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Entry: Firing Foxman Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/firing_foxman#3466 Post contents: Andrew, If you believe that the Irish are the most left wing group in American history, then you are remarkably ignorant of the Irish and of Jews, blacks, Quakers and other 100% heretical groups birthed by the English reformation. The alleged Irish liberalism, almost always summed up with pointing Ted Kennedy, began with simply being forced, by the processes of British imperial history, to live in a world in which your culture is derided and you are expected to assimilate in order to live anywhere but the very floor. In such a society, your politics becomes ‘liberal’ in the sense that it is opposed to the status quo, a status quo that is the fruit of people destroying your culture. In British terms, the Irish became anti-imperial, including when living in the Empire (take the Irish out of the equations, and there is not enough sentiment for independence to even ease a type of Home Rule for Canada or Australia). Is opposing a perverted empire and demanding as much de-centralization as possible conservative or liberal? If you wish, for whatever reason, to conserve that empire and all its ill-gotten gains and its increasingly rotten inherent fruits that poison hordes of people, then you will condemn such stances as the worst of liberalism. If you refer to the Irish in America, then you had best start studying history. When the Know-Nothings use terror against Irish immigrant neighborhoods, as well as the many legal activities, they NEVER do so because they claim the Irish are too liberal. In fact, the very opposite is asserted. The Irish were recognized as being religiously and culturally conservative in ways that would stand in opposition to the essence of liberal WASP democracy. Condemnations of the Irish and then other Catholic immigrants, especially the Poles, were the same right through the 1920s: they were too conservative, and their conservatism was retrograde and could only be anti-American, which would mean they would be anti-WASP. If you know anything about the abortion fight in New York state in the early and mid-1960s, you know that the Pro-abortion side was uniformly Jewish and WASP and the anti-abortion side was uniformly Catholic, with the vast majority of leaders being of Irish ancestry. So then how did we get to Teddy Kennedy and other Irish descended politicians of recent vintage? David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed shows how: assimilation. Fischer uses the Massachusetts Kennedys as Exhibit A of his case that all subsequent groups coming to America ultimately would assimilate to one of 4 16th century local British cultures: two of those together formed Southern culture, and 2 formed Northern culture. Fischer declares that the 1960s and after Kennedys act in cultural terms exactly like the ethnically pure Anglo-Saxon Protestants of Brahmin New England, who hated Irish immigrants even as they welcomed Jews as business partners and partners culturally to oppose Catholics and saw blacks as their permanent toy to uplift, and exactly like the great-grandparents of those quintessential WASPs. Fischer recognizes the obvious: Teddy Kennedy is exactly like the ultra Liberal New England Brahmins of the antebellum era because of assimilation. Teddy has Irish genes and an Irish surname, and he remains a Catholic by affiliation (though he is about as good a Catholic as Henry VIII), but Teddy is a 100% cultural WASP. Sent at: 2008 05 15