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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Since 1860 someone has attempted to assassinate a president/candidate every 5th term except Bush the Lesser. I wonder why it's this term so often through history.

Its worse than that, let the record show that three of the first six elected GOP presidents (Lincoln, Garfield , and McKinley) were killed by Democrats. Meanwhile the lone Democrat to be assinated (JFK) was shot and killed by (depending on who you ask) either an avowed communist, or deep-state opperatives aligned with Lyndon Johnson.

Let me bang my "Read more early American history" drum again.

It is absolutely braindead (to paraphrase @Hoffmeister25) to try to map 19th century politics onto the 21st century. The Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century were not the Republicans and Democrats of today. Republicans during and after the Civil War were the liberals of their time. John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, but more importantly, he was an anti-Union secessionist who was outraged at Lincoln because Lincoln indicated that he was going to give blacks voting rights. Really, try arguing that makes Booth in any way like a modern Democrat or "woke."

I have less to say about Garfield and McKinley as I haven't gotten to their biographies yet, but the pattern held at least to the mid-20th century. Republicans more and more became the party of northern industrialists and urbanites, vs. Democrats as the party of Southern farmers and working class people, but the Republicans began as the remnants of the Whig Party, with a bit of Know-Nothingism mixed in, while the Democrats began more or less with Andrew Jackson - arguably with Thomas Jefferson, but Jackson really made them into the party they became. None of these people would map to what you are conceiving of as a Republican or a Democrat today.

The Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century were not the Republicans and Democrats of today.

While obviously true in that the Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century have all long since passed on, I dont think that proves as much as you and @Hoffmeister25 seem to think it does.

While the issues of the day change, i don't think people (as a general class) do. I read a lot of late 19th/early 20th century history and it seems to me that the core axioms and motivating ethoses of the respective parties of 1920 are readily recognizable in thier 2020 counterparts.

Really, try arguing that makes Booth in any way like a modern Democrat or "woke."

"Normie" Republicans like my parents do just that quite often, by way of DR3 arguments: 'the Democrats were the party of racism then, and they're the party of racism now; the only difference is that these days they want to keep blacks trapped on the welfare "plantation",' and suchlike.

It may not be a good argument, but in my experience it's a common one.

To be completely fair, early twentieth century republicans would be recognizable as plausibly republicans today, just not exactly mainstream ones. Specifically, they'd be recognizable as possibly Rockefeller republicans.

There's a real continuity between Roosevelt and, say, Susan Collins today.

Careful now, you are treading on dangerous ground.

The left wins because they are much more fervent than the right which pushes the tail end of the left into a level of fervent than causes terrorism. Antifa and assassinations are examples of this. I am not necessarily saying assassinations would work for the right but the right needs to become more radicalized in their beliefs and not just want to grill if they want to win.

Big if true.

Not the level of fervency—the idea that terrorism gets wins. That doesn’t seem credible. How does Antifa win more votes? Who the hell is going to switch away from Trump after this?

Radicalizing the right means more Charlottesvilles. More PR disasters.

The left wins by shutting down the right. It is almost impossible to have right wing demonstrations without riots. People are afraid to attend debates. Doxing makes it far more difficult to recruit to political organisations.

If the left won by “shutting down” the right, 2016 would have looked pretty different, no?

Nor has the post-2020 period looked particularly good for the left. There’s a distinct lack of policy victories coming off the most radical parts of the coalition.

No shortage of significant changes in social conditions, though.

Eh, assuming you’re talking about gender identity politics, I trace the current trends back ten years at least. The contemporary radical left would have been, what, Occupy Wall Street? It makes more sense to point to Obergefell, or to the decades of social activism which laid its groundwork.

If you’re referring to racial DEI, I suppose it’s at least related to the post-2020 violence. There’s a plausible chain where softball coverage of riots informed the public that race-conscious policy was fashionable. Except that gives all the agency to the media narrative, not the violent radicals.

If so, radicalizing the right would be an even worse idea, because softball coverage is not going to materialize.

It's unclear that these translate into wins for the left. Actual policy victories after antifa wrecked shit seem to be few and far between.

It's far easier to radicalize a man without a wife, a house and a daughter.

Guiteau had been a Democrat when you needed to be a Democrat to be an effective lawyer in Tammany Hall era New York, but he was a Republican (and, indeed, at least in his own head a Garfield campaign activist) at the time he shot Garfield.

Czolgosz was an anarchist, which strongly suggests he wasn't a Democrat given that anarchists hated all non-anarchist political movements including other left-wing ones.

So you are 1 for 3 on basic accuracy here.

I'm at least two for three on basic accuracy as you yourself have conceded that Guiteau was a Democrat. The only point of of contention is on whether radical anarchists code more "right" than "left". For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

You didn't say that the three Republican Presidents were shot by leftists (which would also have been wrong, as neither Booth nor Guiteau was a leftist), you said that they were shot by Democrats. Leftist~=Democrat doesn't isn't even mostly true until the New Deal (the capital-P Progressives preferred to work as a faction in the Republican party) and isn't consistently true until the Reagan administration.

This response is totally braindead. Guiteau had been a Democrat at one point, but then switched to being a Republican, which is what he was when he assassinated Garfield.

As for your dissembling about Czolgosz, it’s clear that you’ve moved the goalposts immediately upon being corrected. Your explicit claim was “Democrats”, not “left-wingers.” You explicitly made a partisan claim - linking the phenomenon to specific political parties - and are now flailing to make it look like you were making an ideological claim.

(A claim which still doesn’t make sense, because the policy-position split between Democrats and Republicans during the era when both Garfield and McKinley were shot does not at all map onto modern ideas of “left” versus “right”. Was Garfield to the left or to the right of Winfield Scott Hancock, his Democrat opponent in the 1880 election? Who knows? The question doesn’t make sense.)

You accuse me of being "braindead" but...

For my part i think radical anarchists code more left-wing/progressive than they do right-wing or conservative. Would you like to argue otherwise?

In no sense does this address any of the criticisms I’ve leveled against your post. Nobody has argued that Leon Czolgosz, anarcho-communist, was not left-wing. The problem is that, again, your original post called him a “Democrat”. That’s what you said. Not whatever you’re now pretending you said instead.

I think it does and that you are taking refuge in pedantics to avoid the plain truth of my statement.

Your statement isn’t true, though! Are you suggesting that John Wilkes Booth was a left-winger? If not, then your attempt to insinuate that all of the presidential assassins were left-wingers plainly fails. (And again, it fails doubly because Charles Guiteau had few if any identifiably “left-wing” beliefs.)

Or, if you want to instead claim, as you originally did, that all of the presidential assassins have been members of the Democratic Party, you are then stuck explaining why Leon Czolgosz had literally zero affiliation with the party and does not seem to have ever voted for them, as well as why Guiteau was not only a registered Republican but also an active campaigner for the Republican presidential candidate, who hoped to receive an appointed position in a Republican administration.

Overall, your post was a disjointed mess full of easily-refutable claims, and your attempts to rescue it have contained even more lies and dodging. There is no identifiable ideological or partisan pattern when it comes to the men who have successfully carried out executions of American presidents, and your attempt to conjure one out of thin air abjectly failed.

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Charles Guiteau supported the Stalwart faction of the Republican party in the 1880 election. His big stated reason for assassinating Garfield is that he wasn’t given the political patronage job that the Republicans owed him for his pivotal role - giving a rambling speech in support of Garfield (a speech which had originally been written in support of Ulysses S. Grant before Garfield received the nomination) and then passing out pamphlet versions of the speech at the Republican Party convention - in getting Garfield elected. Like, nothing whatsoever about his motivation can be accurately summarized as “Democrat wanted to kill Republican president.”

See my reply to @MadMonzer

Bush’s assassin was just incompetent.

He assassinated the man's spirit and honor, far more significant than his mortal body

Obama's was worse, he wasn't even there.

Nice one, I don't remember this at all.

Reminds me of the top level post recently suggesting that the jan 6 bomber was CIA because how else could he plant an explosive undetected? Meanwhile a man does a drive by shooting of the white house and

the Secret Service believed that gunfire was not aimed at the White House, but rather was the result of a gang fight nearby.

It took them four days to even notice that the white house was hit and five days to arrest the guy.

The jan 6 bomber was literally a glowie-op.

Restating this is not much of an argument.

We don't know that. Could have been that. Could have been some partisan loon.

Oh we definitely do. There's videos of the "bomb" being planted. And them the next day a "plain clothes cop" mysteriously goes straight for where the backpack is and recovers it then hands it to some cops. The whole thing stinks to high heaven and they did use the aleged bombing attempt to throw the book at a whole bunch of people. Not to mention the explosive device LITERALLY being constructed exactly like an "example" bomb down to the stupid mechanical clock thing.

There was also an attempt with a grenade that failed because it was a dud from the Soviet era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Arutyunian

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