A Reality Check

Sullivan posts a reader's comments about the true nature of the populist right (what I call wing-nuts). Money quote:

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-fluoride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrely commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-da-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

Makes you think twice about dismissing that portion of our population, doesn't it? They have a long history, and, while they have won some battles, are pretty much losing the war to progressives.

Change is in the blood of every American, because nearly every one of our forebears arrived here because change was what we wanted. Those who were forced to come here wanted change from their circumstances as well. We are a wandering people, always striving for something new, something more. Those who want things just the way they are have forgotten what it means to be an American. They have become old, they have stopped growing, and they are absolutely terrified. Worst of all, they are bearing children and rearing them with the same backwards, regressive belief systems that they have.