Nice opinion piece by James Downie regarding JD Vance proposed grand political theory

[Moonbeam]

Opinion | A resurfaced Vance interview reveals the truth about MAGA populism

A party cannot simultaneously stand for working Americans and shelter racial prejudice.

www.msnbc.com

I have long traced the present divisiveness in American politics to the damage done to the egos of Southerners over the their refusal to feel the shame of slavery and the shame of the defeat their belief in it caused them. Believing that the hideous is virtue and that defeat was victimization has created a South full of false pride to hid those feelings of well deserved shame. So many fools think the way to self respect lies in delusional alternate realities.

The piece suggests this:

“Freedom and equality have to be linked to each other,” says political theorist Danielle Allen. “You can’t actually have freedom for all unless most people have equal standing relationship to each other.” As Vance’s words show, Republicans’ solution to this problem is to pretend it doesn’t exist. But sooner or later, the bill comes due.

I hope enough people get informed and act on what is at stake. We are either all Americans of a land of concentration camps full of very surprised guests, perhaps.

 

[Greenman]

I've never understood the concept of generational guilt. Everyone who owned a slave is dead, everyone that was a slave is dead. Why should anyone experience guilt over a crime they didn't witness, didn't endorse, and had absolutely zero involvement in? People that weren't even alive when it happened have no culpability of any kind.

 

[BoomerD]

I've never understood the concept of generational guilt. Everyone who owned a slave is dead, everyone that was a slave is dead. Why should anyone experience guilt over a crime they didn't witness, didn't endorse, and had absolutely zero involvement in? People that weren't even alive when it happened have no culpability of any kind.

On that, we agree.

 

[Brainonska511]

I've never understood the concept of generational guilt. Everyone who owned a slave is dead, everyone that was a slave is dead. Why should anyone experience guilt over a crime they didn't witness, didn't endorse, and had absolutely zero involvement in? People that weren't even alive when it happened have no culpability of any kind.

Maybe because the effects of hundreds of years of slavery and racism are still causing disparate effects to the current day. Examples include redlining locking black people, the destruction of black neighborhoods and wealth through urban renewal and highway building projects, where polluting industries are located and who gets to live near them, and how schools are funded (eg, largely through local property taxes so that the communities black people were locked out of can keep their funds in their de facto segregated neighborhoods).

You don't have to feel personal guilt. But the government is immortal, and as a government for the people, by the people, we have an obligation as a society to try and correct the things that we (collectively) have wrongly done to our fellow Americans.

 

[dank69]

On that, we agree.

As far as I know, nobody is saying anyone should feel guilty about slavery. So the question people like greenman should be asking themselves is: why does hearing about slavery make them feel like they're being accused?

 

[Moonbeam]

I've never understood the concept of generational guilt. Everyone who owned a slave is dead, everyone that was a slave is dead. Why should anyone experience guilt over a crime they didn't witness, didn't endorse, and had absolutely zero involvement in? People that weren't even alive when it happened have no culpability of any kind.

You are looking at guilt as if it were something real, as when a jury hands down a conviction.

I don’t see things that way:

A jury can convict an innocent person.

A guilty person can deny guilt even to him or her self. Supposedly I am guilty of original sin. Huh?

So a person’s guilt isn’t so fixed the way I see things. What interests me is guilt as a feeling. There, in my opinion a person can feel guilty of anything or innocent of terrible things.

The feeling of guilt, then, is like a transmissible disease. So what I am talking about is growing up in a Southern culture of defeat for having been on the guilt worthy side of slavery and not liking liking the idea that because of that you are still guilty of something and needing to refute that charge

You are saying the guilt such people see as fingers pointing at them for being born of such a terrible ancestry is unfair because they aren’t guilty, but the problem is that they are the source of that guilt. They are carrying it within.

Not only are they not really guilty of anything, neither were their ancestors. They were all just sleeping machines programmed to justify slavery. There is no real guilt. There is just programmed ignorance caused by motivated sleep and the need to survive by repressing pain.

We suffer because we can feel deep down we are innocent while holding ourselves in utter contempt because we were made to believe our guilt. We carry within us a profound denial of a guilt we are innocent of. This is text book hell.

I am saying then you are protesting a guilt you correctly see you are innocent of, but protest because what you can see with your head is not your real feeling.