Atlantic: Is this the Second Redemption?

[zoogs]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/welcome-to-the-second-redemption/507317/

 

Those simple numbers offer a small glimpse of the totality of the Southern counterrevolution against Reconstruction after the Civil War, and the subsequent bloody Southern Redemption, after which the political power of Southern blacks was effectively extinguished. The radical dream of an interracial politics, with its attendant federal investment and redistribution of resources towards the poor, had been destroyed. The optimism of emancipation leading to racial equality in the South was annihilated with a completeness that is difficult to fathom.

 

...

Early historians of Reconstruction depicted it not as the terrible demise of interracial government, but as an era when corrupt Republicans violated the Souths natural order by forcing self-government on primitive blacks who were unprepared for the responsibility. To the bulk of the white South, Foner wrote, it had become axiomatic that Reconstruction had been a time of savage tyranny that accomplished not one useful result, and left behind it, not one pleasant recollection. Prepare for the Obama era to be framed in similar terms.

This article is dismal and sobering, but it offers cogent possibilities that I cannot discount. Is it a 'second Redemption'? I can't honestly say it won't be.

 

Let's fight to keep it from happening. And I do think it will be a fight. I do not know where even to begin. Except maybe #allhandsondeck.

[Danny Bateman]

Left you a response in another thread Zoogs. I think you'll love that podcast.

 

I agree though. It's depressing thinking about Congressional Dems being completely powerless to do anything against this Trump takeover the next four years. Checks and balances, eh?

 

It will indeed be a fight. I'm not going to let Obama's work get dismantled without fighting that good fight. He deserves those who believe in him to work for him now. I'm ready to take up the cause.