Kossack xxdr zombiexx asked earlier today, in the Tip Jar comment on "Why Republicans are whining about 'Sharia Law' ",
Why do Republicans hate America so much?
"That's easy," I replied. "They have explained it at length."
And I quoted some of them, going back to Civil War hatred of damYankees and the Federal Government, and even further, to the Constitution and Alexander Hamilton's Whiskey Tax in the Washington Administration, and outlining the path from there right down to the present day. Then I realized that I should diary my comments. So here you go.
I diaried about the vitriol that anti-Progressives have been spewing for more than two centuries in the US in Godless, Gritless Liberals, Then and Now, and I have expounded at length in other posts and on dKosopedia on the Dog Whistle Code that they use most of the time to mask their hatred under a cover of Implausible Deniability.
There are two outstanding historic sources of hatred of Yankees and the Federal government, and therefore of the country as a whole: Alexander Hamilton's Whiskey Tax, and slavery. Infrastructure like the Erie Canal is also implicated, because of its support for the Northern Factory System, so much detested by slaveowners because of its dependence on free labor.
- The Whiskey Rebellion was strongest in rural Pennsylvania, where President George Washington rode out at the head of the local militia to put it down, but Rebellion sentiment ran from there down through the Appalachians right to Georgia. The fight between the bootleggers and the Revenooers runs on to this very day, and affects attitudes all through those regions, and those culturally associated with them.
- Slavery has been called The Original Sin of the United States, written into the Constitution, and the basis of the sectional conflict between North and South that still continues after more than 200 years. I have been collecting diatribes by Confederates against the damYankees, including many that are easy to find in Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative (although there are many, many more). Here are excerpts from just one speech on this point. (Foote, vol. II, pp. 165-166)
President Jefferson Davis:
I saw that the wickedness of the North would precipitate a war upon us...Our enemies...persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America...The question for you to decide is, Will you be slaves or will you be independent? Will you transmit to your children the freedom and equality which your fathers transmitted to you, or will you bow down in adoration before an idol baser than ever was worshipped by Eastern idolaters?...These people, when separated from the South and left entirely to themselves, have in six months demonstrated their utter incapacity for self-government. And yet these are the people who claim to be your masters.
They also claimed, and still claim, that the Confederate Constitution represents the original intent of the Founders (particularly the slaveowners among them), including its overt support for slavery and "Christianity", its prohibition on central government spending on infrastructure, its line-item veto, and other such provisions that they still bring up to show how Yankees, Blacks, immigrants, women and other riff-raff still don't understand that true concept of Liberty that is only possible for Real Americans, that is, for old rich Evangelical Protestant White guys.
The Civil Rights movement, and by extension all of the '60s, and the election of our current Black President, are gall and wormwood to them. So also are all other social advances, and every one of the sciences implicated in Evolution by Natural Selection and by Sexual Selection, and Anthropogenic Global Warming.
While their children steadily become less and less interested in the Lost Cause, the White Male Supremacist Southern Aristocracy, and all of their associated greeds, delusions and bigotries.