Conservatives Are Playing The Long Game And Winning

“The new constitution would give Congress too much authority, Patrick Henry warned. “They’ll take your niggers from you,” he said to laughter. The ratification convention is rich with that distinct Virginia blend of high-flown tributes to liberty, honeyed testimonies of personal distaste for slavery, and venomous appeals to race prejudice.” (Michael Waldman) — Patrick Henry is famous for saying “give me liberty or give me death” and less famous for the more salient point that “they’ll take your n****** from you” (via Michael Waldman)

Democrats think of democracy as a thing they have, whereas Republicans see it as a fight they’re in. That’s why Democrats don’t do anything even when they’re in power, and Republicans do even when they’re out. The Dems are bringing a knife to a literal gun fight. No wonder there’s blood everywhere.

Aristotle was a democracy understander, and he understood it as constant class struggle. A.D. Lindsay described his perspective as such: “each class is thought of, not as trying to express an ideal, but as struggling to acquire power or maintain its position.”

America is full of abstract, ideological debates like ‘guns rights’ or ‘abortion’ or ‘critical race theory’ which A) no other country has and B) are really just expressions of class struggle. Republicans say that these are tactics quite openly, but Democrats just don’t believe them. As the Reagan/Bush adviser Lee Atwater said in 1981:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N******, n*****.”

The class that is struggling here is the rich, white men who America was founded explicitly by and for. Only land-owning white men could even vote at the beginning. Their revolution and constitution were just branding exercises,Freedom™ over Slavery Inc. Patrick Henry said ‘give me liberty or give me death’but as Teri Kanefield writes, “What he evidently meant was ‘Give me the liberty to own slaves and the freedom to own guns to keep them in line.’”

As Michael Waldman writes about that founding fascist: