Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose. (cont.)

TW: Sound familiar? Fear has always been a very powerful force in American politics, usually for the worst. Paranoia will destroya...and the rest us if we are not careful. I grew up in and around small towns, they are nice but they hold no moral highground even if many of their occupants feel otherwise.

From David Halberstam's Coldest Winter:
"...the other wing of the Republican Party was very different: it was essentially more grassroots; it reflected old, abiding, small-town American...fears...where among the governing circles in many small towns and cities there was a fundamental hatred of almost everything Roosevelt was doing on the domestic scene, of his New Deal, which these critics passionately believed was, to use their favored word, socialistic...

...but the small-town wing knew that they were the real Republicans...that their values were the truer ones because they were the more American ones...

...The more it lost, the angrier it became. Each time, its representatives had come to the national conventions confident of their greater truths, only to the nomination hijacked by an elite...

...[in the successful Republican 1946 elections] Republicans had campaigned not so much against the Democratic Party as against Communism and subversion..."

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