The Reactionary Mind Can't Help Itself-- It Will Always Try To Steal Democracy

I'm sure you've heard about how the Republicans, spurred on by Koch and other avatars of domestic fascism-- we'll leave the Iranian cash out of this equation for now-- are undermining the infrastructure of democracy itself in the hope of electing more Rick Scotts, more Scott Walkers, more John Kasichs, more Rick Snyders, more Rick Perrys... and a whole Congressful of lackeys and corporate order-takers. Rachel did another great segment on it this week (above) that I recommend everyone watch.

You know when you hear a new book is great from Digby and from Chris Hayes in the same week, you order it-- or at least I do. Did. And I'm reading it. And it's killer and it's in the DownWithTyranny bookstore now. The author is Corey Robin and the book is The Reactionary Mind and I promise you'll be hearing more about it here at DWT. Corey reminds us that the disenfranchisement of "certain" people is nothing new to conservatives and revanchists. It's part of their DNA. He takes us way back to the Jim DeMint of the first half of the 1800s. He's talking about what a conservative is, in essence: "the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win in back." It's kind of like what the big Wall Street firms made 1% Bloomberg do yesterday in trying to shut down OccupyWallStreet.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete-- better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape-- but in voicing them, they raise the spectre of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class-- the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand-- that vexes their superiors.

... In his last major address to the Senate, John C. Calhoun, former vice president and chief spokesman of the Southern cause, identified the decision by Congress in the mid-1830s to receive abolitionist petitions as the moment when the nation set itself on an irreversible course of confrontation over slavery. In a four-decade career that had seen such defeats to the slaveholder [conservative] position as the Tarriff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis, and the Force Bill, the mere appearance of slave speech in the nation's capital stood out for the dying Calhoun as the sign that the revolution had begun. And when, a half-century later, Calhoun's successors sought to put the abolitionist genie back into the bottle, it was this same assertion of black agency that they targeted. Explaining the proliferation across the South in the 1890s and 1900s of constitutional conventions restricting the franchise, a delegate to one such convention declared, "The great underlying principle of this Convention movement... was the elimination of the negro from the politics of this State."

The Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts and Nathan Deals and Rick Perrys won't call them negroes, of course, but who do you think they're trying to keep from voting?