Damon Linker is not a pluralist
To pull a page from his own writing, Damon Linker isn’t just wrong; his wrongness is a threat to American democracy.
by David Schaengold · October 18, 2010
To pull a page from his own writing, Damon Linker isn’t just wrong; his wrongness is a threat to American democracy.
December 20, 2011
March 12, 2016
December 11, 2010
[caption id="attachment_361266" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screengrab from WIVB Buffalo Channel 4 News[/caption]
Still a developing story, but what we know so far points to an utterly depraved act of violence at a Buffalo supermarket.
Comment →Ten people were killed and three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were transported to local hospitals after a mass shooting at a supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side Saturday afternoon.
The shooter was an 18-year-old white male who was heavily armed with tactical gear and was live-streaming during the mass shooting, officials said. City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the shooter is not from Buffalo and traveled “hours” from outside the area.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”
The shooter was identified in court Saturday evening as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder without bail.
The 18-year-old will be back in court on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for a felony hearing.
When Gendron exited his vehicle at the supermarket, authorities said, he shot four people in the parking lot. Three of them died and one is in the hospital. The shooter entered the store and opened fire on customers.
Twitch deletes shooter’s live-stream video of Buffalo mass shooting
A retired Buffalo Police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard, shot Gendron but he was unharmed because he was wearing armor, Gramaglia said. The retired officer was shot and killed.A law enforcement source told CBS News that the gunman had a racial slur written on his weapon. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn will not confirm the existence of the shooter’s manifesto. He said they believe there was a “racial component” to the attack but won’t say more.
This attack is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime and as violent extremism.
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Is there a real argument here, or is your gut feeling of “wrongness” all you’re offering?Report
Wow, that’s a really thoughtful post. I don’t even know how to begin a response.Report
It was a throwaway comment, but the religious right wasn’t the reason Rudy didn’t get the nomination – Rudy is the reason Rudy didn’t get the nomination. If anything, the religious right is what kept Romney from breaking through, but you state that Romney is one in the pantheon of theocon champions and you have the Mormons with the (plurality) right wing Catholics and (majority) Evangelical Protestants as a single bloc in your analysis.
Which is true as far as it goes, but I would submit has *always* been a bloc like this of cyclic waxing and waning influence in American politics (and pre-American politics i.e. the first iteration of the Great Awakening)
So, with the stated assumption that this bloc has always existed, the case to be proved is that it is somehow today a unique threat and/or ‘clear and present danger’. My quick dashed off opinion (to be sure from just the Economist interview and without reading the book) is that it has not. Not if their high water mark (and Waterloo) was Terry Schiavo. If that’s all they got, the Republic is safe from any particular danger from that avenue. They are, in other quarters, blamed for the Iraq war*, but for one, they had a lot of help from other factions, for two the iraq war wasn’t unpopular until it was turning into an intractable stalemate after a year and a half in, and for three, all the way back to the effigies of Jay lit at the signing of the eponymous treaty, we Americans have rarely encountered a war they didn’t like. (and have rarely liked a war we’ve had to endure)
One thing you could say that is unique about today’s religiously minded culturally conservative (and for the most part ex-urban) voters is that their political alliance with ‘wall street’ that started with the Buckley fusion and achieved the presidency of Ronald Reagan (and Bush II) is ahistoric and unprecedented in American history. In other eras, this demographic were the core of Jackson Democrats and William Jennings Bryan’s acolytes. But this alliance is starting to signs of cracking up (i.e. Huckabee) and another round of banking shenanigans could provide the tipping point to finally fracture it (which in turn would greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the risk you assert)
*as part of a general pattern of millennial dispensationalism and as a consequence normally has Israel as its focus, but any port in the storm working in mysterious ways and all thatReport
Shorter me: we have always had these ‘religious nutjobs’. They have even done some real damage in the past (e.g. 18th amendment). But America abides.Report