Nathan Newman wrote:
> He can claim the
>traiditon of xenophobia and apologetics for criminal behavior, but telling
>the government to go to hell when its wrong is the America of Washington,
>Jefferson, Douglas, Debs and Martin Luther King. And its the America I'll
>praise any day of the week.
-Too bad it too often exists on paper and in the mind rather than in -the flesh. Did "we" have a role in creating slavery, McCarthyism, or -imperial war? The good things you cite rose in opposition to the bad -things you slight.
Slavery was a horrible compromise that most of the founders recognized as such at the outset and hundreds of thousands of Northerners lost their lives in the war to end slavery, a whatever retroactive analysis may be applied, that's what a large number of them saw themselves as sacrificing their lives around, if not to eliminate it in the South, at least to prevent its spread anywhere else.
As for McCarthyism, he did abuse the rather substantial power of a Senate chairmanship, but was remember, censured eventually by his fellow Senators, and the term itself used as an epithet of abuse shows how unAmerican his actions are now considered.
As for imperialism, America has a rather mixed history on that point, maybe an issue where I disagree with some people on this list, since from the Monroe Doctrine to our postwar support for many decolonization struggles, we mixed progresive ideals with dirty support for client states. And the better acts of that policy are the result of continual progressive struggle.
Many on the left seem to have a need to claim a complete irrelevance of progressive movements, since if America was so uniformly bad in the past, we on the left obviously were completely ineffectual. Sure the corporations and racists exist and they have many undemocratic weapons at their disposal. Which makes the overcoming of those undemocratic opponents all the more to the credit of the democratic movements in our history.
-- Nathan Newman