The good news in all this is that the Tea Crackers aren’t a particularly young crowd. The average Tea Cracker is a Baby Boomer. The average Fox viewer is even older than that.

Uh-oh. Cue lots of griping about how Not All Boomers Are Racist, and Why Do You Need To Punch Boomers All The Time, and more from the playbook of generational thread derailment.

Amanda, I subscribed to your tweets in my news reader a few weeks ago (I subscribed to Jesse’s too), and apparently <strike>this idea</strike> the fact that Teabaggers and Faux viewers are “old/older” was apparently pissing somebody off (was it yesterday or the day before?).

I was curious how they can dismiss the demographic facts so easily.  It’s getting scary how disconnected from reality some of these people are…

As far as the Southern Strategy goes, that is very well documented, including by people like Kevin Phillips, strategist for Nixon and someone who was not only there when it happened, but also participated in developing the strategy (and is still alive).  Its existence as a matter of history is undeniable. 

But, as you point out, these are people who are trying to ignore vast swaths of science (the Theory of Relativity is a Liberal hoax.  Evolution never happened.  Global Climate Change is a hoax.  WTF?) and inconvenient decades/centuries/millennia of history.  I guess in that kind of climate it’s not that hard to pretend recent well-documented history never happened.  Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King would have been a Republican if he hadn’t been tragically cut down by some hippie (a young Al Gore?), George Bush Jr. won the Iraq War with a small surge and a very large and strong application of righteous willpower (and a huge bulging codpiece?), tax cuts have always increased tax revenue and will continue to so even if they’re set to zero, deregulation will always make any situation better, government is always the problem and never the solution - unless it’s the Department of War. 

I read that Chris Matthews (Radical Professional Left Liberal Media Figure) is now claiming he was against the Iraq War from the beginning, despite the existence of video evidence that proves otherwise — so why not just make the past anything you want it to be?  It’s not like anyone will ever check, except us Dirty Hippies…

Almost seems like there’s a new Southern Strategy—saying that there never was a Southern Strategy but there should have been. (Not that you’d say that out loud obviously.)

Even if the tide of time is on our side, these fuckers are going to do a huge amount of damage in the meanwhile.  And it may get so bad we can’t put it right.

Maddow made the same point about Fox “News” itself earlier this summer. The whole ACORN/Van Jones/Shirley Sherrod/New Black Panther Party stuff that the Breitbart/Fox/Drudge nexus have been pushing, along with the Park 51 Community Center and even Jan Brewer’s nonsensical stuff about crime waves and beheaded people in the desert…all about terrifying white people. Then again, Ailes comes from the Atwater line of GOP operatives, so it’s not terribly surprising.

The Southern Strategy is alive and well…and it’s still working.

‘How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’

‘Four.’

‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’

‘Four.’

...

‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.

‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’

‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
...

Yes, conservatives have been getting incredibly more bold in their desires to lie their asses off. They have an entire cable network devoted to it plus many talk radio shows. The issue is what to do about it from the liberal/progressive side. Some liberals and progressives argue for more aggressive/bullying tactics against the right, i.e. the Grayson/Weiner/LBJ rehabilitation side. Others argue that this is intellectually dishonest and betrayal of liberalism and other critics want a more counter-cultural, non-violent action rather than old-style polticking against the right. Generally, I’m really favoring the going all out against the right/LBJ style. The lies of conservatives must be pointed out brutally and constantly.

I agree that the need for racists to be more circumspect has blunted their ability to transmit these values to their children. I remember my sister telling me that our former stepmother told her never to date a black man because of the way “they are with their women.” This remark came as a surprise to me and my sister because it seemed to come out of the blue. I guess some people with racist attitudes are now so circumspect about these attitudes that they are a surprise even to family members.

It’s not entirely shocking that they are making this claim; after all they’ve already tried putting their own spin on slavery itself by emphasizing that most whites didn’t own slaves and the ones who did “treated them very well.”  It’s a vile way of shifting the focus on the issue and sidestepping the fact that owning another human being as property is wrong regardless of how well you treat him.

Er about the hippie thing, MikeEss. I identify as a pretty liberal person but actual hippies leave a distaste in my mouth from some reason. Maybe its because I was born in 1980 and never really got the entire hippie thing, especially since my parents were not hippies. They weren’t conservative by a long shot, both are pretty liberal, but its of the New Deal/Great Society squishy liberal type.

  I also think that the actual hippies caused a lot damage to the American Left in myriads of ways even though they did a lot of good for American society as a whole. Many of the blue-collar voters that provided the former base of the Democratic Party found the hippies off-putting for various reasons, usually silly ones but the hippies never really tried outreach to them unlike their European counterparts. This helped drive a lot of blue-collar workers to the Republicans. I think the hippies also installed a certain distaste in old-style policticking in large portions of American liberals and progressives to our detriment and too much faith in the power of protest marches. Finally as Tyro noted in the Scrared thread, many liberals are drawn to milque-toasty types. This was true before the hippie era but the hippie persona exasperated this after the hippie era ended.

  One reason why American liberals and progressives are slowly gaining strength is that we are returning to the sort of tactics and love of old style politics employed before the hippie era but modified for the internet age. At least thats my belief.

Rewriting history is the typical fascist’s game, so it’s no surprise to me that wherever they can, they try to do this kind of thing, and turn lies and hatred into education.

Because this kind of thing is absorbed culturally, the memes of hate have had to be broken. Since the previous thread’s fixation on the context of the word ‘butthurt’, I’ve been thinking about this, too. Liberal efforts to improve conditions for all through language have the potential for being dismissed as nitpicking, as the extreme success of the “politically correct” meme showed.

But Amanda’s point about disconnecting the generations from hatred (and false entitlement to it) is very important one. It is a critical, proactive step. I well recall my mother, when I was very small, carefully teaching me ‘Eeny-meeny-miney-moe’.  She didn’t wait for me to pick it up in some southern Ohio schoolyard, but made me learn the words:

Eeny-meeny-miney-moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eeny-meeny-miney-moe

Now, I was a bright kid, and while tigers have toes, I couldn’t imagine one hollering.  Didn’t they roar or something? I asked my mom on the spot.

She never answered me.

Many years later, I figured it out on my own, or ran into the original somewhere. The brilliance of leaving the discovery of this parallax—that our ancestors could be awful human beings, and some of their tudes were still very much around—to my grown years has always impressed me, and it is the effect that Amanda is describing above on a culture-wide scale.

The reichwing wants to increase the amount of hate in the world. Liberals work to decrease it. This is a definition to keep in mind at all times.

”...after all they’ve already tried putting their own spin on slavery itself by emphasizing that most whites didn’t own slaves and the ones who did “treated them very well.” It’s a vile way of shifting the focus on the issue and sidestepping the fact that owning another human being as property is wrong regardless of how well you treat him.”

Suggested Faux News crawl:
Slavery: Good or Bad?  Opinions differ…

Lee, are you thinking of hippies or the student anti-war movement?  Hippies tended to be more countercultural and not as involved in politics or protest. The SDS, on the other hand, were out protesting and marching and got the shit beat out of ‘em by Daly’s thugs at the 1968 DNC.

Speaking of SDS, an oldie, but a goodie: the Port Huron Statement:

http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html

This is NOT a “hippie” document. It’s a political manifesto by people who were engaged, not by those who decided to “drop out.”

I had to go to DC to retrieve my things the weekend of the rally. I went to Mt Vernon on the 27th and it was completely full of teabaggers. I am also a hearty-looking Swedish Midwesterner, so people thought I was one of them. One of the most striking things of the Mt Vernon tea baggers was an obsession with how being a slave for Washington wasn’t that bad. He let them take holidays! They got to keep chickens and eggs! He freed them when he died! What was the big deal, black people? You were better off being a slave for him than a slave for the Democrats like you are now! White people are slaves to taxes; wouldn’t you rather be owned by by Washington?

Suggested Faux News crawl:
Slavery: Good or Bad?  Opinions differ…

Nah, that’s a CNN crawl. The Fox crawl would’ve eliminated any suggestion that it was bad…

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with focusing on history and educating people about it as a political strategy.  In fact, one of the things that indicates how much this Tea Cracker revolt is rooted in long-standing resentments of people who sat out the counterculture and are jealous and bitter is that they are basically borrowing the strategy of the “teach-in”.  Teach-ins are awesome.  Virtual teach-ins like the kind Ta-Nehisi Coates conducts are awesome.  They’re great….if they’re the truth.

The problem is that conservative teach-ins are generally a pack of lies and often straight up fascist propaganda.  And by that, I mean *literal* fascist propaganda, as in Beck recommending a book written by a Nazi to his people.

Lee:

I grew up in the ‘60s, but I never actually knew any hippies.  My family was (is) very conservative, so my only exposure to any of that was snippets here and there on TV.

I can believe that some of the more radical stuff is hard to make sense of decades after the fact.  But at the time, as crazy as everything was, it was easier to understand. 

The Vietnam War poisoned everything.  We’re (some of us) upset now because 5,000 or so American soldiers have been killed in Iraq/Afghanistan.  By 1968 something like 25,000 American soldiers had already been killed in Vietnam.  By the end of the war, 58,000 Americans had been killed — for no apparent reason.  And there were hundreds-of-thousands of wounded and crippled soldiers who would never be the same again.

Add in the fight for Civil Rights, the generic head-in-the-sand conservatism of the times that was trying (even then) to pretend that Leave it to Beaver was the Real America, and it’s much easier to see why some people got the idea that radical changes needed to be made to fix our broken culture.

Of immediate concern is the fact that in today’s America, if you’re to the left of Ronald Reagan and your name is not Joe Lieberman, and you do anything other than hide your leftish political feelings from everyone, you are a hippie.  Whether you wanted to be or not.

Welcome to the club…

“Nah, that’s a CNN crawl. The Fox crawl would’ve eliminated any suggestion that it was bad…”

...okay, how about this:

Faux News Crawl:
Bringing Back Slavery:  Good Idea or Great Idea?

...

Scott, ftw!

When facts become opinions, everything is a debate.  And debates can be won with lies, personal attacks, or emotional appeals.  Good political strategy if the facts aren’t on your side.

I am the president of an Interfaith Group in Florida that is working hard to build relationships between people of different faiths.  I went to a program on Saturday night at one of our our member mosques on how to respond to the asshole in Gainesville who is planning to burn the Qur’an on 9/11.  This Muslim group is professional people and mostly westernized.  They are confused and frightened about what is happening.  They are currently taking the approach of keeping their heads low and not making any trouble.  They were talking about building Park 51 somewhere else to appease the haters.  I think this is incredibly sad.  When we do interfaith dialogue meetings we get about one hundred in attendance.  The christians and jews present assure the muslim folk that we are advocating on their behalf as much as we can.  But as you can guess, even in more blue southeastern Florida, racism is pretty intense.

Suggested Faux News crawl:
Slavery: Good or Bad?

AKA JAQing off.

MAJeff: A little of Column A and Column B. I realize that the hippies and the war protestors were different types usually but with some, slight overlap. In the minds of a lot of people they were conflated. I also think that both hippies and the anti-war movement had positive and negative effects. The hippie movement exasperated a long standing preference towards milque-toast. The anti-war movement kind of installed too much faith in the power of protest marches and a distaste of politicking in its traditional but rather effective form.

  The SDS was awesome and really effective. On usenet years ago, there was an interesting counter-factual discussion if the anti-war movement could have been more effective if it maintained a more straight-laced style like the SDS did during the late 1950s to mid-1960s.

  MikeEss: Okay, that makes sense.

No, the Fox News crawl would be:

Bad vs Good Slaves: When To Whip?

Just like it used to be. And, in many places, still is.

JohnMcKay@25 Awesome timing for your comment. Not that you’re going to miss the eastern seaboard this weekend.

The generational transmission of racism has mostly been interrupted, but then you get these big groups of young racists who must’ve learned it somewhere. Did they just live in communities (see “Whiteopia”) that the civil rights act passed by? Are some of them doing it out of rebellion? Would they still be doing it if there weren’t billionaires pouring money into making racism look cool?

I was particularly taken by this, though:

I read that Chris Matthews (Radical Professional Left Liberal Media Figure) is now claiming he was against the Iraq War from the beginning, despite the existence of video evidence that proves otherwise.

I think that the major media have found an alternative to Orwell’s “memory hole”: instead of gathering all the no-longer-operational fact and shredding or burning them, you just flood the world with so much crap and so many hyped outrages that no one can keep track any more.

It’s all good news for JohnMcKay.

Jackspratt, don’t think it’s not in the blue states.  I have seen the polls on the downtown community center getting worse and worse right here in NY and it’s been breaking my heart.

Alysia, the happy slave, not really?  I thought that myth was Gone With the Wind, so to speak.

Slight nit to pick

After all, mowing down civil rights protesters with hoses happened within the lifetime of the majority of Americans.

The median age in the US is 36.7 meaning that the majority of Americans were born after 1972, four years after the end of the Civil Rights Movement.

paul@28, AnglScarlett@30:

Or, in case of Bloomberg, having it both ways. He can announce the moral and legal high ground, but then use NY1 to whip up a hate frenzy. Such a fool. Thinking that appeasing these fascists is somehow never going to touch him.

Cue lots of griping about how Not All Boomers Are Racist, and Why Do You Need To Punch Boomers All The Time, and more from the playbook of generational thread derailment.
Comment #1: Well, what?  on 09/02 at 11:41 AM

Not from me, that’s for sure.

When I was a kid, it was totally normal to use racist words in all but the most formal conversations.  Things started to change in the mid to late sixties, very slowly, but it’s in the memory of most people my age.  And there are still social groups where no one blinks if you use those words.

Knowing they’re wrong is totally different from feeling they’re wrong, and knowing people of other races are of equal value and intelligence and so on is not automatic if you learned something different at an early age.  You have to work at it, and if my experience is typical, even if you work at it from childhood on, you’ll probably still be working on it when you die.

People say “I’m not racist,” because they really think that knowing race shouldn’t matter is enough.  But it isn’t.

One thing I still can’t stand is this Greatest Generation hagiography.  They’re the ones who staffed the fire hoses in the South, and they’re the ones Teabagging now.

JohnMcKay (@26),

The u n’s ipcc report that everyone cites was yet AGAIN discredited by several contributing members of the panel that put it together.

That’s actually a bald-faced lie. Also, the science supporting global warming is over 150 years old at this point (timeline). The logic is obvious and I’ve never seen a denier break it. CO2 (and other GHGs) block infrared radiation. Human activities emit CO2. CO2 concentrations have risen by 36% since the beginning of the industrial revolution. That CO2 must be absorbing infrared radiation and that extra heat has to go somewhere. Denier “science” requires some perfect and as of yet undetected negative feedback mechanism that makes that energy just disappear.

Re: happy slave, there’s people who will say that slaves were valuable and had to be taken care of, the real victims were poor people who could be worked for less than subsistence wages (and then they parallel their own lives writing software or such as similar).

When a slave was unable to work any more, you could just magnanimously free her or him. 

And at least the factories and mines didn’t choose who you were supposed to breed with.

Fox News crawl:  “Slaveowner reparation for room and board—how to collect?  “Slave” tax, or simple garnishment of Welfare payments?”

@Comment #17: MikeEss on 09/02 at 11:40 AM

Of immediate concern is the fact that in today’s America, if you’re to the left of Ronald Reagan and your name is not Joe Lieberman, and you do anything other than hide your leftish political feelings from everyone, you are a hippie.  Whether you wanted to be or not.

Welcome to the club…

WORD.

I also wonder, just how hippie were the hippies, anyhow? Were they really the mythical beasts they have become in American memory, the perpetually stoned long haired dudes and chicks who lived in San Fancisco, and drove underpowered vans? Did they really all take the brown acid and dance naked to the Greatful Dead?

Or was it all surprising similar to how it is now, with liberals and conservatives and pointless wars and racism? And people just remember the hippies because they were so colorful?

All the warming deniers need is one (1) scientist making a fairly standard error, and it getting into a paper, and it can allow All Science to be attached to the Rosicrucian lizard elites of the Trilateral Commission, and so be dismissed/accepted as part of the Grand Conspiracy and its adherents…

wait for it…

hated!

Special thanks to JohnMckay for providing us direct evidence this afternoon.

I think this is all pretty much what the death throes of a decaying empire look like. We will never even begin to return to sanity until we give up our imperial delusions of grandeur.

@penn, 36

No one cares about the actual science.  The thread is about conservatives telling bald faced lies about everything else, why would you ever think they’d care if people know they’re lying about global warming?  Bring up their lies, and they’ll ignore you and tell a new lie about it, while decrying you for your love of Al Gore, who’s pushing the global warming myth so he can become emperor of the moon or whatever the conspiracy is.

They don’t care about truth, or facts, or reality.  They never have, and they never will.  And even when you call them out on their lies, they’ll show no remorse; fuck, they won’t even acknowledge that you said anything.

The only thing that matters to them wrt global warming (or evolution, or any other part of reality that they want to unmake) is telling enough lies to make people skeptical.  And oh lord, have they succeeded on that one.

One thing I still can’t stand is this Greatest Generation hagiography.  They’re the ones who staffed the fire hoses in the South, and they’re the ones Teabagging now.
Comment #35: Punditus Maximus on 09/02 at 01:30 PM

The Greatest Generation were supposedly born between 1909 and 1924.  1925-1946 is dubbed the Silent Generation.  I guess they’re not so silent any more. 

They were too young to fight or otherwise participate in WWII, but identify with it as if they made those sacrifices.

Toitle,

This is where there are a couple strains of wingnut. McKay is crazy enough that he believes the lies.  It’s the Koch boys and Cato and the like that dishonestly cherry-pick in order to make claims and get the rubes like Johnny boy to go along. He’s simply not smart enough to understand how science works.  A different example is this woman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5NvD56vRs&feature=player_embedded

That the things she’s spouting can in no way be simultaneously true is something that is beyond her intellectual capabilities.

I don’t believe it matters whether they believe the things they say, or only say them out of calculated cynicism.  People go on and on about “oh, they don’t really believe this, they’re just cute widdle evil monsters!  They’re only trying to make money, which forgives everything!” but whether they’re honestly evil or dishonestly so, they’re still doing the exact same thing, to the exact same effect.

Intent only matters insofar as it can be used to predict future crimes.  But the ones who honestly believe this bullshit don’t believe it because they were convinced of it, they believe it because they wanted to be convinced, and so they accepted any evidence that they could find.  John McKay probably is stupid enough to think global warming is a hoax, but he thought that before he was told a single lie about the evidence, and will continue to think it until the day he dies.

The average Tea Cracker is a Baby Boomer. The average Fox viewer is even older than that.

Unfortunately, the average consumer of any kind of TV news is pretty old. Just check out the ads. And it’s been that way for as long as this Baby Boomer can remember.

The same people who bitch endlessly about how minorities vote Democratic, and who love to point out that Obama scored only a minority of white males (or whatever), get huffily indignant if you suggest they appeal to bigotry.

I don’t believe it matters whether they believe the things they say, or only say them out of calculated cynicism.  People go on and on about “oh, they don’t really believe this, they’re just cute widdle evil monsters!  They’re only trying to make money, which forgives everything!” but whether they’re honestly evil or dishonestly so, they’re still doing the exact same thing, to the exact same effect.

Intent only matters insofar as it can be used to predict future crimes.  But the ones who honestly believe this bullshit don’t believe it because they were convinced of it, they believe it because they wanted to be convinced, and so they accepted any evidence that they could find.  John McKay probably is stupid enough to think global warming is a hoax, but he thought that before he was told a single lie about the evidence, and will continue to think it until the day he dies.
Comment #44: Toitle on 09/02 at 02:01 PM

I’m not sure anyone has claimed that they’re only trying to make money which forgives everything.  Lying to make money is considered by most decent human beings as pretty disgusting.

Intent matters in disproving their claims—if you can show even *they* don’t believe it, it’s harder for the mushy middle to continue to follow them.  Why would you want to follow a dissembling cheat?  Unless of course you think you’re going to be a fellow dissembler and cheater who will profit thereby.

Yamara, I learned it as “catch a TIGGER by the toe”. I found it a pleasing image until I was about 14 and the penny dropped.

I’m not sure anyone has claimed that they’re only trying to make money which forgives everything.  Lying to make money is considered by most decent human beings as pretty disgusting.

Oh yeah, I know no one here does that, but people on other websites I go to less and less often have a tendency to forgive people who advocate or perform horrible things by saying “they’re only after a profit.”  Like corporations trying to crush worker’s rights, or things like that.

But I’d maintain that they don’t care if the followers know that the leaders don’t believe what they’re saying, because the followers are only interested in justifying the beliefs they want to have.

The Greatest Generation were supposedly born between 1909 and 1924.  1925-1946 is dubbed the Silent Generation.  I guess they’re not so silent any more.
They were too young to fight or otherwise participate in WWII, but identify with it as if they made those sacrifices.

That’s the generation of Jack Lemmon, Bob Dylan, John McCain and my mom.  They’re the ones who had to trawl around in the shadow of their older Greatest-Gen brothers and sisters all their lives or who, if born at the fag-end of their cohort, were brought up by young parents who had actually achieved something and knew it, but who didn’t manage to pass that feeling of achievement on to their kids.  Perhaps the reason for that is not very far to seek; the reaction of the kids must have been: Who can compete with that?

They weren’t born at the right time and weren’t old enough to fight the celebrated war (WWII) but they were born at the right time to fight in Korea, a war about which maybe five movies were made up till the point at which Robert Altman came along and filmed MASH.  (And MASH is not a work of unstinting praise.)  Their older brothers and sisters or young parents fought a war on two fronts and won and their kids set off a cultural implosion the end of which is still not in view.  They themselves?  Not so much.  They took great care of the yard.  They understood books and music and made good critics and fair artists.

Their best people (by that I mean the best, not the most celebrated) have been subtle and fair-minded, but their worst people have been insecure.  (Don Draper, were he a real dude and not a fictional character, would have been a man of the Silent Generation*, and the overriding question of his life is literally: Who am I?)  The idea that nobody would listen to them, pay attention to them, solicit their opinion** or give them their due must be an idea which has haunted them, not just on an individual basis but en masse, throughout their collective existence.  There’s no reason for this to have changed now that they’re aging.

There are few things worse than the sensation of having been ignored and there’s a generation of people out there for whom this sensation has been a part of their psychic background as far back as they can remember.  (Some of the stuff Betty Friedan writes about in The Feminine Mystique could also be applied to the men, maybe not of her own generation, but of the generation following hers.)  This feeling of superfluity has got to constitute a sore point, to say the very least, and to suppose that the practiced opinion-meisters who shill for the political right wing are incapable of taking advantage of it would be naïve (or stupid; take your pick).

* I use this term because it’s the standard term and because people as a rule can agree about what it means, not because I like it all that much or because I am trying to invoke the stereotype which it summons up.

**There is a demographic reason for this; large groups of people always find it easier to get a hearing than smaller groups of people, and like the X-ers, the Silent Generation were a small cohort.  I myself think that may be because so many of them were born at a time (the Great Depression) during which many people felt unprepared to raise any more children than they had to.  (I suspect that for every kid born after 1929 and before the early Fifties or so there were one or two kids who were not born.  Can’t prove it, but that’s what I think.)

Atheist:  How hippie were the hippies?

Good question.  Most of what people think was the “hippie movement” was a bunch of kids in their teens who had caught word of something interesting happening and wanted to join it.  Some of them did, and of those, most went home after a little while.

Hippies were not just people who acted goofy and got high and said “peace” a lot, and wore clothes that seemed to be made of something indescribable and faded.  Most of them had jobs.  Because, really, how could you not?  Most of them didn’t have trust funds, after all.  Some of them wanted to move “back to the land” but most didn’t.  Some who did, made it as farmers and others didn’t. Most of them lived in town, although it was always fun to visit friends in the country, meet the goats, go swimming and so on.

As to that famous slogan “Turn on, tune in drop out”—yes, they were in favor of legalizing marijuana, they wanted to tune in to what was really important, even if it didn’t impress the neighbors, and what they wanted to drop out of was the prescribed lock-step procession through school to one’s previously determined appropriate level, the 3.2 kids and the suburban house or apartment in a good neighborhood, and all that kind of thing. 

Now, here’s the thing that will surprise you youngsters:  We are still here.  I am old; I claim to be Older than all y’all, and I almost certainly am.  I have known hippies older than myself, but most of them are dead now.  I have worked hard all of my life, in fact, I am still working (little trouble with my health a few decades back, and then there was that stock market thing . . .).  Yes, there were a few hippies in any group who seemed to be perpetually stoned, and yes, a lot of us drove VW’s—I had a whole fleet of them—maybe they were “underpowered”, but I don’t remember being unable to go anywhere I wanted to go or unable to get there on time.  I’d still be driving a bug, but they’re a luxury item now, and I can’t afford one.  I delivered a rural mail route for 30 years in a bug, and it went up hills and through snows that my buddies with their front wheel drive four wheel drive vehicles couldn’t get through.

We are still here, still working for peace, we just don’t make a fuss of it.  We never did, it was those kids at the “summer of love”.  One thing most hippies have is a sense of humor and they will make the most ridiculous statements and laugh their fool heads off, watching people try to keep up with them.  Gotta go take an “uncle” (somebody’s uncle anyway) to a medical appointment.  In my ugly old VW replacement van.

“Do people really think that Dr. King made a speech and suddenly all those mean racists just evaporated into thin air?”

Yes.
I’m so sorry, but YES, this IS what MANY people believe. In fact, it’s EXACTLY what I, and thousands of my classmates, were EXPLICITLY TAUGHT in public schools in the 80s! I seriously suspect a version of this is still being taught in lily-white northern Kentucky public schools, but I don’t know for how long it was taught before I started class, and how farspread it is.

feel the christian love.

So, JohnMckay, did somebody in a VW Microbus cut you off on the freeway a few years back and you’ve been bitter toward “hippies” ever since?  That is a metric buttload of pointless bitterness you’re carrying around, aimed at people who almost certainly exist largely in your wingnut-koolaid-addled head. 

When are assholes like you going to stop worrying about and beating up StrawHippies?  My god, the ‘60s ended 40-years ago.  Give it up already…

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?  Nothing because hippies don’t have a fucking sense of humor and they are all lazy moochers.

You know, a young hippie couple live up the street from me, beat up Mystery Machine and all… There’s another painted bus eaten by the ivy further up the street, too.

That is a metric buttload of pointless bitterness you’re carrying around, aimed at people who almost certainly exist largely in your wingnut-koolaid-addled head.

The primary defining feature of contemporary conservatism (and much of historical conservatism) is hatred. There’s a direct line from the know-nothings to the Klansmen to the Coughlinites to the Birchers to the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition to the Militias to the Tea Crackers.  It’s all about a resentment of some “non-American” other, be they Eastern European Jews or Southern European Catholics or freed slaves or liberals or faggots or feminists or environmentalists.

Our friend John must have never heard of Abbie Hoffman.  Actually, hippies are some of the funniest people I know.  They don’t tend to laugh at racist, sexist, or homophobic jokes, however, so I can understand why JM might think they have no sense of humor.  After all, in his world, humor is all about making fun of people you perceive to be inferior.

#51 No one asked about why he got shot, then?

#52. My uncle was a self-identified hippie, and for significantly longer than a summer. He hitchhiked across the U.S. selling T-shirts, backpacked in Mexico, then started a career in the Navy, eventually retired, and became a deacon and scholar. After all of these years, he’s not a hippie, but he’s definitely still a dirty lib.

And if we can’t talk about global warming as an example of the conservative war against science, we can just talk about evolution like we’ve been doing for the past 80 years - that’s still more than sufficient.

@Selena777

No one asked about why he got shot, then?

I would suppose for the same reasons that JFK or Reagan did: lone crazy person.

Personally, I don’t really remember first being taught about it at all (although I know I was - I went to MLK, Jr. Elementary), but I remember it was a bit of a shock when I got a little older and realized that the fact that my mother was born in the late 1940s meant that she had actually lived through all that history.  It had just been taught as so long ago.

It wasn’t that the racists evaporated overnight, just that there weren’t that many of them to begin with and MLK managed to shift the peer pressure from supporting the racists to supporting the not-racists.  (Peer pressure, after all, was what caused otherwise sane young people to try evil drugs like marijuana, cigarettes, and alcohol, and eventually to engage in unwed sexual activity.  Thanks D.A.R.E. and public school sex ed!) 

I think that actually that is sort of the opinion of the modern tea party movement.  They are all so sure that most Americans agree with them and the only reason this isn’t obvious to everyone in the world is that the minority (liberals) have used the grown-up version of peer pressure (political correctness) to make it seem otherwise.  This is also how they are so sure that none of them were the mid-century racists - no one really was, just a few bad apples who behaved badly enough to result in civil rights and eventually reverse racism.

My dad went the trajectory from Catholic seminary student, to hippie (hitch-hiked back and forth across the continental US for three years) including the drugs and trying out various spiritual traditions, to farmer and teacher and father of six children. Someone told him once, “When you’re 20, you’re a liberal. When you’re 40, you wise up and become a conservative.” He said to me, “They didn’t say nothin’ about what you were supposed to be when you’re 60!” At 62 he’s pro-Obama and anti-war and forwards Mennonite essays on the subject to his Republican Christian friends. So, yes…some of the hippies did become “respectable”, but that’s not to say they aren’t still around and aren’t still fighting the good fight.

That horseshit fantasy about livin’ off the lan was about canceling property rights solely and why can’t we have what we didn’t earn.

Funny, I don’t recall wingnuts getting bent out of shape about trustfund babies being handed billions of dollars without doing any real work to earn that money, and only getting it because they hit the genetic jackpot.

You want a society where those who work the hardest are the most rewarded?  Fine, we eliminate all income taxes, but impose a 100% estate tax on everyone and radically restrict the amount of money family members can transfer to each other to prevent them from trying to avoid paying the estate tax.  The revenues brought in will pay off the national deficit and then cover all of society’s basic needs enough to ensure that every person in the country has all the basic life needs: adequate housing, nutrition, education, and healthcare.  For those who want more than the basics, let them work their tails off if they want so they can go buy that Ferrari.

This idea that Republicans despise the poor just because they are supposedly “lazy” is so disingenuous that it’s vomit-inducing.  Repukes have no problem with laziness whatsoever, they just hate people that they think of as less worthy for complaining about being stuck in minimum wage slavery.

So yeah, let’s go with your plan… those who work the hardest get rewarded the most.  But being the great-great granchild of someone who might have worked super hard 100 years ago shouldn’t entitle you to massive wealth just because someone dies, when you did nothing personally to deserve it.

I mean, if you want to make wealth a reward that is earned by those who work hardest for it, then you better be willing to accept that trustfund babies can no longer spend their entire lives being lazy celebutantes.

But since I already know that you’ll defend the principal of wealth inheritance, your screed about work and laziness and who “deserves” to have money is useless tripe.

Republicans aren’t opposed to laziness, they embrace it.  They just don’t like seeing anyone who they consider one of “those people” being lazy.

Taking that quote from Atwater as gospel to how racists think, a liberal has to come to the conclusion that the root of racism is in fact conservative philosophy.  The part about tax cuts (for the wealthy) is the one part that stands out.  If we want to make racism obsolete, we must make conservatism obsolete as well.

Our friend John must have never heard of Abbie Hoffman.  Actually, hippies are some of the funniest people I know.  They don’t tend to laugh at racist, sexist, or homophobic jokes, however, so I can understand why JM might think they have no sense of humor.  After all, in his world, humor is all about making fun of people you perceive to be inferior.
Comment #59: Captain Bathrobe on 09/03 at 12:24 AM

The “hippies aren’t funny” comment wasn’t posted by JM, but by “Atheist, a Feminist.”

Someone seems to be having trouble keeping their pandagon logons straight.

#60:
Nope. That was already answered. Some lone racist (a dying breed, because everyone was just so moved by King’s rationality and love and peacefulness and Christianity) shot him. And everyone was just so horrified that they would never allow something awful like that to happen ever again.

Start by teaching this to credulous 5- and 6-year-olds who still implicitly trust adults to do the right thing by them, who have an extremely limited understanding of the world outside their community; and who have underdeveloped logical capacities.

Reinforce the lesson each successive year. Make sure the history that is being taught concurrently is “whitewashed”—none of those inconvenient historical facts that point to post-MLKJ racism, especially not state-sponsored or institutionalized racism.

Also, be sure to avoid any icky modern-day issues, like: the higher rate of racial minorities (in poverty/jailed/pulled over by cops/given shittier loans) than whites, or any related studies supplementing suspicions that these facts are, in fact, racist in origin, etc.

In the end, you get adults who are convinced racism is dead and blacks are always playing the “race card.”

In any all-white or mostly white community, this can and does happen very easily. The few minorities raised in this environment are susceptible to the brainwashing as the whites.

@Comment #50: Older on 09/02 at 05:25 PM

Thanks, Older. Much as I suspected. It’s all so mythologized now, is the only thing.

Is it just me, or are conservatives feeling more emboldened than ever to lie their asses off?

Only since about Election Night 1992.

My god, the ‘60s ended 40-years ago.

MikeEss, a lot of the Boomers’ pointless political wrangling becomes clearer when you realize they’re still bitching about things they were mad about in college.

I like the idea of living off the LAN. Not sure why John the troll objects to e-commerce?

@65 oldfeminist

I guess I should have been more clear with my snark.  I thought I was over the top enough to be clear, but I suppose Poe’s Law comes in to play.

John Mckay at #52

Hippies do not have a sense of humor, not now, not then.  [...] The bullshit summer of love lasted fiifteen minutes then real men and women went back to work or war while hippies lived on the dole.  That horseshit fantasy about livin’ off the lan was about canceling property rights solely and why can’t we have what we didn’t earn. [...] Peace Dude?

Me at #55

What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?  Nothing because hippies don’t have a fucking sense of humor and they are all lazy moochers.

I am sorry if the difference wasn’t clear enough.  I will work on that.

How the fuck did a post about the Southern Strategy turn into a festival of hippie-punching?

Sorry, Atheist, A Feminist.  JM is unsubtle enough that it would be truly difficult to exaggerate his message without purchasing a zeppelin and tie-dying it and hanging 4,582 hippies from it by ropes then flying said zeppelin to Woodstock and crashing it into Max Yasgur’s Farm. 

All you did was condense and clean up his prose.

Plus, there seems to be a vogue for pretending to be a troll.

@oldfeminist

I thought the song reference would do it.

I do like that you think the addition of fuck cleaned it up, though.

ooooo John McKay knows *all about* hippies!!  Better than those who lived it, I am *so* sure.

Atheist has it right, and a little snark never hurt no one.  I used to respond to hippie-bashers by saying “Hippies just wanted every one to enjoy life, they wanted an end to wars, they wanted people to be kind to each other.  What, exactly, is wrong with that?” You know, I never got a cogent answer, not that I ever expected it.

And wooo woooo, look out, for they are among you this day!!  And nowadays most of them don’t look a whole lot different from everyone else, but that is in part because another thing we did was we broke Americans free of the “style” straitjacket.  Before hippies, both men and women were expected to choose from among a very limited selection of acceptable clothing styles and hair styles.  Now guys with long hair can even be executives, sometimes.  And there are dresses available that actually look *good* on fat women.

As to that sense of humor thing, I could name a whole lot of hippie jokes, but I fear they would go over most people’s heads, or past their ears, without making an impression of any kind.  They tell jokes, certainly, but they are also prone to large scale performance jokes.  Remember that whole “smoking banana peels” thing, way back in the late 60"s?  A joke. And look at how many people fell for it.

I have raised three separate generations of hippie kids (all mine, although many are adopted; I can’t seem to get over this “parent” thing).  As as far as I can see, there are hippies in each group, although some of them would call themselves something else. 

Most of my kids have worked actively for social justice, and yes, that is a hippie thing to do.  We are disproportionately represented amongst those who are trying to fix the system so it works for all of us.  All of them without exception are generous, and do almost daily acts of private charity.  The old joke bumper sticker “Don’t like cops?  Next time your car breaks down, call a hippie”?—Not so much a joke as the truth.  I’ve pulled numerous people out of ditches with the rope and jacks and come-along I used to carry at all times, and I don’t know anyone whose breakdown was ever fixed by a cop.  But that’s not their job, after all.

My oldest daughter told me that one of her favorite songs is “You Made Me a Pallet on the Floor” because she had seen me do it so many times, and she knew what it meant to people.  I am so proud of her, and of all of them.

Mr. McKay, you probably never even met a hippie.

Okay, back to the scheduled subject matter.  But just don’t get me started.

Signed, Older than ALL y’all, still livin’ it and still lovin’ it.

Oh PS, Atheist?  You know what it is that’s mythologized, it’s that whole incredibly stupid “summer of love” thing.  It really did a number on people’s brains.  They thought there was something there that wasn’t there, like maybe they had all come in flying saucers or something, rather than catching the Greyhound to join up with people they had heard were doing cool things.  That was a hippie joke, although not one of the better ones.

It greatly magnified and distorted the whole thing in people’s eyes, not in the same way for everyone though. 

When I was working for the Army* (yes, we did that) I was easily identified as a hippie, because my dresses, although conforming to accepted style, were of relatively unusual fabrics, and because I sometimes forgot to wear shoes to work.  My boss approached me one day, and in tones of utmost seriousness, asked me what “my people” thought of some current issue.  (This was about the time when “my people” were gathering on the train tracks to prevent the movement of people and materiel to the Vietnam war, but the issue, whatever it was, wasn’t that.  He knew perfectly well what they thought of that.)

* I had a security clearance.  Let me tell you what is the purpose of a security clearance.  It is so that people can be forced to know things that Man Was Not Meant To Know.  Word.  And it’s for life.

@Diane #66: Wow. Very perceptive. Well done.

and now even attacking the theory of relativity.

I just about fell out of my seat from laughter when I first saw that a few weeks ago.  I never knew who was behind Conservapedia until the relativity-denial silliness, and then discovered the wingnut site was created by Andy Schlafly… the son of the horrendous Phyllis Schlafly.  It all made sense after that.

2/10

But who won, then? The people who were busy spitting on the Little Rock 9? Or the people who changed the channel on all of that, yawned and popped a beer?

“Nobody gives two shits where you worked or how many kids you had or any of that shit.  Its pretentious.  I had a security clearence too, guess what?  No one gives a shit.”

...but it’s not pretentious to come onto somebody else’s blog and troll their threads and derail the topics of discussion while calling other posters “pretentious”, amirite?...

...but it’s not pretentious to come onto somebody else’s blog and troll their threads and derail the topics of discussion while calling other posters “pretentious”, amirite?…

No, that’s bearing the flame of Truth against the darkness of Communism/Liberalism/Fascism/Nazism/Islam/Liberation Theology/Socialism/etc., which is exemplified by one blog that advocates for rather mainstream* liberal ideas.

*Or at least, mainstream before the world went insane.

Poor Mr McKay.  But as the hippies used to say, whatever floats yer boat, man.

0/10

Parody anger or actual anger?

JohnMckay, a little tip:

Those people around you, wearing those hospital gowns, being watched by orderlies to make sure everyone takes their medications and don’t fight with the other patients?  Well, they’re not hippies, at least not any more than you’re what Ayn Rand thought of as a proto-John-Galt.

I doubt seriously you have any more experience with Real Live Hippies than I have with Real Live Vampires or Compassionate Conservatives (is there a difference?).

You know who’s making your life bad, who’s ruining the country, why things are shitty all over?  Because of people just like you, who vote against their own interests while guzzling Wingnut-Koolaid, watching Glenn Beck, and dreaming about Bush Jr.‘s Manly Crotch Bulge.

Grow the fuck up and take some responsibility for trashing America.  Learn the difference between your pipe-dreams of a Conservative/Libertarian Paradise (like Somalia?) and the real world.  Understand that the Top 1% are leeches on society, worse than the bottom 25% in every measurable way.  Realize that the Republican Party, the Teabagger Party, and all too much of the Democratic Party are completely devoted to the Top 1% and the rest of us be damned, including you.

Here’s the question:  If every hippies was rounded up and shot, if Jane Fonda and Michael Moore were executed on live TV, if Al Gore had his tongue cut out and his fingers chopped off so he could never express his thoughts on Global Warming again, if every Democrat was put into a FEMA concentration camp and worked to death making tanks, and airplanes, and rifles, if every political party was outlawed except the Republican or Libertarian Parties (your choice), if government got out of every form of taxation, every form of regulation, every kind of social safety net, if abortion was illegal, birth-control outlawed, every girl who lost her virginity before marriage was stoned to death, every Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Person was found out and eliminated, if polluting was rewarded instead of punished, if everyone who wasn’t a White Protestant was forced out of the country — in short, if everything you nutcases in the Reichwing have always wanted became true, what would you have? 

I’m betting it would be a literal Hell on Earth, and I bet in the deepest, darkest, most secret parts of your shriveled heart, you know I’m correct.

When they line you up against the wall right next to the rest of us, and hand Ann Coulter the machine gun to mow us down, remember who warned you…

I doubt seriously you have any more experience with Real Live Hippies than I have with Real Live Vampires or Compassionate Conservatives (is there a difference?).

Vampires bring you back after they kill you.

@87 and 88

Some vampires have souls?

The difference between a conservative and Dracula?

One is a souless, shape-shifting bloodsucker who has power over people with weak minds, the other is a vampire.

To McKay,
Punctuation and grammar are your friends. Try actual English.

And, McKay, your “concern” for the status of black folks in American society is obviously an important part of your politics. Your “concern” is noted. I’m just wondering, though, what role does the de-industrialization of the American economy and the stagnation of wages occurring at the exact moment when African-Americans became available for the full social rights of citizenship play in your analysis. After all, poor black folks were/are poorer than poor white folks, due to the US government’s active policies of impoverishment. In the 1960s, black folks became eligible not only to vote but for the rights associated with the welfare state, and since the 1970s average wages have stagnated.  Is it the fault of liberals that industry decided to move overseas at the very moment black folks became citizens?

Also to McKay,
You might be wondering why you haven’t been banned:
it’s probably because you’re so over-the-top you’re more of a jester who it’s just too much fun to gawk at then some manic preacher to be humored. Don’t call people dirtbags and fuckfaces if you don’t know the difference between liberalism and communism.

People who have just the tiniest bit of sympathy for your Put-Upon-Middle-American-Man shtick (most readers/commentators here probably don’t) feel really fucking embarrassed every time you open your face and vomit your shit all over the page.

“Go look at that workers paradise Detroit, own it mikey its liberalism run wild without any restrictions and it’s left several generations of inner city kids mired in poverty.”

The city of Detroit is sucked dry by generations of rapacious auto company executives who wanted to pollute and pillage without limit, who needed a place to put their plants but were uninterested in the lives of the people who sacrificed themselves to the corporations.  Big auto was totally uninterested in anything that might affect the next quarter’s profits, to the extent they repeatedly failed to take their competition seriously and do the long term planning and research it would take to stay alive.

And a few Americans try to do something to help the people left behind in the wreckage of Capitalism Gone Wild, those efforts don’t succeed as well as hoped, and therefore it’s the fault of liberals that Detroit is not what it could be?  Huh?

“Thats some compassion mickey, call me what ever you want dirtbag but liberals own that shit, and crowing about how morally superior you are is hilarious.”

...and conservatives, who claim to have the inside scoop on morality, straight from the hand of god — what did they do about cleaning up the mess they made?  Squat.  A big steaming pile of squat.  You assholes are “Pro Life” for the fetus and after you’re born, just like Alan Simpson, they want you to work as hard as possible for a few years and then die quickly so the Top 1% can have another tax cut…

“Tell me how liberals and their union stooges didn’t suck the blood out of that school system, say it fuck face, tell me how much they cared for the children.”

...‘cause if there were no teacher’s unions, and no liberals, we’d be paying teachers Minimum Wage and that would solve all the problems with education in America, right?  Forget making sure that those who benefit most from the existence and maintenance of civilization ever be required to pay some taxes to keep it all going.  Forget that human beings are more than “human resources” to be used up and discarded.  Oh no, that’s way too much to ask.

And the children?  You hate the children.  You despise the children.  You loathe the children.  The only children you like are blond-haired, blue-eyed, Aryan, and the offspring of good wealthy Republicans.  You’d eliminate Social Security, Medicare, streetlights, fire protection, cops, roads, clean water and air, and it would all be cool with you as long as we have plenty of ships and planes and missiles and rifles and bombs and soldiers so we can kill people all over the planet for no good reason. 

The children?  The Reichwing doesn’t give a good goddam about anyone except themselves.  So don’t come onto my turf and tell me that we’re immoral.  You assholes wrote the fucking book on immorality.  In the original German…

“And I’m delusional.”

Yes, you are delusional.  It’s obvious to anyone except you.

” Too funny.”

No, not funny at all.  Just sad.  Very, very, disturbingly sad…

Cracker, I asked you some questions. What role does the deindustrialization of the American economy, and the stagnation of wages for the bottom 95% play in your world-view? C’mon cracker, you’ve got to have an explanation for that shit, doncha?

Again, fat, drunk and on a feminist website is no waay to go through life assholes.

Projection much?

I’m too poor being a single mother of three, including one child with a serious disability, to buy alcohol. This capitalist paradise sees fit to provide me with $9.65 an hour for working my ass off from 4am to 1pm daily.

I’m pretty sure that the Tea Party is in various places all over the US. Personally, as a black Southerner leftist liberal, even I get tired of this whole ‘the South is racist’ rhetoric used by northern liberals. It usually comes off as an attempt to say ‘All racism exists in the South, therefor none exists were I’m from.’ Case in point, isn’t the Tea Party biggest in the Midwest? But that can’t do, a lot of east coast liberals are from there (according to bios of a number of prominent liberals, including feminists (a few at feministing to be sure))!

Are the Tea party racist? Yes.
Are the Tea party based in and only in the South? No

Oh, and first comment. Feministing screwed up their site, making it near impossible to use. This site is much faster, and I remembered a few interesting articles from months ago. So glad to be here… *crickets*

@WriterX

You are right in that racists are everywhere, but there are more Tea Partiers in the South than in any other region of the country (and there are very few in the Northeast).

Here is a CBS poll.  Slightly over one-third are from the South, one-quarter are from the West, slightly less than that from the Midwest, and less than one-fifth are from the Northeast.

@Atheist, A Feminist

The population in the the south is also a lot larger than in the Midwest too. So I guess that poll is saying that per person, you’re more likely to run into a tea partyer in the Midwest than in the south.

And if you don’t think that large racists exist in large numbers in the northeast, how about you ask a few black people (or hispanics) on their views of that. I think they’ll disagree.

Basically, the largest migration of Blacks in America is to the south. That’s because it ain’t so bad down here, believe it or not, and you can’t tell me the same problems that exist here doesn’t exist elsewhere. It may be more subtle, but that doesn’t mean it’s disappeared.

Henry Louis Gates
Madonna Constantine
Oscar Grant

Shall I go on? Odd that the news never reports these as historic cases of racism, which they surely are. But I guess makes my fellow citizens in the other three regions sleep well (and supposedly innocent) at night.

Correction-

“And if you don’t think that racists exist in large numbers…”

@WriterX

I do think racists exist in sizeable numbers everywhere.

The percentage of the US population that lives in the South is roughly 36%, in the West is about 22%, in the Midwest is also about 22-23%, and in the Northeast is roughly 20%.  So, basically your odds of running into a Tea Partier is not significantly higher in any one region. (Those percentages are based on the 2000 census.)

I wasn’t disputing your claim about lots and lots of racist Americans everywhere, just pointing out that the Tea Party is not largest in the Midwest.

I know that (as a white woman) I have far fewer fellow white people coming up to me in the Northeast to criticize the way minorities behave than I did while living in the West and South, but I am under no illusions that this means my new neighbors are completely different than my old ones.

Also (because I was curious), if you limit population numbers to whites only (like the Tea Party tends to do/want), then the South has roughly 34% of the white population, the West has roughly 19% of the population, the Midwest has roughly 27% of the population, and the Northeast has roughly 20% of the population. (Again, 2000 Census data)

Thus, your odds of running into a white Tea Party supporter would be highest in the West, then in the South and finally least likely (and roughly the same) in the Northeast and Midwest.

It is my understanding that the “Southern Strategy” includes a decent portion of the region defined by the census as the West, however.

I am not taking issue with your thesis just with the evidence you used to support it.

@Atheist, A Feminist

Heh, wrote a long post, but then I realized that you were right, so I deleted it. And then I wrote an even longer post! Most of this isn’t directed at you, Atheist, and not even at this blog, but really at the Mainstream media for propagating it and general frustration.

Beginning of rant-

The original point I was trying to make is that posts like the OP try to make it out that the South is somehow unique its racism. The mainstream media does it too. Oscar Grant can be shot on a subway, and there’s no mention of Oakland’s history of racism. The slightest thing happens in the South, and we get the ‘has the South truly gotten over its racist past’ rhetoric. I can only assume from reading or hearing that over and over, that racism has never been a ‘past’ problem for the North or West.

If we were to say that the Tea Party was 100% racist, and that every single person in this country who was a racist was also a member of the Tea Party, then as you said, the West would have the highest percentage of racists by regions.

But racism doesn’t work like that. I recognize that not every Tea Party supporter is a racist (no doubt most are), and that you can’t tell a racist from their political beliefs, party affiliation, or where they were born, but only by their actions and personal beliefs.

And yet, we still get articles like this one, which completely ignores that, and does nothing to solve the issue of racism except placing all the blame on the South, and by that suggestion, it ends up denying that racism exists in the other three regions of this country.

“The Tea Party is the Southern Strategy”

No, it’s a nation-wide strategy.

It just so happens that the South has more whites (and 2nd I believe in non Hispanic whites) than anywhere else along with the greatest population by region in addition to a population that isn’t as varied as NYC or Western states. So while the percentages are about even, the numbers are higher.

Note: I see a few Indians, Asians, and Latinos from time to time, but the numbers are still low around here enough were I can go months without seeing any; my city is about 500k in population.

If you walked into two houses, and one had only two people who were racists, and the other one had only four people who were racists inside, either way you’re still in a house with racists. Does it matter if there are more racists in the south because of a higher population OR percentage? And should the Northeast get off the hook for supposedly having fewer racists, even though that can be laid on higher and more concentrated immigration, and larger cities that encourage interracial communities?

I don’t think so. A racist is a racist is a racist, and they are everywhere. Yet this blog focuses on The South-

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/C54/

as a problem unique to itself. It’s the reason I stayed away until Feministing became horrible to use, even though I loved the other articles here.

And like I said, it only deludes people into thinking that if South=Racist, then North/Midwest/West=Not Racist.

And as for the South? I am a proud black Southerner, the son of great leaders like MLK, and Lincoln, who both came from the South and leaders like Harriet Tubman born into slavery in Maryland. And if you insult the South, you’re insulting me, and my family and my friends, whether black or white. I am not denying the racist history of the South or that the South doesn’t still has its fair share of both closeted and out in the open racists. We have a long road forward.

But what in this article helps towards reaching that goal?

It’s about time that Northerners, Midwesterners, and those in the West stop denying their own racist histories.

Because I assure you, while the South has the largest history of racism, the North has one almost as old, and the West has one just as cruel. And not just against Blacks.

Basically what I’m saying is percentages for racism and tea party members do not matter, and neither do numbers. The fact that the Tea Party exists, and that racism is still going strong in this country, well it’s not a problem you can just pawn off to another region, while ignoring it in your backyard.

@WriterX

I forgot to say in all of my number citing: Welcome!

I totally agree with your central point.  I was born in California and grew up thinking that “we” had won the Civil War.  That is a big problem.

I hate to try to speak for Amanda, but I think part of the reason she focuses on the South (and Southwest) is because she is from Texas.  (Pam Spaulding also has roots in the South.)

I probably should have been more clear/honest in defining which whites: the percentages of whites I used are only including non-Hispanic whites.  (My mother is most racist against “illegals” and so when I went with the white racist numbers, I used her definition of white.)  I don’t know if the South is still leading though.

Thanks. Yea, I understand about parents. My mother is similar, except it’s against Gays (she has her own term for them). Nothing like hypocrisy.

WriterX:

The original point I was trying to make is that posts like the OP try to make it out that the South is somehow unique its racism.

No.  Amanda was referring to a very specific historical incident, the adoption of the Southern Strategy by the Republican Party.

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to a Republican Party (GOP) method of winning Southern states in the years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by exploiting opposition to the cultural upheaval of the 1960s/70s and in reaction to the changing economics of the South.

I.e. racism.