On Apr 24, 11:15 am, Yoorg...@Jurgis.net wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:02:30 -0400, emoneyjoe <
emoney...@iglou.com>
> wrote:
>
> >>> I was talking about me, if I want to move way
> >>>out someplace and stay in the house all the time
> >>>to avoid people in general, do I have that right,
> >>>or not, in your biased thinking?
>
> >>That's not even a serious thought.
>
> >>Why wouldn't it be?
>
> >>And what does "my thinking" in relation to civil rights,
> >>discrimination, racism, and all sorts of rightwing bigotry have to do
> >>what what you just described?
>
> > It isn't "right wing" bigotry, every democrat
> >I have ever known was a bigot.
>
> for supporting civil rights, civil liberties?
>
> You DO know that conservatives OPPOSED all expansion of Civil rights
> and Civil liberties in the 60's, Right?
>
> > You did completely misread or misinterpret
> >what I asked,
>
> You asked a nonsense question
>
> Predicated on totally unbelievable stupid beliefs and lack of
> understanding
>
>
and here it is in black and white.
the modern conservative movement was built on racism:The Racism-
Conservatism Link: 'National Review' Firestorm Over Racism Calls Up
William F. Buckley's Troubling Legacy
http://www.alternet.org/news/155124/the_racism-conservatism_link%3A_%27national_review%27_firestorm_over_racism_calls_up_william_f._buckley%27s_troubling_legacy/
AlterNet / By William Hogeland
The Racism-Conservatism Link: 'National Review' Firestorm Over Racism
Calls Up William F. Buckley's Troubling Legacy
Did Buckley ever really renounce his defense of white supremacy in the
South?
April 24, 2012 |
The National Review's dropping of two writers -- one for publishing a
racist article in another publication, the other for giving a racist
talk -- has renewed discussion of that magazine's early positions
regarding race and the legacy of its founder and guiding spirit
William F. Buckley, Jr. Since Buckley's magazine was critical to the
success of the postwar right, mainstream conservatism's supposed
renunciation of racism has depended in part on a prevailing, little-
examined notion that having defended white supremacy in the South in
the 1950s, Buckley later apologized for that position.
His fans, both conservative and liberal, cite the apology. It's become
part and parcel of a contention that racism and conservatism are not
ineluctably connected.
But the aged Buckley was renouncing a position entirely different from
the one he'd actually advanced in the 1950s.
Writing in 1957 in defense of jury nullification of federal voting
laws, Buckley insisted that whites in the South were "entitled to take
such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,
where they do not prevail numerically," because the white race was
"for the time being, the advanced race." In 2004, asked whether he'd
ever taken a position he now regretted, he said: "Yes. I once believed
we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal
intervention was necessary."
Nicely done. Where in '57 he'd asserted a right even of a minority of
whites to impose racial segregation by literally any means necessary,
including breaking federal law, in '04 Buckley expressed regret for
supposedly having believed only that segregation would wither away
without federal intervention.
Stupid the man was not. He gets credited today with honesty about his
past and with having, in his own way, "evolved up." Modern
conservatives, more importantly, get to ignore the realities of their
movement's origins.
Buckley did evolve, just not in the way his fans like to imagine. His
effort to construct working-class white Southern racists as an
advanced race was brief. (Given Buckley's ideas of what advanced races
like to do -- sail, listen to Bach, defend high culture against
barbarity -- it's not surprising if they disappointed him.) By 1965,
at a famous Oxford Union debate with James Baldwin, Buckley was
fighting what had already become a rearguard action on civil-rights
legislation, and he was taking a new position. Claiming now that
everybody already agreed that race prejudice is evil, he accused the
civil-rights movement of no longer seeking equality but the actual
regression of the white race. He announced that if it ever came to
race war, he was prepared to fight it on the beaches, in the hills, in
the mountains.
And he joked that what he really objected to was any uneducated
Southerner, black or white, being allowed to vote. That's less a
turnabout on equal rights for blacks than a retreat to a more
logically consistent snobbism, and the joke was serious: that same
year, James J. Kilpatrick put forth in the National Review an argument
mixing states-rights populism with ruling-class prerogative, warning
that federalism would be destroyed unless states were free to impose
voting qualifications, and that such qualifications must discriminate
equally, not racially.
Race nevertheless long remained a defining conservative issue for the
National Review. In a 1969 column, Buckley hymned the research of
Arthur Jensen on race and IQ, which showed blacks testing lower than
whites on abstract reasoning skills, a finding from which Buckley
deduced a racial imperviousness to improvement by education. In the
1970s the magazine persistently defended apartheid South Africa on the
same basis that it had once defended Jim Crow.
The problem isn't that old Bill Buckley gets a pass. If conservatives
today really mean to mark out an American conservative ethos with no
remaining ties to racism, wouldn't they need to reckon, far more
seriously and realistically than they seem prepared to do, with the
painful legacy of the postwar right when it comes to what was then
called racial integration? With the Cold War, integration was the hot
issue of the day -- and that was the day when the right wing was
taking over the Republican Party. Nelson Rockefeller was a fire-and-
brimstone Cold Warrior but hyperliberal on race; he was just the type
the Buckleyites were knocking out. Ties between conservatism and
straight-up, hardcore, undisguised disgust at the presence of African
Americans in any position other than servile were once so tight that
for some of us with long enough memories it's somewhat bizarre even to
have to review them.
And the deeper one digs into the history of race and the right wing,
the trickier things get. There's another remark of Buckley's that gets
him routinely credited with acknowledging, in old age, postwar
conservatives' error on race and personally recanting it: a comment he
made during an interview with Judy Woodruff in 2006 regarding his
opposition to the 1962 Civil Rights Act. "The effect of that bill
should have been welcomed by us," Buckley told Woodruff. He framed his
old objection to the act in terms of William Rehnquist's supposedly
having persuaded him and Barry Goldwater, when developing positions
for the Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, to view opposition to
the act as an inescapable conclusion of the supposed strict
constitutionalism on which Goldwater was running, a position that
Buckley told Woodruff he'd since come to regret for its
"constitutional formalism."
Buckley's 2006 frame is a false one. Advancing states-rights and anti-
judicial-review arguments against civil-rights laws was nothing new to
Buckley in '63-'64, and his arguments certainly didn't depend on any
"formalist" urging from Rehnquist. By the time of the Goldwater
campaign, nearly 10 years of unrelenting objection to every form of
civil-rights legislation had appeared in the National Review, weirdly
blending the (supposedly race-neutral) "strict-constitutional"
argument with Buckleyite claims for the right of cultures deemed
superior by Buckleyites to violate the Constitution.
So if Buckley was really telling Woodruff in 2006 the only thing his
admirers can mean when they call his remarks an apology or a recanting
-- that he'd been persuaded in the '60s by a well-regarded legal
scholar to go along with a strict constitutional position that, while
intellectually sound, had some regrettable real-world ramifications
for black people, which Buckley only later came to understand and thus
to regret -- he was being preposterous.
But there's a more intriguing possibility. In 1952, Rehnquist wrote a
now-famous memo on Brown vs. Board of Education. The Times recently
revived a discussion of it, and of Rehnquist's denial that it
reflected his own opinion. That memo put forth an idea related in
interesting ways to Buckley's '57 "advanced race" essay.
In the memo, Rehnquist deemed the Supreme Court a poor place for
ruling on individual rights, suggesting that the Bill of Rights and
the Fourteenth Amendment can't be enforced by judicial review in
communities where those rights are opposed by a majority. That is,
they can't be enforced. "In the long run," Rehnquist wrote,
"majorities will decide what the constitutional rights of minorities
are." And that's at first what Buckley seemed to mean, too, when he
said in the '57 essay that the question of the white right to prevail
could not be "answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights
of American citizens, born equal."
But Buckley's '57 essay turns that already startling idea upside down.
It says that even a minority of whites has a right -- nay, a duty! --
to take measures necessary to prevail against a majority of blacks.
That kind of romantic, questing elitism did not fit the new Rehnquist-
Goldwater populism, which appealed to majority and states rights in
resisting federal enforcement of racial integration. Really, Buckley's
view revealed too much of what "states rights" was so often code for:
white supremacy.
Is it possible, then, that what Rehnquist actually advised Buckley
during the '64 platform discussions amounted to a request to tone down
the eccentric flights of derring-do, to get with the program of
pushing the rights of majorities in local communities over those of
the federal judiciary and legislature -- i.e., get with the right-wing
party line regarding segregation, which Rehnquist was even then
transforming from the fatalistic mood of his '52 memo into a positive
program for Goldwater's speeches?
And when Buckley said he regretted going along with Rehnquist, might
he really have meant he regretted relinquishing youthful, romantic
militancy about the rights of superior civilizations, and adopting
instead a dry, constitutional argument promoting mere white majorities
(often irritatingly low-class majorities at that)?
If so, Buckley's remark to Woodruff would at least make sense. And
Buckley often made sense.
Buckley's most quoted remark from the Woodruff interview is cryptic,
relying uncharacteristically on the passive voice: "The effect of that
bill should have been welcomed by us." How can "the effect" he's
talking about really be legislating equality for blacks (something
Buckley continued to object to, as I've pointed out)? That would be
weird. More likely the cagey old bastard meant conservatives should
have welcomed the effect of the Civil Rights Act on white voters in
the South. They of course did respond to its passage by flocking to
the Republican Party, an effect explicitly "welcomed" at the time by
Buckley, and by others who would soon be leveraging that effect for
the election.
In any event, it would be interesting to see conservative
intellectuals, not liberal ones, digging into this history.