What goes around

The latest round of violence, vandalism and intimidation coming out of the right-wing anti-everything coalition is alarming. Are we witnessing an irreversible trend against the rule of law and republican tradition in America? Or is this merely the continuation of juvenile but sometimes deadly foot-stamping by the ever-present reactionary minority?

Now Cantor's dumb-ass attempt at projection has doubled down the "so what?" response of republican official glee over sending their minions to physically intimidate the governing majority of Democrats. I guess it's not actually lying when you interpret events in the most paranoid and delusional way possible. So as usual, "lone wolves" har har get to send faxed pictures of nooses to black congressmen, windows busted at Democratic offices, and threats conveyed by voicemail (really? are the tea-baggers so old they don't understand how caller ID works?) and the beneficiaries of bullying get to stand there and cutely explain how "you filthy libs brought it on yourselves" without even a hint of fear about what goes around...

You can even look historically to know that political violence by right-wingers is rarely punished. Looking back really far, Constantine is remembered as this wonderful guy who unified the Roman Empire and legalized Christianity while his hagiographers gloss over the rotten, bullying tactics he used. He essentially destroyed the tetrarchic system established by Diocletian which stabilized the empire after 50 years of bully boys ripping it apart. In our own past, you have the Know-Nothings beating the pants off of immigrants with almost no retribution.

Abraham Lincoln was also legally elected by a majority and the South initiated the most brazen act of bully boy antics the country has ever seen (the parallels between Lincoln and Obama run far deeper than the "team of rivals" thesis). Then after the civilized and progressive North finally manned up to oppose the confederate foot-stampers, which regrettably took much longer than it should have and laid the foundations of corporate power rotting the republic to this day, the South was so intransigent that they resisted even admitting the idea that they lost. It took almost a century for the "redemption" thesis to finally fall into the dustbin of academic history but Gone with the Wind and thousands of "the South will rise again" bumper stickers attest to the idea that white Southerners do whatever they feel like with no apologies.

Everyone knows that the Nazi Brownshirts ran amok in Weimar Germany, cracking skulls of anyone who got in the way of the Machtergreifung or fascist seizure of power, but how many people today know that the other side, the Social Democrats, had a paramilitary force of their own called the Stahlhelm? And there were more SD paramilitaries than SAs? It was not an insignificant factor in Hitler's rise that the Social Democrats tried to take the high road and not resist. History would be very different if the Left had the balls to fight back, both in 1860s-70s America or 1930's Germany. Lesson being that Democrats today ignore right-wing, reactionary violence and threats thereof at their own peril.

George W. Bush seemed to echo this in some ways when ignoring the "failure" his Iraq occupation. There were other, profit-motivated, reasons for refusing to even attempt to scale back the violence but perhaps ole' W remembered who his adopted confederate homeland was able to outlast the "Northern, Federal occupation" by exhausting Republican efforts to reconstruct the South so Confederates could get back to the business of their feudalistic "tradition" of white supremacy and rule by aristocracy.

So, what goes around doesn't always come around. In fact, it rarely does. And civilization and democracy suffer for it. Freedom and liberty in the liberal sense guarantee that the rights of reactionary elements, who hate democracy and freedom for all, are protected in order to give plenty of room to those who would destroy that very system that protects them. The old saying is that evil wins when good does nothing. While the system of absolutism and tyranny that reactionaries often bring with it is good for those at the very top, Americans being led by those top 1%ers to oppose the blandly moderate program of Barack Obama and Democrats should remember that life gets far worse for the majority, of which most of them will remain in. Tea partiers and others righteously angry at the plundering of society by the top 1% would do well to consider John Rawls' philosophy of the veil of ignorance and not trust to the "benevolent" business interests they seem to place so much hope for the future in.