From The Mobile Register
Posted on 11/07/2003 9:04:23 PM PST by blam
Look away, Dixieland
US Democrats won't win in the South while they keep quiet on race
Sidney Blumenthal
Saturday November 8, 2003
The Guardian (UK)
Everything seemed to be going so well for Howard Dean, the frontrunner in America's contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then he made a throwaway remark that changed everything: he wanted, he said, "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks". Dean's error was to evoke the divisive Confederate symbol, hated by black Americans as standing for slavery and still upheld by many Southern conservatives as representing their "heritage". Because he was the frontrunner, other Democratic candidates seized on the opportunity to create a controversy, implying that Dean is racist. The immediate effect was to slow his momentum. But, as with many so-called gaffes, his comment alluded to a fundamental political truth: the Democratic and Republican parties have traded places after decades of struggle over civil rights. The solid South of the old Confederacy, which once voted uniformly for the Democrats, is now the bastion of the Republicans.
From the beginning of the Democratic party, through the civil war and the New Deal, the South was the foundation stone of the party's national strength. With the coming of the civil-rights revolution, Democratic presidents Kennedy and Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans - from Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan - developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code going back to the civil war - phrases like "states' rights", used to justify slavery - in an updating of the well-worn strategy of invoking race to keep poor white and black Americans divided on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan.
Dean, the former Vermont governor, raised in New York City, is the most distinctly old-line Yankee to emerge to prominence within the Democratic party in living memory. Despite his New England pedigree, George Bush is a man of the Republican South. If selected, Dean will challenge the first conservative Southern president in modern US history. The possible confrontation reflects the deeper polarisations of race, class and society that are driving the country apart.
In March, Dean described the thinking behind his controversial remark more fully: "I think the Republicans, ever since 1968, with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, have divided us on race issues. Look, when I go to the South, I talk about race deliberately... If we're going to have elections about race, we might as well talk about it openly. I want white males, particularly in the South, to come back to the Democratic party. And the case that FDR made was, look, when was the last time you all got a raise? When was the last time your kids got decent health insurance? What kind of schools do your kids go to if you can't afford a private academy?"
His problem is that, this time, he left off the filigree of Nixon and Roosevelt. And so, for days after his gaffe, Dean engaged in the etiquette of fulsome apologies. He began by condemning the Confederate flag as "a painful symbol", then asked for forgiveness from "any people in the South who thought they were being stereotyped". A day later he called his language "clumsy", and added: "I deeply regret the pain that I may have caused." An overdue discussion of the Republicans' Southern strategy was replaced by bowing and scraping.
Dean's Confederate flag problem coincided with another, seemingly unrelated, difficulty - over a mini-series, The Reagans, commissioned by the television network CBS. The intersection was less odd than it appears; Reagan and the Confederate flag, after all, have long been for the Southern Republican party the equivalent of apple pie and motherhood.
The Reagans mini-series is the latest in a long line of cheesy TV productions mangling the lives of the presidents, though no one has chosen to politicise these tabloid productions until now. This time, a Republican mole filched a copy of the script, and the Republican party chairman, Ed Gillespie, assumed the pose of historian. The script put words into the mouth of Reagan - like these about Aids sufferers: "They that live in sin shall die in sin" (what he actually said was: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague", because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments"). Gillespie called on CBS to pull the series or flash a warning on screen every 10 minutes that it was make-believe. CBS promptly crumpled, pulling the show from the network schedule. Leslie Moonves, the CBS president, abased himself with abject apologies.
The Reagans, judging from leaked excerpts of the script, features a distracted Ronnie and harridan Nancy, a melding of 1950s situation comedy and Mommy Dearest. Policy and politics are not its centrepieces. Certain crucial events in the rise of Reagan are noticeably missing. The actual words on race and civil rights, essential to his political success, are absent, though the Republicans haven't complained.
Some true-life scenes: Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so." After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan travelled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights".
As president, Reagan aligned his justice department on the side of segregation, supporting the fundamentalist Bob Jones University in its case seeking federal funds for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. In 1983, when the supreme court decided against Bob Jones, Reagan, under fire from his right in the aftermath, gutted the Civil Rights Commission.
Reagan consolidated the Southern strategy that Nixon formulated in response to the civil rights movement. It is this Republican party that has created the radically conservative Southern presidency of Bush. When Bush's candidacy was threatened in the Republican primaries of 2000, he rescued himself by appearing at Bob Jones University and wrapping himself in support of the preservation of the Confederate emblem on the South Carolina state flag.
Dean's remarks were awkward, but his challenge to the Republican party's basic character and the need for a strategy for defeating it will inevitably be revisited by whoever becomes the Democratic nominee, if that nominee cares about winning.
On the day before Dean's last apology, Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the third-biggest lobbyist in Washington, was elected governor of Mississippi. He had campaigned at an event sponsored by the Council of Concerned Conservatives, an overtly racist group and successor organisation to the White Citizens' Council, which led opposition to civil rights in the 1960s. In his lapel, Barbour wore a pin of the Mississippi state flag, a matter of controversy because of its incorporation of the Confederate flag. On election night, even before he was announced as the winner, Barbour received a congratulatory telephone call from Bush. Look away, Dixieland.
As the great novelist William Faulkner, of Mississippi, wrote: "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
· Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars. Starting next week he will be writing a fortnightly column on US politics from Washington
From The Mobile Register
Yes they do make quite a combination. Sidney Blumenthal is a known and proven liar, keep that in mind as you read his articles.
Unfortunately for him, nobody's buying that crap anymore.
He's like the political version of Ace of Base.
And, you are absolutely correct. Sidney and The Guardian: Made For Each Other.
Their British audience will get to get his cogent insights about U.S. politics. Not that it will be the truth, mind you. But it will be what they want to hear...
Somebody is lying for sure. Here's a couple of Reagan quotes, each found in multiple sources:
"I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary."- RR, 1965
"I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964." - RR, 1968
So Blumenthal has the luxury of picking and choosing, I suppose. However, it still reminds me of liberals who try to tell me that the GOP opposed the CRA in Congress, a common myth without any basis whatsoever in fact.
I'll take that as a compliment. I guess we can say that the party of Jefferson has become the party of Stalin.
They can't quite figure out that causing trouble and hoping to benefit from it are not going to get them votes.
5.56mm
Satan is as good as Stalin. To bad Zell Miller is retiring. I kind of liked his independent nature.
This from the party of divisiveness born of culture and race worship. The party that invented and deployed the race card and pc double speak. The party that hates the decendents of the American Revolution and their superior culture. The party that makes bold statements about ending the rightful culture and influence of the decendents of the people that won and built this nation and formed it's constitiution.
This from the party that disdains assimilation, and embraces the balkinization of the nation. The party that grabs at power by driving a wedge between the european race and all others, and is constantly busy flooding the nation with non-european third worlders, now blames the Republican party for benefiting from their treason against the legitimate citizens of this nation, the decendents of the American Revolution.
When Reagan made the statement, "I didn't leave the democrat party, they left me", it hit home in the South. The chord struck the heart and turned the south from a democrat stronghold to a republican stronghold.
Now we are entering a new phase. We didn't leave the Republican Party, the party left us, is going to be the growing opinion over the next decade, and is already the opinion held by a growing number of conservatives, given the common interest of both parties who have obviously declared joint war on the rightful heirs and assigns of this nation, their constitution, and their resources.
Both parties and the Supreme Court, have declared war on the decendents of the American Revolutions birth right, their freedom to guide the direction of their nation, the freedom to self determination, the freedom to say no, the right to private property, their culture, their heritage, even their right to survive as a majority in their own native homeland. Both parties have burdened these decendents with a false duty and obligation to improve the lot and line the pockets of tin pot dictators the world over, to the tune of a 34 trillion dollar so far, and no improvement in any area in sight. The only return on that investment has been world wide anti-Americanism, jealousy, and hatred, both within and without the nation.
"Both parties and the Supreme Court, have declared war on the descendants of the American Revolutions birth right, their freedom to guide the direction of their nation, the freedom to self determination, the freedom to say no, the right to private property, their culture, their heritage, even their right to survive as a majority in their own native homeland."
Therein lies your problem; yours isn't Reagan's claim that the party somehow left you, in spite of your desperate need to somehow legitimize your stance, but rather, it is a history of a political party not willing to refuse its natural growth as afforded by the very culture you claim to represent, and your refusal to grow with it.
The limitations you wish to place on the Republican Party would make it some sort of exclusive Club whose members qualify as a result of "approved" cultural-racial (and don't deny that's the true meaning behind the "survive as a majority" segment of your response) traits that would make them “true” heirs to the American experiment.
Here's a news flash...the concept of inclusion gave birth to this nation. The idea that some were better than others by reason of birth was rejected in the refusal to acknowledge monarchial rule as a legitimate form of government, and embracing the fact that “all men are created equal”.
Do you know what that means?
It means that all Americans, ancestral or newly-naturalized, have a voice to equally say “no” to people seeking to exclude them from similarly directing the direction they wish their country to take. And here’s more news…they have a right NOT to set aside their cultural traditions because of that idea of inclusion promoted by the Founders, while you lack the right, and the power, to exclude them because of their exercising the right to do so.
In other words, AS an American, I am free to embrace my culture and my heritage, and you can’t force me to either set those things aside, or embrace yours.
Socio-political ideological battles are not won by removing oneself from the field of battle, but rather by placing oneself, and thus one’s ideas, in the very center of the largest battlefield to be found, and fighting to promote those ideas.
Why have the liberals advanced their agenda so far these past 50 years or so?
By practicing inclusion, or rather by feigning inclusion, and giving the allusion of being inclusive while in actuality being elitists.
Conservatives, or rather some who would present themselves as conservatives, raise the flag of “pandering” the moment the party seeks to establish a dialogue with a particular group of people they deem to be something other than simply Americans, because of the perception that somehow including these groups of Americans in the party’s tent, somehow makes the party “less pure”.
This reeks of exclusion, and it’s about as anti-American as any notion ever promoted by the left.
To defeat the liberals, we must not only expose their inclusion shell game, but we must become inclusive, and embrace all who simply want to do the only thing required of an American...to love freedom enough to allow others to be equally free, and to be willing to lay down their lives in the defense of that all-inclusive freedom.
So, as you leave the party and urge others to do the same, understand that you are advancing the idea of political segregation, and be sufficiently honest to acknowledge the fact that the true anti-Americanism is the promotion of exclusion over the acceptance of inclusion.
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