The Curse of American Exceptionalism

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo reports:

In an essay entitled “The Yankee Problem in America” Clyde Wilson wrote of “that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can easily be recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around . . . . they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America and the world, into the perfection of their own image. . . . Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee – self righteous, ruthless, and self-aggradizing.” The “Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants,” wrote Wilson. By this he meant the communist ideologues who were centered in New York City in the mid twentieth century and whose children, many of whom became the pro-communist “campus radicals” of the ‘60s, were known as “red diaper babies.” David Horowitz was one, and writes about this phenomenon in several of his books.

To such people, “anything that stood in the way of American perfection must be eradicated . . . liquor, tobacco, the Catholic Church, the Masonic Order, meat-eating, marriage,” wrote Wilson, referring to various crusades of the “Yankees” (by whom he does not mean all Northerners, only this special breed).

The renowned historian Forrest McDonald made similar observations in a 1985 essay entitled “Why Yankees Won’t (And Can’t) Leave the South Alone.” “The first thing to understand about the Yankee,” wrote McDonald, is that “He is a doctrinal puritan, characterized by . . . pietistic perfectionism. Unlike the Southerner, he is constitutionally incapable of letting things be, of adopting a live-and-let-live attitude. No departure from his version of Truth is tolerable. . .” The Yankees “embraced totalitarian republicanism and thought thereby to establish God’s kingdom on earth” by using governmental force to eradicate “sin.” They “formed the backbone of the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.”

You'll want to read the entire article about people who don't want to mind their own business.