Born Fighting

I have been reading James Webbs, Born Fighting. It describes how the people called Red Necks came to be in America, and might explain why todays Liberals dislike them so throughly. "THE SCOTS-IRISH (sometimes also called the Scotch-Irish) are all around you, even though you probably don't know it. They are a force that shapes our culture, more in the abstract power of emotion than through the argumentative force of law. In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don't even know their ethnic label, and some who do know don't particularly care. They don't go for group-identity politics any more than they like to join a union. Two hundred years ago the mountains built a fierce and uncomplaining self-reliance into an already hardened people. To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else's collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns. And nobody is going to get their guns."

The book also describes the Viet Nam war to which the current Iraq war is being compared. The red Necks were a major portion of the fighter sent to that war. "Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level should consider that the Vietnamese communists admit to losing 1.4 million soldiers, compared to South Vietnamese losses of 245,000 and American losses of 58,000. And those who believe that it was a "dirty little war" where bombs did all the work might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has ever fought. Five times as many Marines died in Vietnam as in World War I, three times as many as in Korea, and there were more total casualties (killed and wounded) for the Marines in Vietnam than in all of World War II."

Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are representative of the SCOTS-IRISH influence in American, and received the prejudice of the Liberal elite for the SCOTS-IRISH who emigrated to the hills of Appalachia. Liberals hate George W Bush calling him dumb, based on this stereotype.