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- Apr 8, 2019
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Myth, marketing, and history are melding into many different and discreet Frankenstein sub-realities, and that is disturbing to me. Common reality and common ground are subducting under the immense weight of ersatz realities being hard sold to different facets of the American population.
Conservatives do not have the capacity to sell their take on historical events like people on the left do because they do not have a hold on the academia and the media like the left does. It doesn't mean that you cannot find conservatives making dubious claims. It means that dubious conservatives claim do not constitute the background assumptions animating contemporary discussions. When there are bogus claims that are replicated in research, textbooks, the media and even in movies, it's almost certainly convenient for the left.
Some of it is especially pernicious because they're not outright lies. They are convenient omissions or phrasing that smoothens out important detail. On the left, especially on the far left, there is a large temptation to portray American origins as racist, in large part because it taints conservativism. It lets people on the far left blow conservative arguments and ideas out of the water as rooted in racism or even in white supremacy. For example, a historian recently published a book on the relationship between segregation policies and Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany. It's absolutely correct, except for one tiny detail that changes everything. The title of the book is "Hitler's American plan." From the moment Democrats went from defending slavery to defending segregation, Republicans opposed them. It's completely dishonest to lay the blame on America as a whole when millions disagreed, one of the two dominant parties opposed it and eventually dismantled it. It's even more dishonest since the arguments Republicans made were conservatives: racism violates the principles behind the foundation of America.
Of course, there are more blatant lies. For example, Antifascists in the US are behaving more or less like European Fascists of the early 20th century. Mussolini was a prominent socialist in Italy. He wrote in socialist magazines. Roosevelt sent some of his staff to study his regime because he liked his economic policies and Mussolini praised the New Deal in an Italian magazine. Antifascists also dress in black head to toe to intimidate people with whom they disagree, pushing for boycotts and censorship... They might as well start speaking Italian and call themselves blackshirts. They claim to fight fascists, but they are fascists themselves.
Mussolini wrote that fascism is about the centrality of the State: "Everything in the State. Nothing outside the State. Nothing against the State." The common thread is not hard to see, but you only see it if you have those facts in your hands.
But common ground and enlightened compromise are the glues which hold a free society together.
Of course. If negotiating an agreement is not possible, we are left with only two options: I force my way on you, or you force your way on me. That's part of what makes freedom of speech so fundamental: it's part of this intention to rule out violence as a legitimate way to coordinate our interactions.
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