the radicals

I decided not to post this on the Where do Moderates Belong? thread currently running, because that one is founded on the assumption that radicalism is a bad thing.

Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes radicalism is the only thing that makes sense.

I'm reading Fawn M. Brodie's biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania Congressman who led the radical wing of the Republican Party during and after the Civil War, was single-handedly responsible for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and was the force behind the impeachment of Johnson.

Brodie says he was "undoubtedly" a radical, and that "(R)adicalism is a state of mind which in the generic sense represents the desire to 'root out' or get to the root of a social problem, often by way of revolution rather than evolution. The compulsion to overthrow something is the important ingredient in the radical state of mind."

In Stevens's case, what he wanted to overthrow was slavery, and to follow up by punishing those who had practiced it for the crimes they had committed.

Where is moderation possible when it comes to an issue like slavery? On the one hand, before the Civil War there were the few people like Stevens who hated Slavery so much they became obsessed with wiping it out along with the people who perpetrated it. On the other hand were the slave-owners and slave-traders, criminals who had convinced themselves they were living in a world that contained no boundaries of human behavior or human decency. They even pretended that owning slaves was compatible with Christianity!

There were also a lot of moderates in the two parties of the time, Democratic and Whig, who just wished these problems would go away. Sort of like today's moderates.

The fact is, between slavery and anti-slavery there is no moderate position. Either we allow it or we don't. You can't have just a little bit and pretend that's OK. So if history shows us one thing, it's that Stevens, the radical leader of a tiny radical minority, was right. The rest of the country was wrong, so wrong in fact that they figured out a way to circumvent Stevens's race laws after they were added to the Constitution. It took the rest of the country 100 years to catch up to Thad Stevens. Except for the black part, of course.

I could draw parallels between the events and political configurations of that time and this one, but I'm not going to. I'll just say that the Republican Party was mostly a place for moderates until it got hijacked by Confederate pukes and primitive Christ cultists, leading to the question, Where can moderates go?

In this world, I'd suggest there's no place for you. Either you're on board with the overthrow and cremation of the tyranny of Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon, or you're not. And yes, Michael Moore is a radical. You say that like it was a bad thing.

The late Mrs. Brodie, incidentally, was something of a radical herself. Originally from Utah and with family connections at the very top of the Mormon Church, her first biography was an expose of the career of Mormon founder Joseph Smith for which she is reviled and considered a traitor in SLC to this day. She also wrote one of the earliest revelations of the sex life of T. Jefferson.