The Right and Its History

Finally an incumbent Democratic lawmaker and not a blogger makes the correct comparison about the right wing by connecting the dots from the days of slavery to today. Finally a Democrat has realized that yes, once again, the self-labeled conservative right wing is on the wrong side of history when it comes to granting equal access to everyone. There is no illogical jump of history to compare the right wing of the slavery debate and eventually the Civil War, to the right wing of the women's suffrage movement, to the Civil Rights movement to today's health care reform debate.

There is no denying it was the right wing of the slavery era that supported and fought to ensure the institution of slavery. They did it. You can't deny it. The right wing threatened issues of state's rights, nullification and even threatened secession. Guess what? They are doing the very same thing today with health care reform. Yes the right wing at the time was the Democratic Party but it was the conservative movement of the day.

By the time women's suffrage was at the forefront, the parties were changing ideologies but the wings remained the same. Again, the right wing-- the conservatives-- opposed women's rights. They did not want anything to change. Conservatively speaking they believed everything was just dandy the way it was. Conservatives greatly opposed any change to the social status quo especially granting women more rights.

It goes all through the Civil Rights movement as well. The Democratic Party splintered into hundreds of pieces because of it until what's left today are what we call the Blue Dogs, who are the supposed "conservative" realm of the Party. The right wing, which found it a welcomed home in the GOP, greatly benefited from the Party shift and controlled government by the "southern strategy"-- a playoff of using southern states (the same people who supported slavery) to win elections and enforce what we now know as a modern conservative rule of the nation. (We just had 8 solid years of it!)

The right, yes, has been on the wrong side of history throughout all this. It is the same wing that supported slavery using the very same arguments we hear today. They opposed women's rights using the very same arguments we hear today. They opposed Civil Rights and sunk the nation into a regional hold on federal power with large support from the very people who opposed emancipation and suffrage.

Finally people are catching on. But the story that makes it to the media is that Republicans, today's right wing movement, want an apology. Not that what Harry Reid said is very true. The media ignores the dots and wants to focus on the sensation of the story.