Historians Michael Vlahos and John Batchelor make an interesting comparison between Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) of the 2010’s with religious slavery abolitionists of the 1850’s. Their discussion emanates from a new book by Andrew Delbanco about the run-up to the American Civil War. Back then there were two elite groups: the abolitionists in the North and the planter elite in the south. The Northerners were absolutely determined to destroy the society of the south … and eventually prevailed.
Vlahos makes the argument that SJWs have deemed themselves to be the natural inheritors of the abolitionists 160 years prior. Most modern SJWs appear to be fueled more by daddy issues than any religious conviction but yet have been programmed to believe that they are on a religious like crusade to cleanse the sins of racism, sexism, transphobia, and white & male privilege. Their ultimate goal is to use the power of the government as a kudgel to effect the change they believe to be necessary, in much the same way that the abolitionists used the power of the federal government to destroy the society of the south. In both cases, the majority in the center was and is being forced to choose sides.
One question SJWs will never allow themselves to consider is whether their mission is a truly righteous one rather than one more akin to more nefarious revolutions in the 20th Century. What we have seen, and will continue to see, are the “Blue” elites taking a most pious stance and an absolute conviction to, not just hurt, but destroy anyone they deem to be a Deplorable.
They have no meaning in their lives so they feel they need to adopt a cause to advance up Mazlow’s hierarchy.
They have been taught to reject things like eating well, staying fit, making a lot of money and finding an awesome spouse and nurturing a family. And for many, following one’s faith. By rejecting these basic elements that form a great life, they seek these ridiculous substitutes. I no longer debate or argue with these people. I tell them to GTFO as my opening line and waste as little time as possible on them.
The idea behind abolition was to re-distribute wealth from the elite of the agrarian South to the elite of the industrial North, who wanted all that cheap black labour for themselves. That’s why the blacks were turned loose and not culled or deported to Liberia.
Today’s social justice war is funded by the exact same people, this time with a view to expropriating and eliminating their competition for dominion of the world economy. All that’s really changed is that the elites have given up the pretense of believing in God.
Actually the idea was that slavery is evil, and it is.
@UnMe.
Well I agree with you on that. The statement “The Northerners were absolutely determined to destroy the society of the south … and eventually prevailed ” is false. A disagreement turned into war and the South lost and was not destroyed, it was just modified for the good.
Exactly.
To suggest the abolitionists had some elaborate scheme “to destroy the society of the south” is a nonsense. From the very beginning they made no secret of their objective, which was straightforward and no mystery – heck, they even named themselves by that objective: abolish slavery. Of course such an objective would have antagonized the US South: it was a slave society.
They were most certainly not the SJWs of their day; that’s a very superficial and thin allusion indeed and a comparison that does dishonour to the abolitionists. They put up with years of violence and disapproval from large swathes of society and took personal risks no modern latte-sipping, university-administration-protected, conniving SJW has ever had to face.
And please, enough already with the “poor old South and those schemin’ Yankees”! The South seceded, precipitating a civil war which it lost.
That was over 150 years ago. Get over it.
Since I was a kid in the 60’s the left has attacked everything. It promoted drugs, of all kinds. From mexican ditch weed that I couldn’t even tell if I got high, to todays basically hash, that I can smell in the driveway, and reaks by I get to the door. Pills, legal and illegal. Perscribed for kids and just the regular tedium. Sexual weirdness, to now the kids that aren’t perscribed pills by the iron grip of greedy doctors and pharmaceuticals, are to get transgender surgery at 15.
I been watching the left burn, stomp and crap on the flag. The enviromental left chased out our heavy manufacturing to China were it produced more pollution. But those were blue collar jobs, vets, guys and gals that drove Plymouths and had flags off their porches. Archie Bunker types. But the died the kids sold the house and the urban neighborhood went to slums and the Democrats could figure were their tax base went. Now those cities, all built on productive industries, are housing slums for illiterate immigrants that trade their vote for welfare, or at least a warm census body count so urban democrats can have more represenitives then their legal numbers would allow.
Schools used to teach actual skills, but now just emotions, feelings.
I dont see the fundamentals of the left laying off the gas pedal. Reagan not so much as he fought communists take over of the Actors Guild( did you know he enlisted in the reserves in…1936?), the Bush’s and Mitt Romney sons of affluence very much laid down against the Left. McCain, very shallowly educated and crippling desired of fame was played like a chump. So now Trump, who stomped on the GOP, Inc. More so than defeating Cankles, Republicans were waiting for him, since Reagan. HW Bush only got elected by Reagan. Perot swooped in and was what the GOP wanted.
Trump will get reelected, if he isn’t assassinated. And the left will double down. They have to. And after Trump, the war starts. We don’t have the independent, secure, shure leaders. The left will produce a dream and capture the hearts and imagination. And behind, to fill the federal offices, a vast army of hard leftist operators, who remember and say never again by any means nessasary. Politics by other means.
“The enviromental left chased out our heavy manufacturing to China were it produced more pollution.”
The US manufactures more now than ever before.
“But those were blue collar jobs, vets, guys and gals that drove Plymouths and had flags off their porches. Archie Bunker types. ”
Mostly reliably Democrat voters back in the day. Union blue-collar klugs don’t know better.
Manufacturing output and manufacturing jobs aren’t the same thing. But I don’t expect either honesty or intelligence from you.
And do you even KNOW what America “manufactures” most? I doubt it, so here … let me inform you what is behind the statistics you gloat over (as if you “know something” Paul doesn’t).
Refined petroleum products — such as gasoline, fuel oil, jet fuel and liquefied refinery gases — are America’s top manufactured product, with a value of shipments going out the factory door of nearly $700 billion in 2014, more than four times as much as the No. 2 product: light trucks. America’s other top manufactured products are pharmaceuticals, airplanes and automobiles. Rounding out the top 10 are iron and steel, animal slaughtering, plastics, organic chemicals and petrochemicals
Huh!? … imagine that? Fossil Fuel refinement is America’s #1, by far, “manufactured” product. Huh!? So in your quoting America’s manufacturing as … “more now than ever before” … you might wanna thank … fracking, horizontal boring, and shale oil. You might want to thank … Trump. And you might want to thank the Trump tax cuts and Trump economy for all the other TOP manufactured products. However, I seem to recall that your leftist types pretty much HATE every single one of the emboldened products that you crow about as if they are simply some disembodied “statistic”
Yes, Paul (I assume) and I are THRILLED that MY President Trump has restored America’s manufacturing sector! Winning!!!
“Manufacturing output and manufacturing jobs aren’t the same thing. ”
Yeah…I am aware of that…nothing I said implied otherwise, or any hostility to fracking, which got roaring while Trump was still ripping people off by various scams.
Ohhhh yeahhhh … I “forgot” … that “Trump has done NOTHING to facilitate and/or unleash our BOOMING, KILLING IT economy”. Nope. It all pre-existed Trump. All that Obama-tawk about killing the fossil fuel industry by forcing “costs to necessarily rise” … laid the groundwork for Trump’s “inherited” boomtime. Sheesh.
Thomas Sowell wrote in Intellectuals and Society how blacks where quite successful in the North, worked hard and had a greater percentage of married families than the whites. All gone now thanks to the Democrats and lefties and their attack on the black family.
Funny I can of equate today’s SJW’s not to the abolitionist cause, but instead to the Spanish inquisition.
The element of extreme fervor was also present during the Spanish inquisition, as it was, as discussed by Vlahos and Batchelor, prior to the 1860s civil war and is present now.
We personally saw this level of fervor on display during a recent visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. At a family gathering, at which a family member from Rochester, NY was present, she went into almost hysterics about how dare people elect a person like Trump and interrupt the social and economic changes that had been put into effect.
The only other added ingredient not present in the 1850s is an overlay of the fervor of Marxism.
The discussion by Michael Vlahos and John Batchelor is appropriate as many of us here have said for quite some time there is a cold civil war occurring in the US which is heating up since the election of Donald Trump. Just watch the fallout of increased leftist anarchism if the Republicans retain the house and increase Senate seats, and maybe somehow stop the Democrat inspired and supported “refugee” caravan.
In Canada there is hardly even a resistance movement to this SJW takeover of our society other than a few isolated voices such as the more recent Peterson, Shepherd, and maybe some other in the recent past, the names of which escape me at the moment.
This discussion between Michael Vlahos and John Batchelor suggests a rereading of the essay by Angelo Codevilla in the American Mind linked to by someone earlier today probably in Reader Tips.
“The revolutionary import of the ruling class’ abandonment of moral and legal restraint in its effort to reverse election results cannot be exaggerated. Sensing themselves entitled to power, imagining themselves identical with legitimacy, “those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity“—here the US Constitution and ordinary civility—are small stuff to them.”
https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic/
“The anti-Kavanaugh campaign is but the latest of the ruling class’s nationwide incitements to intimidation, inconvenience, and even violence against persons who stand in its way. “
The following is from the Codevilla essay linked to above and is highly relevant to the discussion in this thread as it shows the level of civil war or revolution that is present now. Again, my apologies to the original poster of this American Mind essay.
“In 1919, a member of the Russian Duma had asked: “Comrade, is this just?” Lenin famously answered: “Just? For what class?” Forty years later, in similar circumstances, Fidel Castro delivered the dime store version: “Within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.” In 2018 our ruling class, in unison, set out to destroy all but the biological life of a political adversary. It substituted vehement assertion for truth, cast aside argument, foreclosed questions, celebrated its own deed and vowed to persist in it. Asked whether what they were doing was right, Senators Booker and Hirono answered directly—the others did so indirectly—that this was the right way to proceed with a person whose jurisprudence was so objectionable. Whether they know whose footsteps they are following matters little.
What matters a lot is that our ruling class does not deal and will never again deal with their opponents as fellow citizens. Theirs was a quintessentially revolutionary act, after which there is no stepping back.
The “resistance” worked. You may have won the last election, said the ruling class. But we’re still in charge. Indeed, they are. And they might stay that way. But human nature ensures that people reply, and repay. Establishment Republicans were driven to admit that their kind could no longer buy the Left’s comity. Hence the Wall Street Journal’s editorial announcing “We’re all deplorables now.” That is the only sense in which the “resistance” may rue the Kavanaugh saga. That is revolution’s logic.”
Further.
“In short, the “resistance” has begun to radicalize middle America. It redoubled millions of Americans’ sense of siege, their fear of unbridled rule by unaccountable powers, of being accused of “hate speech,” of normal life made impossible by Progressive socio-political demands. It confirmed the sense that Donald Trump and such as he, whatever their faults, are all that stands between themselves and having an alien way of life imposed upon them.”
And, if I may, hopefully not ticking off our gracious hostess, another excerpt from near the end of the essay, again very relevant to the discussion in this thread.
“Prior to Progressivism, the American political tradition had not been about imposing any way of life on anyone. The earliest of our great religious-political controversies was settled in 1636 when Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Rhode Island. The Mormons, rejected elsewhere, made the desert bloom in Utah. Getting along by agreeing on the agreeable, agreeing to disagree on the rest, and the subsequent sorting out of people into compatible groups, is what kept the peace among a diverse people. The Civil War loomed because Southerners unreasonably insisted on expanding their “peculiar institution” since they feared—all too reasonably—that a preponderance of free states would force them to give it up. In 1861, Lincoln tried to avoid the war by pledging on the North’s behalf not to transgress on the South. But by then, neither side believed in self-restraint any more.
Nor does any side in our time truly believe in and practice self-restraint. For the Progressive side, it is anathema in principle as well as in practice. The conservatives, among whom the zealot’s taste for taking the speck out of the neighbor’s eye is not widespread, revere self-restraint in principle, but are learning to transgress against it in practice.”
Understood and well-said, however …
We conservatives via our representatives, the GOPe, practiced perfect self-restraint and decorum for years … and took it up the back-hole. We patiently waited for the decorum to pay dividends in facilitating a civil conversation about crucial issues facing our country. And waited. And waited … till our natural reaction was a Trump victory. Let me say …
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The preamble (statement of purpose) of the US Constitution beautifully summarizes my opinion about the civil discourse in America today. It has become necessary in the course of Communists and their media allies attempting to destroy our country … to fight back. Not physically fight … yet.
Steve Hilton had quite a good piece on the “Rage in America” which said it better than I.