The Rise of the New Confederacy

If one looks at where many of the Republican saboteurs in Congress hail from, it doesn't take long to realize the majority are from states that made up the former Confederate States of America.  Now, as was the case 153 years ago - these individuals and the states and districts they represent abhorred the federal government, sought to resist changes in the concept of human rights and equality, and opposed modernity in general.  Some things do not change.  Indeed, South Carolina just passed a bill seeking to nullify the Affordable Health Care Act, apparently having learned nothing from the Civil War.  Andrew Sullivan aptly described these people and their mindset yesterday citing a study I referenced about evangelical Christians:

The bewildering economic and social and demographic changes have created a cultural and existential panic among those most heavily concentrated in those districts whose members are threatening to tear down the global economy as revenge for losing two presidential elections in a row. They feel they have already lost and have nothing to gain from any constructive engagement with a president they regard as pretty close to the anti-Christ of parasitic minorities. They feel isolated in a more multi-cultural country. They feel spied upon and condescended to. They have shut out any news sources apart from Fox.

Bob Felton further zeros in on the root of the problem:

There is a huge reservoir of people out there who are simply not capable of thriving in the modern world. They cannot do the kinds of jobs that need doing, they cannot understand the people doing them, and they resent and dislike the young and educated for whom it is all second nature. The world they grew up in no longer exists; it is modernity itself that is under attack.

A column in the Washington Post follows up on this revolt and willingness to destroy America rather than accept change:

It took on new force with fears of the federal government in Washington interfering with their cherished way of life. It gathered steam with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And it all came into full flower when shore batteries fired on Fort Sumter. It was the spirit of the Old Confederacy, a state-sponsored rebellion hellbent on protecting its “peace and safety” from the party that took possession of the government on March 4, 1861.

This virulent hostility to the Union led the Old Confederacy to conclude — as expressed by South Carolina — that with Lincoln’s elevation to the presidency, “the slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.”

Federal government as the enemy.

Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government. 

The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.

Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.” 

Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames.
But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.

They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.

Decent people who believe in the U.S. Constitution must stand against these hate and fear motivated elements.  They must be defeated politically and culturally and need to become the pariahs that they deserve to be.   The future of America depends on their defeat.