A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today’s Republican Partyâ€â€and by extension the conservative movement at its heartâ€â€supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.
Well, sure. We’re all closeted gays with mancrushes on fascists, and that includes the women, too.
In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn’t be a “code” for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today’s civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.
And conservatives are demonstrably stupid, too. But at least we’re not so gullible.
I read “demonstrably stupid” as “W” and quickly hit the enter button on my keyboard.
I felt like a genius after.
See? Now aren’t ya’ll glad you got a unreconstructed South Alabama gully jumper who actually knew George Wallace before he got pinked reading this stuff (I mostly just skip the long words)?
Now whenever anybody says, “See? That proves the meme!”, ya’ll can just answer, “Yeah, but that’s just Yokel. The boy ain’t right in the head. Ain’t never been right in the head. Must have been the grits.”
Um, actually, Wallace didn’t get pinked reading this stuff. Poor sentence structure.
But that’s just me.
Gerald Alexander has a long essay in the Weekly Standard (9/24/07) arguing that the Republican party is historically the party that should be credited with civil rights for blacks.
Cool, but I’m standing by GeraRd.
Alexander:
Caric:
What is my favorite color?
Blue.
No, red !
SPROIIIIIIIIIIING…
– Typing just “W”‘s. That’s entry level. Now when you can coax “W”‘s and “M”‘s out of the same key – now thats genius.
– On topic. Has anyone ever done a study re the Lefts obssesive pre-occupation with all things bigoted, or in more general terms, their eternal self-imposed angst concerning all of the most base aspects of human nature, because you know, thats got to be some kind of indicator right there, and it does get tiresome having to constantly “suspend disbelief” and all, just to try to talk falsiness to impedence all the time so they don’t completely fall apart.
– Besides, even closeted gays with mancrushes on fascists need love.
Oops.
Actually, double oops. It looks like the Weekly Standard essay I linked to was something like an abridged version of the one in Jeff’s link.
Yeah, but I’m not Jeff. Yet.
OK, it’s Saturday morning and I’m hung over. I’ll go back to bed now with a wet towel over my face.
Aldo, I’m just teasing you. I’ll take that as a compliment.
I think blogs work best when they evolve into a collaboration between two or three good, like-minded, posters, and that seems to be happening here with you and JG.
You guys have different styles, and slightly divergent interests, so I usually don’t confuse you. This new work by Gerard Alexander fits so perfectly with the themes that JG has been posting on lately that I just assumed it was him.
After a good breakfast of beer and menudo I’ll be fine.
Here’s a thought:
Ask how many white males of my generation from the South (like me), who easily recognize the destructive legacy of racism in the South, why they became Republicans.
You will be amazed how many times the words peanut, Carter, Plains, idiot, Jimmy, and malaise are mentioned. Not necessarily in that order, but if you use a little cluster analysis the trend will become clear.
Of course, the worst busing violence in the country was in Boston.
I’m not sure what that says about the Kennedy, Dukakis, and that guy in the Swiftboat with the Cambodian Christmas lights strain of racism in the Democratic Party–but as long as we’re here…
When I was in jr high, somehow it was decided by the “popular” girls that anyone who wore black and red on Fridays was a slut. Somewhere along the line, watching the finger pointing and the guffaws, someone would clue in the confused girl to what was being said. Her intentions of wearing black/red on a Friday meant nothing, it was the “in” crowd’s definition that held sway, to the point that no amount of explanation redeemed the poor “out” crowd members and they eventually ‘went along’ rather than being publicly humilitated.
The Left is filled with jr high bullies that never grew up.
Spot on, Darleen.
Unfortunately, the right is filled with “out crowd” members who go along rather than be humiliated by the MSM, which is run by the bullies.
The Republicans “disestablished” slavery, fought against Jim Crow laws, voted for Civil Rights legislation… and so obviously THEY are the racists. Whatever. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
But because the Dems have managed to cow or shove out opponents in academia (largely) and the press corps (also largely), the reversed narrative has become “common sense history.”
And they did it using exactly the same tactics, I can even recall them from college. There was a core group of far-left professors with a cadre of angry far-left students, and the administration did less than nothing about their bullying tactics, which included preferential grading, harassment, and when a “conservative” student got involved in school politics, organized “campaigns” against them including rumors and false claims against them.
One of the PoliSci teachers actually defended the practice when caught as “training for the rough-and-tumble of real-world politics,” an explanation that the administration accepted.
From what I hear, it’s worse now than it was then.
Alexander’s facts are right — which doesn’t matter at all — but his passing and passive adoption the left’s false equation of “educated, younger, non-native-Southern” with non-racist, however small it is in his text, is the worm in it — and that matters.
It’s only via strategic splittings and false rhetorical realignments of group interests along unnatural (non-economic, basically (Marx!)) lines that Democrats’ electoral strategies can work — can make the world’s Carics and Obamas (the Ds’ actual constituencies) work as representational stand-ins for King’s marchers (their actual excluded “Other”).
Once made, such false identifications are impervious to refutation — they’re not made logically, so contrary facts only strengthen them — but they can be forgotten.
Highlighting them doesn’t do what you think it does.
I disagree. If anything, it can help turn back those on the fence who don’t like being bullied, providing them with the rhetorical arsenal to defend themselves and to resist being bullied into joining the left’s narrative or racial justice and their own part in championing it.
It may not matter much in the short term — sides are taken, minds are set. But it could matter in the long term, especially as people look beyond traditional media and traditional education avenues for the information upon which their belief system is developed.
On another level, WRT refutation, these false facts simply are NOT forgotten, for the same reason they had to be created… they bolster a particular mindset.
And unless for some other unstated reason that mindset simply fades away, those false facts are constantly used to reinforce it.
Yes, the core of deluded psuedo-intellectuals are impervious to contradictory information. But by pulling enough decent people out of the “support mechanism” for that delusion, the delusion loses its existential sting on the world at large, if not the deluded themselves.
Well, there are two cores, the psuedo-intellectual driving core and the dependent “client core,” but I hope my point is clear anyway.
I also have to disagree that highlighting them doesn’t do what I think it does, since that is mainly gets it off of my chest.
Why would anyone imagine that ron reagan’s early campaign speech on “states rights” in Philadelphia Mississippi was a coded appeal to the racist terror regimes of the Jim Crow era? He could have chosen that town for lots of reasons. Because of his fond memories of his civil rights work in the South. Because his campaign bus just happened to break down there. Because while passing through he was arrested and released into the hands of the Klan.
It doesn’t have to have been because of the state sponsored murders of two Yankee Jews and a negro. Could have been lots of things.
You have a point to make, andy? Some kind of rebuttal to Mr Alexander’s arguments. Or do you need Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to make it for you?
In the incident i am talking about, it is hard to “acknowledge” or find the non racist appeal. It’s not a coded appeal. It’s a rather explicit one. In Philadelphia Mississippi, I don’t need Jackson or Sharpton and definately not Reagan to speak for me. There’s two yankee jews and a negro that speak for me there.
However, I don’t make any claims as to how this act by Reagan helped his election. About how educated suburban middle class voters react to this sort of thing. Maybe in the past they reacted well to the writings of the National Review:
I don’t know if that sort of thing still worked in the 80’s. Or if maybe you had to word it differently.
I seem to remember Reagan winning in an electoral landslide at some point. Awful lot of racists he picked up along the way, eh?
Or maybe some people just misunderstood the coding in “Hymie Town.”
Anybody got any idea what the circulation demographics for the then two year old National Review was in 1957?
“I seem to remember Reagan winning in an electoral landslide at some point. Awful lot of racists he picked up along the way, eh?”
Like I said, I have no idea how it helped his numbers. But lots can fit under a big tent. In the 30’s southern conservatives helped the new deal by being Dixiecrats, for example.
“Anybody got any idea what the circulation demographics for the then two year old National Review was in 1957?”
You mean who besides Buckley read it? American Renaissance, apparently.
What’s fittin’ under your tent these days?
I had to Google American Renaissance to see what you were talking about. It doesn’t take much of a tent at all to cover those folks, a white sheet is plenty. They have nothing to do with the vast majority of white Southern conservatives.
“I had to Google American Renaissance to see what you were talking about. ”
I linked to an article in it, longing for National Review’s old days. When I dont think they were appealing to just southern conservatives.
“What’s fittin’ under your tent these days?”
Two yankee jews and a negro take up all the room. You see why I defend them so.
So what you’re saying is, you care about them, and all the rest of the world can go to hell?
“So what you’re saying is, you care about them, and all the rest of the world can go to hell?”
Certain people have done some things in Philadelphia Mississippi that made me wish them to hell, for sure.
“Two yankee jews and a negro take up all the room. You see why I defend them so.”
Oh My God, you guys! Andy Fucking CARES!
“Andy Fucking CARES!”
everyone cares for their nads yo.
Not even a clever tool …