Open Left

Actually It's Much Older Than That (4.00 / 1)

Post WWI is more like it, with the the 1919 Red Scare.  Except that was a bipartisan affair, with Democratic Attorney General Palmer getting into it with gleeful abandon, thinking he could get elected President as a result.

But Republican business elites were the driving force, just as they are now with Fox and Freedomworks.

Go back much further than that, and the parties get reversed, and it was the Southern conservatives who committed fucking treason when Lincoln was elected.

Yeah, they were committing treason in the name of fighting big government.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

---

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 05:55:49 AM CST

[ Parent | ]

the most interesting things about the red scare (4.00 / 1)

1. it targeted on the basis of ideology as well as identity (immigrant, southern and eastern european, jewish, etc.)
2. immigration was in the DoL then, not the treasury or the DoJ or the new DHS.
3. the Secretary of Labour individually reviewed the deportaitons and overturned countless of them (compare to Ashcroft and Special Registration in 2003 and 2004)
4. set precedents
5. followed precedents
6. contributed to the rise of jay edgar hoover
7. i'm not sure about this last one, but i think a mitchell palmer was a quaker :)

---

by: dr anonymous @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 08:04:10 AM CST

[ Parent | ]

Yup. There's a reason why "it can't happen here" was written in the 30s. (4.00 / 1)

Sinclair Lewis wasn't only transporting the rise of the Nazi movement into the US, he could dig into more than sufficient evidence of similar populist extremism in the US in the past years. And he obviously used this for his book. That's what actually makes his story so believable.

---

by: Gray @ Tue Jan 26, 2010 at 08:19:31 AM CST

[ Parent | ]