Before my wife finally got her negative COVID test back allowing me to return to work (for some reason they didn’t record she was a healthcare worker and her case wasn’t expedited so poof went days of pay for us both) I had an interesting exchange with a fellow concerning what’s going on in Portland Ore where the family of DaWife’s father is from and where I almost moved after honeymooning there (Apparently the best non-move I ever made in my life).
Along with the standard mostly un-poisoned soup arguments about how peaceful most of the protesters who have been rioting for two months are I heard one argument against the Department of Homeland Security Troops being there that did have some resonance (no it wasn’t the “secret police” nonsense that my sons friends are falling for and some democrats are pushing).
This argument is that this is a local matter and in one sense he had a point. The citizens of Portland districts elected their Democrat city counsel that has supported this nonsense, the citizens of Portland as a whole elected their Democrat Mayor who has allowed these riots to take place and handcuffed their Police, the citizens of the Oregon district that includes Portland elected the Democrat congressmen defending this stuff and opposing the feds protecting federal property and the citizens of Oregon as a whole elected the Democrat governor and Democrat senators who have turned a blind eye to the violence, except to attack Federal Agents in general and President Donald Trump in particular for trying to stop it, at least when they go after Federal locations. So they’re getting what they voted for.
In fact Erick Erickson argues Let Portland Burn:
Let the market decision by letting the actions of a free people control their fate.
The President should withdraw from Portland immediately and let the city burn, if it will, or thrive if it will, but it is the choice of the people there.
A President sending in a police force to a city is a dangerous precedent that will be expanded upon even though the United States Constitution lacks a general police power. A city allowed to chose its own fate is a positive precedent from which we can all draw lessons.
Let Portland burn or not, but let it decide without intervention from Washington.
And Jazz Shaw notes:
the people of these cities continue to elect the same group of Democratic hand-wringers year after year no matter how badly conditions on the ground deteriorate. So does this mean that the rest of the nation and the federal government are out of options besides just waiting for the cities to implode?
There’s clearly an argument to be made in favor of such a conclusion, though it’s an ugly thought to contemplate. As Erickson suggests, there must surely come a point where the remaining sane people in Portland and these other cities will look around at the shootings, the rapes, the arson and the looting and come to the conclusion that something isn’t working. This relies on the old adage which holds that a liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet.
Now I must confess that there is some appeal in this. Why waste federal resources to protect people from their own bad decisions? I’ve heard variants of this concerning folks who build in areas that are regularly threatened by Hurricanes or Wildfires. Why should my federal tax dollars be spent to protect these fools from themselves?
But what really funny about this argument I’ve been reading these exact same points, argued by southern supporters of slavery during the 1850 up to the start of the civil war.
As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been reading Hart’s brilliant American History told by Contemporaries during my lunch break, I’m on volume four and have for the last month (not including during quarantine) been reading argument after argument by congressmen, senators, governors writers newspaper and thinkers and ordinary people both defending and opposing slavery and one of the arguments that is constantly being made by the Democrats concerning slavery is that it’s none of the North’s damn business what the south chooses to do about slavery. It’s not a federal issue but an issue for the individual states whose citizens support the institution. Here is one example:
Never, in a single instance, has the South, in any shape or form, interfered with the North in her municipal regulations ; but, on the contrary, has tamely submitted to paying tribute to the support of her manufactures, and the establishment of her commercial greatness; yet, lie the “serpent warmed in the husbandman’s bosom,” she turns upon us and stings us to the heart. If Great Briton or any foreign power, had heaped upon us the long catalog of insult and abuses that the North has, there is not a man in the whole South who would not have long since shouldered his musket, and, if necessary split his heart’s blood to have avenged them. But because we are members of the same political family it is contended we must not quarrel, but suffer all the impositions at their hands that in their fanatical spleen they may choose to heap on us.
That’s the Charleston Mercury circa 1860 which sounds an awful like the Democrats today. But you know who sounds more like them. Democrat President James Buchanan who sat back while the slave states seceded and seized federal property and arsenals:
How easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever, and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country! They, and they alone, can do it. All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way.
Doesn’t that sound like the whole Pelosi/Media meme of the violence will all go away and the people of Portland will be fine if Trump just ignores what’s going on.
But we don’t have to go back to the 1800’s for these words. We can go back to living memory, 1957, to the floor of the US Senate to hear the arguments of Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) made against the 1957 Civil rights act on the floor of the Senate during the Debates chronicled in Robert Caro’s extraordinary biography of Lyndon Johnson The Years of Lyndon Johnson specifically in volume three Master of the Senate (another set of books I highly recommend four volumes are out vol 5 is yet to come) this exchange from page 965 come immediately to mind:
McNamara said Michigan needed no defense, that his state could handle its affairs without outside interference. “Then why does not the Senator let us do the same?” Russell asked. There was applause from the southern senators seated around him, but he had asked a question, and he was to receive an answer to it. “McNamara,” Doris Fleeson wrote, “roared in the bull voice trained in a thousand union meeting halls: ‘Because you’ve had ninety years and haven’t done it’ “
Now I’ll readily concede that given our current education system and the lack of interest in reading anything but Howard Zinn communist approved history some of these debates and arguments might not be familiar to the current Democrat Leadership like Nancy Pelosi or Democrat Mayors like Ted Wheeler or “Journalists” like Brian Stelter let alone the rank and file leftists/ Democrats posting on facebook or twitter.
But as someone who HAS read this stuff I find it incredibility interesting that the arguments of today’s Democrat left/media are the arguments of the slaveholder and the defenders of Jim Crow and are being made under the banner of Black Lives Matter.
But it makes sense after all the slaveholder and the proponents of Jim Crow also insisted that the way of life they defended was for Black American’s own good. And just as in those days, we see blacks trapped in cities controlled by democrats, beset by crime and drugs with Democrat leaders keeping those who would free them from these plagues out supposedly for their own good.
Ah the Democrats back to their segregationist roots in public once again.
work due to his communist connections (which he stated as late as 1987 he did not regret) under an assumed name to write episodes that he gleefully described as attacks on Capitalism. When viewed today, however, these stories that supposedly celebrated collectivism instead come across as a love letter to the Catholic Church and a bastion against tyranny. A message that modern liberals, normally happy to view Lardner’s work, do not appreciate.
