Editorial note: I’ve had some personal difficulties, so this post has been delayed. My apologies for that. So I won’t edit (much), but know that I started the post having a good day, and will be finishing the post….well….time will tell….
Second Editorial note: I have had to do quite a bit of work on this one. I started out thinking I would simply do a quick post, but the more I dig into it, the more I feel needs to be shared. So, this is not from the day after, but I won’t edit out the time frame, since I want ya’ll to get the feel of a tired man trying to think all this through.
Yesterday (love was such an easy game to play….) I posted what I learned about the history of school shootings in the US. I’ll leave the link below in case you wish to read it or reread it:
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.wordpress.com/1820
I’m going to write an entire post about the third point I said I would discuss: The apparent Second Amendment/gun control arguments are a red herring of the most despicable order. (Hey! I wrote that!) Editorial note: honestly this will likely end up being a three post topic.
I want to establish two points quickly. The two sides of the debate have valid principles at the foundation of their debate. Just like abortion, you have two strong principles at loggerheads, but people essentially jump up and down about the one they side with, but refuse to acknowledge the truth upon which the opposition stands. Second Amendment people wish to have the right to bear arms because they deeply (and I think rightly) believe that guns are often necessary to protect against the evils of tyrants, robbers, rapists, the worst of the worst. Gun control advocates have an equally strong desire to protect life, they wish to curtail the foolish misuse of guns that has demonstrably taken so many lives. I want to start with this because I want to do the opposite of what the sleaze ball politicians are doing. I want to actually respect your position. I want to let you know that someone, at least, is actually listening. And I learned from The Seven Habits of Highly People that people don’t really care what what you know, till they know you care.
Getting back on topic, polarization is simply the result of our two party system, and it is hard to know which one to start with. I’ll flip a coin and pick a party, and then I’ll run for the goal line. Let’s see how quickly I get tackled.
We’ll start with the Democrats. “Heads it is.” Editorial note: this coin flip turned out to be exactly where I needed to start after all.
First of all, the Democrats built up their once awesome power base, in part, off of gun control. Old habits die hard.
I have to be honest, before I started writing this post, I had no idea how the Democrats came to be the party of gun control. They have been all of my adult life, and I frankly just went with it. It was a fact of and force of nature, like gravity, sunlight, and surface tension on water. Republicans are pro gun anti life, (except with abortion, but we’ll worry about that brain twister some other day….if ever), and Democrats were pro gun control anti liberty. I honestly never thought to ask, till recently, how we got here.
Cliff’s notes version: Al Capone was one of (some would say the most) the most notorious gangsters of the Prohibition era, back in the day when it was spelled with an “r.” (I hate these word crimes). Gangsters had started to shoot up society with their Tommy Guns (yet there were profoundly fewer school shootings back then…..) and the government felt the heat to hammer down the law. At the time, the Democrats were in profound control. FDR was large and in charge, and would be for the next thirteen years, the only President in history to serve more than two terms. The Dems also held the reigns in Congress and the Senate: in the House, 322 seats were Democrat, 103 were Republican. In the Senate it was 60 to 35. The Supreme Court was the only impediment to the Democrats holding virtually absolute power at the time-there were five Republicans and four Democrats.
For all intents and purposes, it could be argued the Democratic party was the government in the late thirties. The common man was living large in the fifties, and even into the sixties, and the Democrats received a lot of credit for that. But part of their power block had been built on laws controlling the guns of Mafioso, and later, in the sixties, when JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, the party continued to be the party of strong gun control. The Democrats, and frankly, even Republicans felt that the laws being passed were reasonable. This changed in the late sixties. This was the time when the debate became super charged.
2. The Republican Party got so used to not being the party in power, they became the reactionary party.
As you can see from the above statistics, the Republican party had their keisters handed to them during the forties. All too often, people who find themselves on the losing side can become desperate. As an example from history, at the end of both WWI and WWII, the Germans started sending the elderly and lads scarcely more than children out on the battlefield, anyone and everything they could throw at us, with the futile hope that if they could slow us down some miracle would turn the tide.
According to Vox.com, the best and frankly most effective reactionary Republican was no other than J. Edgar Hoover. While he was a Republican in affiliation, J. Edgar’s main loyalty was to himself. Some would argue that is unfair, and that his chief loyalty was to America, which may be true, though some suspect his vision of America was a bit fractured. Most of his efforts to affect elections seemed somewhat centrist (though to most modern minds, meddling with elections at all was intensely unethical), and frankly his most notorious spying during the Roosevelt administration was against fellow Republican Sen. Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. He became furious with Democrat President Truman because he created the CIA, which he saw as a rival to his precious FBI. Hoover ordered the release of awkward information about Truman’s association with Kansas City political graft boss Tom Pendergast. David McCullough in his epic biography Truman writes about that association, and the challenging campaign Truman ran against the odds to be reelected. In the biggest surprise election from that time till the election of Trump, Truman proved the experts wrong and won another four years as President.
We move on to the fifties, when Senator McCarthy made a splash with his anti communist tirades. In February of 1950 he became famous with a speech he made claiming he had a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department. He began a witch hunt that in the short run made him very powerful, but led to his disgrace and downfall, and has been a black eye in the Republican party ever since.
As the sixties progressed, the assassinations of prominent Democrats, along with violent riots and protests, caused the Democrats to crack down even further (and frankly, also Republicans, but the blame often tends to fall on the party in power). By 1968 American people on both sides of the aisle had grown disenchanted with the government. The hippy movement, the civil rights movement, and the liberal left attempted to take over the national convention. Frankly….I was going to gloss over this, but these things happened scant years before I was born. I’d heard rumors, vague references to the riots of hippies who tried to take over the Democratic convention. Then I started reading the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention
From the article:
[President] Johnson had wanted the Democratic convention to be held in Houston, but [Chicago mayor] Daley had successfully lobbied the president to have the convention held in Chicago, as he wanted the convention held in his city to showcase to the national media how successful he had been since he started serving as mayor in 1955.[17] Daley, a man who ruled Chicago in an extremely authoritarian style, felt very strongly that the protesters were going to ruin what was supposed to be his moment of triumph and was determined to stop them.[17] One of Daley’s aides told the media that the anti-war demonstrators were “revolutionaries bent on the destruction of America”.[18] The mayor attempted to impose restrictions to keep protesters as far away as possible from the convention, on their numbers, and on their activities, making it very clear that he much preferred that no protesters come to his city.[19] Two of the SDS [student democratic protesters] leaders, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, had planned to keep their protests peaceful, but the lack of permits for protesting together with thinly veiled threats that the Chicago police would beat demonstrators made it clear that there would probably be violence.[16] When the media reported that Daley had given orders to the police to restrict the activities of Democratic delegates loyal to McCarthy, Daley was enraged, giving a rambling press conference saying, “This is a vicious attack on this city and its mayor”.[20]
The leaders of the Yippies (an acronym for Youth International Party), Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, specialized in outlandish, bizarre rhetoric that attracted maximum media attention, and Daley took many of their more outrageous threats seriously.[21] To sabotage the convention, Hoffman and Rubin announced that they were sending “super-hot” hippie girls to seduce the delegates and give them LSD; that they were going to put LSD into the water supply of the International Amphitheatre; and were sending well-endowed hippie “studs” to seduce the wives and daughters of the delegates.[21] In a typical press release, Hoffman and Rubin stated about their plans in Chicago: “We are dirty, smelly, grimy and foul…we will piss and shit and fuck in public…we will be constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man”.[21] Daley took all of this seriously, and much of the excessive security was due to his belief that the Yippies were going to disrupt the convention in the manner that they had proclaimed they would.[21]
Daley’s heavy-handed security measures incensed the media. Walter Cronkite complained of “a totally unwarranted restriction of free and rapid access to information.”[20] Eric Sevareid stated that Chicago “runs the city of Prague a close second right now as the world’s least attractive tourist destination”.[20] Intelligence agents had infiltrated the protesters, including agents from the Central Intelligence Agency, who – contrary to American law – had been sent to spy upon Americans in the United States.[18] Just before the convention started, Hoffman and Rubin showed up at the Civic Center Plaza to free the pig named Pigasus whom they had nominated as the Democratic candidate, leading the police to seize Pigasus while arresting Rubin and five others.[16] The Pigasus incident was captured live on television. Over 10,000 people had arrived in Chicago to protest against the Vietnam War, and the city in late August was much on the edge.[18] The Chicago police raided the mostly black neighborhoods of South Chicago to stage mass arrests of the Blackstone Rangers, a black power group that was alleged to be planning to assassinate Humphrey.[22]
Also:
The security measures imposed by Daley had been so intense that it was not possible to walk across the convention floor without jostling other delegates, which added to the tensions as dovish and hawkish Democrats fiercely argued about whether to accept Johnson’s war plank to the platform. All of it was captured live on national television.[34] Pro-war Democrats challenged the right of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was serving as the floor manager for McCarthy, to be there and sought to have him expelled from the convention.[34] Inside the convention hall were televisions showing the police beating and clubbing demonstrators outside, which increased the tension.[34] Robert Maytag, the chairman of the Colorado delegation asked: “Is there any rule under which Mayor Daley can be compelled to suspend the police state terror being perpetrated at this minute on kids in front of the Conrad Hilton [hotel]?”[35] Daley’s face flushed with anger while his supporters began to boo Maytag.[35] On the convention floor, Senator Abraham Ribicoff rose to give a speech nominating McGovern as the Democratic candidate.[36] During his speech, Ribicoff pointed to Daley and said: “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”[36] Pandemonium broke out in the convention hall, with some delegates praising Ribicoff while others denounced him. Daley rose up to scream at the top of his voice at Ribicoff: “Fuck you, you Jew son of bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”[36] Despite Daley’s foul-mouthed antisemitic tirade, Ribicoff merely said: “How hard it is to accept the truth. How hard it is.”[36] Four Chicago city officials, known Daley loyalists, jumped on the stage to usher Ribicoff away, and Daley’s bodyguards surrounded him, though from what threat they protected him remained unclear.[35]
The convention was noteworthy for leading to a significant change in the rules governing delegate selection, largely overshadowed at the time by the rioting in Chicago.[37] The McGovern–Fraser Commission, chaired by Senator McGovern, officially known as the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, was appointed to examine how delegates were selected.[37] The commission documented that in many places in America the Democratic Party was “an autocratic, authoritarian organization” that engaged in the “shameful exploitation of the voter.”[37]
Nixon won that year, and the power hold the Democrats had had since FDR was at an end. I’m going to end on this note, I’m going to share some footage from the convention, and I hope all and sundry will compare this fiasco to January 6.
I’ll hopefully have more Friday.
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 