A "Yankee" is "self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing," which is why Hillary Clinton is "a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee," writes Professor Wilson. The Yankee temperament, moreover, "makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants." (He was obviously referring to the burgeoning communist movement in New York City in the early twentieth century, which produced so-called "red diaper babies" such as the former communist rabble rouser David Horowitz.)
In another LRC essay entitled "Saint Hillary and the Religious Left," Murray Rothbard noted the tendency of the Yankees, rooted in New England, upstate New York, and the upper Mid-West in the nineteenth century, to embark on a "fanatical drive" in "devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a Kingdom of God on Earth." The Yankee "kingdom" is "egalitarian and collectivist, with private property stamped out, and the world being run by a cadre or vanguard of Saints."
Even when the Yankees embraced abolitionism it was rarely, if ever, because of any concern about the well-being of slaves. As Professor Wilson writes: "abolitionism, as opposed to antislavery sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners . . . was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven on Earth . . . . [M]any abolitionists expected that evil Southern whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated by virtuous Yankees."
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