Shameless

Yesterday I wrote a post about the constant and disgusting comparison that anti-choice zealots make between themselves and abolitionists. This was highlighted not only in the call for violence like murderer Scott Roeder, but in the cheap intellectual arguments of Washington Post Fred Hiatt-hire Charles Lane now ready to add the most extreme of Teabaggers are a great and bright shining pageant of democracy.

...the antislavery side had its moments of nullification as well. In 1851, a Boston crowd broke into a federal courthouse to free "Shadrach," a black man being held there by U.S. marshals enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. Abolitionist Theodore Parker declared this blatant defiance of Washington "the most noble deed done in Boston since the destruction of the tea in 1773."

I am not suggesting a moral equivalency between the anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces. But I am suggesting an attitudinal equivalency

Now, one could certainly have chosen a better example of "anti-slavery" extremism -- say the easily identifiable John Brown? But no, Charles Lane deliberately chose to go with the guy who wanted to the 'free while black' and those who had the temerity to agree with him rather than send him back to slavery. Take it away, Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Lane is referencing, in rather disrespectful fashion, the awesome Shadrach Minkins. A Norfolk-area slave, Minkins' unthinking extremism deluded him into believing that he was a human being. Upon this radical realization, the hot-headed Minkins fled North and took up with a band of ex-slaves and abolitionists who also had thoughtlessly decided that blacks were people.

Lane is trying to cover himself by noting that he's comparing attitude, not morals. This only works in the most absurdly narrow sense--both abolitionists and fire-eaters believed that aspects of the federal law should be resisted. But this is like saying that both Roosevelt and Hitler had resigned themselves to mass killings. ...

There certainly is more here that's erroneous--I'm not convinced that "attitude" and "morality" are separate spheres. Moreover, I think that if Lane had used some empathy, the kind that leads you to use a man's full name unencumbered by scare quotes, he'd see the difference. Instead we have a lazy, mealy-mouthed "on the other hand" kind of centrism, which is every bit as rote, calcified, and rehearsed as the extremes it claims to deride.

All exactly true and on point.

Yet it is the flimsy argument of Lane that wins the day for the beltways easy non-intellect.

I watch these gathering of a few hundred or thousand protesters and see cable networks lavish attention on this conglomeration of tax-protesters, bigots, Paulites, and Glenn Beck-morons, a hodgepodge of legitimate and crackpot positions often poorly put forward (to say the least) with denominators so low and common that are denominators are fucking sick of them -- and then I recall hundreds of thousands marching for other things like against wars and for immigration reform without any coverage at all. Even contemporaneously. The same weekend the House passed health care reform and a few hundred shouting Teabaggers were lavished with coverage, a couple hundred thousand marched for immigration reform blocks away. Nobody even knew it. It might as well have not occurred as far as the media was concerned.

(via Meteor Blades at the Great Orange Satan)