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View Full Version : Will the Right's Fake History Prevail?



Pernicious
11-02-2014, 04:48 PM
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If most polls are correct and voters elect a Republican-controlled Congress on Tuesday, a principal reason is that many Americans have been sold on a false recounting of the nation's Founding Narrative. They have bought the Right's made-up storyline about the Constitution's Framers detesting a strong federal government and favoring states' rights.
This notion of the Framers as enemies of an activist national government is untrue but has become a popular meme as promoted through the vast right-wing media and accepted by the timid mainstream press, which is unwilling to fight for an accurate portrayal of what the Federalists who wrote the Constitution intended.
So, without much pushback from those who know better, the Tea Partiers, Libertarians and many Republicans have successfully walled off much of the U.S. population from the actual history, which would reveal the American Right to be arguably the opposite of true patriots in its disdain for the assertive national governance devised in 1787.

Plus, the Right's fake interpretation of the Constitution cannot be disentangled from the disgraceful history of slavery, segregation and today's renewed efforts to prevent black and brown Americans from voting.
Indeed, race has always been an intrinsic element in the American Right's history, which can be roughly divided into four eras: the pre-Confederate period from 1787 to 1860 when slave owners first opposed and then sought to constrain the Constitution, viewing it as a threat to slavery; the actual Confederacy from 1861 to 1865 when the South took up arms against the Constitution in defense of slavery; the post-Confederate era from 1866 to the 1960s when white racists violently thwarted constitutional protections for blacks; and the neo-Confederate era from 1969 to today when these racists jumped to the Republican Party in an attempt to extend white supremacy behind various code words and subterfuges.
It is true that the racist Right has often moved in tandem with the wealthy-elite Right, which has regarded the regulatory powers of the federal government as a threat to the ability of rich industrialists to operate corporations and to control the economy without regard to the larger public good.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Will-the-Right-s-Fake-Hist-by-Robert-Parry-Constitutional-Issues_History_Independence_Political-141101-625.html