Dr. Hanson, on modern Democrats

The inestimable Victor Davis Hanson, reflects on the similarities between the modern Democratic progressive culture and the antebellum South.

Progressives, in fact, seem to like the protocols of the old Confederacy in lots of ways. Southern antebellum chauvinists once claimed that the culture south of the Mason-Dixon line was innately superior to the grubby, industrial wasteland of the north. A two-class system of masters and slaves allowed an elite the leisure and capital to pursue culture without the rat-race competition of a striving middle class. So blinkered was southern arrogance that its pre-war youth insisted that southern manhood, with its innate moral superiority, could defeat a much larger, richer, and more industrial North — a myth dispelled early on at Shiloh.

It's damned fine writing, dipped in the strength of understanding history.

One more snippet, for fun.

Once a region, a state, or a group of people becomes racially obsessed and prefers the culture of two rather than three classes, they turn absurd. Soon they stop listening to reason and fall into predictable mythologies of cultural superiority, regional chauvinism, and ultimately secession as proof of their moral supremacy.

What follows next never ends well.

Go, as they say, and read the whole thing.  It's well worth the ten minutes you'll spend.