political margins for years, where increasingly ideological Republicans—from Tea Partiers in Congress, to red-state governors, to Chief Justice John Roberts—seek a less perfect union.

They are not the political stepchildren of Ronald Reagan, who, after his day's political battles, shared a belief in a functioning federal government with his top adversary, Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill. They are closer to the GOP activists drawn to Barry Goldwater's 1960s-era Conscience of A Conservative manifesto, which counseled killing government and not making it work.

The most apt historical precedent for today's marauder Republicans is the old Confederacy, where the provocateurs are not merely intent on stopping federal governance, but withdrawing from it or sabotaging it if they can't get their way. Today's Tea Party darlings like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and the House right-wingers driving the federal shutdown are cut from the same disunionist cloth as the old Southerners who fomented secession and the Civil War.

[malaise]

1. Yep

That's the truth - and the fuggers would lose again.

[DonCoquixote]

2. and let's not forget one lesson from Dixie

in the first civil war, England and France supported the Confederacy, in part because they still had designs on the Americas, and thought hamstringing America was the best way to protect their holdings. Now, you would have the Chinese getting involved, to the woe of both North and South.

[HereSince1628]

3. ~40% of sitting legislators in the US belong to ALEC

and ALEC wants strong states (controlled by ALEC) relative to the federal government.

They don't want anything like the geographic division of the war between the states. They don't really want war -between- the states. They want war of the states against the strong central government, so that they can crush or at least make dysfunctional the uniformity of law and regulation that central government imposes on laissez-faire capitalism.

They seek anarchy that can be exploited by the rich. Disharmony, dysfunction, and dissolution of the central administrative core of the Union are fine with them.