I would like to offer an alternative to liberals in search of an analogy. The standard two liberal villains are Adolf Hitler and Joe McCarthy. Not only are they over used, but comparing any political opponent to Hitler is absurd. Hitler had no political opponents. He killed them. On the bright side, he also ended up killing most of his supporters, as well. Senator Joe McCarthy (R - Wisconsin) was a typical drunken lout of a bully who invented an issue to save his political ass, something most professional politicians can respect. It's also helpful to remember that he originally ran as a New Deal Democrat, in 1939 for a judgeship and in 1944 for the Senate. He lost both elections and only then switched to the GOP, thus proving that politics is not about issues it's about winning.
Now, clearly neither of these deserving liberal boogymen are a good analogy for an idiot like Senator Tom Tancredo, Republican from Colorado. Tom wants to make every illegal immigrant (or I.I.) a felon, and considers a `Guest Worker Program" a form of surrender. But exactly what Tom's felonyship of America is supposed to achieve, I'm not sure. Right now, if we catch an I.I. we deport them. Are we supposed to put them in jail before we deport them? Felons also lose the right to vote, something I.I.'s can't do anyway. But this was the issue Tom was originally elected on, clearly by voters suffering from A.D.D., and it's been his personal crusade to round up all twelve million I.I.'s and toss them back over the border - one at a time, if necessary.
In 2002 Tom read a Denver Post article about a straight A high school student, an American citizen, who could not go to college because his parents were I.I., and thus he couldn't qualify for student loans or scholarships. Tom immediately began a campaign to have the boy and his parents deported. Tom bemoans the "cult of multiculturalism" and worries America is turning into a "tower of Babel". Not that he's Xenophobic or a racist, he insists.
But, Tom, that just leaves stupid.
What we know for certain is that Tom's goal is one of the most self destructive measures offered to voters since William Hung appeared on American Idol. Tom wants a 700 mile long high tech wall built between the U.S. and Mexico, much like that other expensive failure the Great Wall of China. And what the heck ever happened to the Berlin Wall, and the Iron Curtain? If they had worked, don't you think they would still be around?
And God help us if the wall should work...with the unemployment rate currently at 4.73%, there are few "unemployed legals" to fill the millions of jobs which will be vacated by Tom's forced migration, so the "big fence" will not only cost taxpayers a couple of billions to construct and maintain, it will also drive up the cost of food in grocery stores and restaurants while driving small farmers out of business. The cost of new home construction will rise, as will the cost of home repair. And, I suppose, we must also arrest every employer who hires an I.I., which means a lot of Republicans are going to have to give up their gardeners, maids, nannies, etc. etc. We're talking about a kind of economic dislocation unseen in this nation since the Great Depression, and Tom wants us to do this to ourselves.
So, okay, Tom's ideas are emotionally appealing but simplistic to the point of idiotic, as previously mentioned, but assuming that Tom is a true believer in the honored Amercian tradition of "cutting off your nose to spite your face", to whom do we compare him to? Well, there is one American who comes to mind, one true believer responsible for leading America into a five year war and the American south into a century of poverty. His name was William Lowndes Yancey, and he was, like Tom Tancredo a firebrand who considered compromise a defeat.
Yancey was a pro-Federalist newspaper editor who married a widow with an Alabama plantation, and the ownership of slaves converted him into a passionate pro-slavery, pro-states rights' politician. He even publicly favored reopening the slave trade with Africa, which had been closed by the British Navy. Yancey opposed the compromises of 1850, which sought to establish a balance between slave states and "free" states. Anything short of total domination by slave states was not a victory, in Yancey's view.
As early as 1858 Yancey was called the "Orator of Secession". He worked hard to split his own (Democratic) party on the issue, believing a Republican (anti-slavery) victory in 1860 would radicalize the south. He was, in the words of that genius Bruce Catton, "...somehow typical; one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850's (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but not do anything more than that."
That the North had twice the population of the South, that the North had ten times their industrial and agricultural capacity, that slavery was already dieing in the South, that the North would not fight to free the slaves but they would fight to preserve the union in the face of secession, that Lincoln did not believe the Federal government had the power or the right to outlaw slavery, all this meant nothing to Yancey. Yancey wanted secession not simply despite its self destructive effects but it seemed almost because of them.
Once war broke out Jefferson Davis sent Yancey to England to seek recognition. The Prime Minister eventually met with Yancey, and asked if he had been serious about his call for a resumption of the slave trade. Yancey had to admit he had been serious, and that was the end of any chance that England would recognize the confederacy.
Yancey then came home and successfully opposed Davis' attempt to draft troops into the confederate army and the he also opposed the formation of a Confederate Supreme Court. It must have been Yancey, Davis was thinking of, when he said the epitaph of the Confederacy should be, "Died of a Theory.'
Yancey himself died in July of 1863, uncompromising to the end. The result of his life's work was the total abolition of slavery in America and the ultimate victory of Federalism over State's Rights.
It is an estate Representative Tancredo might take note of, had he the intellectual honesty to do so.