Virginia/Its Not For Lovers Anymore
or
The Hate That Dares Speak Its Name:

You know, Virginia is almost 20 percent African American. I hope they're all registered to vote.

I'm not as outraged as others--I think the more naked the Republican Party is about their "utopian" fantasies the better. Check out Boaz's piece on how libertarians generally forget all about Slavery when they imagine America's free past. And for libertarians let us substitute a more accurate word: paid apologists for a conservative status quo that privileges money and property over the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for those without property. One of his examples is the undoubted racist fantasist R. Emmet Tyrell:

I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery. Take R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of the American Spectator. In Policy Review (Summer 1987, not online), he wrote:

Let us flee to a favored utopia. For me that would be the late 18th Century but with air conditioning....With both feet firmly planted on the soil of my American domain, and young American flag fluttering above, tobacco in the field, I would relish the freedom.

I take it Mr. Tyrrell dreams of being a slave-owner. Because as he certainly knows, most of the people in those tobacco fields were slaves.

Boaz goes on to assert that he's only trying to talk to nice libertarians, the ones who kind of forget about racism accidentally while romanticizing the past. But what gives Boaz the right to hive off of his own libertarian party the conservative oligarchs, aristocrats, would be southern heirs? The fact that up until now the Republican party has tried to borrow both languages--the language of state's rights and southern honor and also, sometimes, for some purposes, the mantle of individual liberty. Now with McDonnell's move in Virginia the mask is really off. For good or ill? I'd say, for good. The fact that the Republican party is now an entirely revanchist collection of would be traitors to the union really shouldn't be kept hidden from the American People. If this is the terrain they want to fight on let them do it.

aimai