In this post, we said that all oppression comes from the government — even that oppression that comes from your employer, or your spouse, or your neighbor. Interestingly, all the big manifestations of oppression that we can identify from American history have come from… the government.
We described oppresssion as physical or economic constraints imposed on the people for which there is only limited or no recourse.
Slavery: In place because of laws that permitted it. It required a war to overturn those laws… with another law: the Thirteenth Amendement to the Constitution. Note: the Democrat Party was the intransigent defender of slavery
Jim Crow Laws: Enacted in Southern states by Southern Democrats, these were laws enacted by the government. And, as with slavery, the Democrat Party was the intransigent defender of Jim Crow laws.
Segregation: Again, rules and laws enacted in Southern states by Southern Democrats. And again, the Democrat Party was the intransigent defender of segregation.
If you define the conquest of American Indian territory by European settlers as oppression — a legitimate beef, by the way — then that oppression came about by the expansion of governement, executed by another arm of the government: the military.
Even if you’re the most die-hard, racist Black Lives Matter militant, then your complaint is against yet another arm of the government: the police. And if that beef is legitimate, then what do the leftist BLM militants propose to counter government abuse? Increased government! Idiots.
Yes, yes, yes, there are little eddy currents of oppression all over the place, all across the country, but these are enabled, facilitated even, by the systems and institutions enacted and maintained by local, city, state, regional and central… government. Systems and institutions that deny you and me: recourse.
The American Left is the political tendency wedded to the notion that the government — the most oppressive institution in the history of America — ought to have expanded power.
The manifestions of oppression listed above all came from the Left.
It’s not difficult to see why this is true: The Right political wing has as a core tenet, confidence in the individual’s ability to run his or her own life. As a result, the main tendency of the Right will always be to reduce the powers of the government, to starve it of its most important fuel (money), to constrain the government’s abilty to constrain you and me. If and when the Right ceases to be that political tendency, then we will all be doomed. America will have ceased to exist as the novel, truly revolutionary idea that it once was, and it will spiral down into third-world, tin-pot dictatorship territory.
This is not all that outlandish a prediction. Academia, pop culture, Hollywood, the media… these institutions are already there.
As these things go, so goes…
— xPraetorius
