WASHINGTON — The outpouring of acclaim for Nelson Mandela from across the American ideological spectrum contrasts with the history of an earlier era, when many politicians and others derided the late South African anti-apartheid crusader as a communist and a terrorist. ... The Reagan administration invited senior South African security officials to the United States, violating a U.N. arms embargo, and the United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have imposed economic sanctions on Pretoria.Think about it. 240 years ago, the Right were the loyalists, the defenders of British rule in the American colonies. Then you can step up through every major social change and foreign crisis since 1783 and you will see that the conservatives have a horrible track record of being on the wrong side of history. Over and over, when their past opposition to things is brought up, they either are forced to apologize outright (ie, slavery) or they just try to muddle things to cover up their historical fuckups (segregation, civil rights, suffrage).
Reagan also had Mandela placed on the U.S. international terrorist list, where the anti-apartheid leader remained until 2008.
It's not an unblemished record of historical failure, but it's hard to conclude otherwise than that the Right is essentially the Chicago Cubs of politics.
It's systemic.
ReplyDeleteConservatives' legitimate functionality in society is that of a brake. They stop stupid reform ideas and reduce the rate of progress to one which the country can follow (unlike breakneck modernisations as in Shah Persia, pro-Moscow Afghanistan et cetera).
This leads naturally to conservatives often being on the wrong side of history in the long term. Actual conservatism (providing political inertia and stability, being hesitant about experiments) is useful, though.
Re SO, you may well be right about the Conservatives role in the past, but that's no longer the case when urgent action is required to prevent humanity from poisoning its own nest irretrievably and taking many other species with us. We may be just about to commit the greatest act of wilful cosmic vandalism in the history of the Universe, and conservatives are withholding the necessary adjustments that might, just might, prevent that worst case scenario.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Conservatives are essential in a society, like anti-foaming agent in a rug shampooer. But you cant let them be in charge.
ReplyDeleteThey ain't wrongg; they just ain't right.
ReplyDeleteBy that definition, S O, today's American "conservatives" aren't conservative. They want to impose untested and untried social experiments upon America such as eliminating public services that have existed since the founding of the country in favor of private services, and want to discard things that are tested and tried and true like the U.S. Postal Service and public libraries because "the free market can do them better". For some reason they think playing God with the fate of 300 million people is their due. WTF?
ReplyDeleteThe USPS thing is especially egregious, given that the Post Office is the one and only government service *explicitly* called out in the Constitution. I guess they support the Constitution except when they don't. Or maybe their lips got tired after reading the text of the 2nd Amendment and so they haven't bothered to read the rest of the document?