Down the Memory Hole
In a recent blog Helen Rittelmeyer cites a new publishing celebrity for the New York Post and a Doubleday expert on the American Right, Ross Douthat, whose gripe is that American conservatives had actively supported segregation. Douthat is certainly not the only authorized intellectual who has been saying this. One of Helen’s respondents, who has taken the pen name Tobias, likewise complains that American conservatives had behaved immorally about segregation. Contributors to this website are urged to stop hiding the obvious in this case.
Ross and Tobias are both mostly wrong about how “American conservatives” viewed segregation and desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. Outside of the South, where many New Deal Democrats like George Wallace as well as self-styled Southern conservatives like Richard Weaver supported segregation against federal attempts to change it, postwar conservatives were not noticeably in favor of state-enforced physical separation of the races. Having spent many years investigating conservative movements in Europe and in this country, I find little to support the view that members of the Old Right were generally enthusiastic about racial segregation. National Review certainly attacked the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in neither case did it do so in order to keep blacks and whites separated. The presidential bid of George Wallace, who had been an ardent segregationist in Alabama, did not resonate particularly well among movement conservatives. Those conservative journals to which I then subscribed viewed Wallace as a New Deal liberal, albeit one who had decided to”use the race issue.” The late Frank Meyer railed repeatedly against the “non-conservatism” of this Alabama governor and his populist followers.
When David Frum confronted me in 1986, after I had spoken at a Philadelphia Society meeting on the early history of the American Right, and asked why I had not discussed “all the racism in the movement,” a confrontation, by the way, that I mention in my most recent book, I retorted that I was not aware this “ism” had played a significant role in the movement discussed. In comparison to the resentment against blacks that one could dig up in old issues of Commentary, especially when Jews and blacks were fighting for control of the New York City school system in the 1970s, racial animosity was no big deal on the Old Right. Although Buckley in his less inhibited days had warned against creating radicalized blacks electorate by passing the Voting Rights Act, the question then was the political effect of mobilizing black as voters. Buckley was not commenting on racial characteristics or on the need to assign separate facilities for different races.
One could of course chide the Old Right, from the revised neoconservative or leftist perspective, for not having been sufficiently angry about segregation. But that’s different from arguing that American conservatives enthusiastically endorsed racial separation. In fact save for an obsession with the Communist menace, there were few things that absorbed the energies of the conservative movement nationwide fifty years ago. Keeping blacks and whites segregated was clearly not one of them.
Let me assure the reader of my serene detachment in judging this matter. Anyone who has read my studies on American conservatism could not possibly argue that I have a soft spot for my subjects. As a small-government, Taft Republican and as an historian, I came away from studying the post-World War Two American Right with profound disappointment. Its activists, led by W.F. Buckley and Frank Meyers, had strayed almost steadily from the late 1960s on in a neoconservative direction, and they had imposed a form of groupthink upon their naïve followers that eventually led into the zombie-like “conservative movement” that now causes us to retch. Nor do I share, officially or unofficially the concern of a younger generation of Americans about the evils of white racism. I would not be disturbed even if I had found evidence in an older generation of conservatives of improper thoughts about race. Very few white people in the 1950s were as racially sensitized as the American population now is or pretends to be.
At the same time, I am annoyed by those neoconservatives who reconstruct their collective past to show how liberal they or their predecessors had been on race issues. Even more unsettling is the duplicitous way in which these opportunists have pushed the cult of Martin Luther King, a figure whom the first generation of neocons couldn’t care less about. Neocon scribblers conveniently discovered King after his death, as someone whom they could reinvent for their own uses. But pointing out these lies is not the same as being upset that people sixty years ago were not as idiosyncratically sensitive on race issues as they are right now. On the other hand, since Tom Piatak is correct that the liberal-neoconservative media keep out of public discussion any view of the past or present but their own, it is unlikely that what I’ve said will go anywhere. And so we’ll have to resign ourselves to discussing this subject among ourselves! Or perhaps we could get Pat Buchanan, who is our conduit to the outside world, to write on the Old Right, the neoconservatives and race once he’s finished with Churchill.
Comments
For the American salon left - and neoconservative soul brothers - one of the most difficult aspects to accept about a prospective Obama presidency is how much such a reality would corrode their vision of a steady-state “racist” America. For them, “colored” drinking fountains and bathrooms are as much a part of American life as car commericials and MySpace, armies of Klansmen clash by night, and from every tree a lynching noose doth hang - at least, metaphorically. “Racism” in America today is kind of an amorphous, blobby voodoo inflicting all white people, and maintaining an oppressive status quo by almost magical/witchy means. That’s because there are little or no actual, substantial nooses or Klansmen we can determine in this dimension of reality, the one with Reese’s Peanut Cups and snow tires. No, racism is a chronic affliction hard-wired into the white soul. We are told this not by creepy radicals concocting bombs in the shadows, but by our mainstream “experts.” Their politics and worldview are so hysterically anachronistic they would have no presence at all in the American square without support from like-minded - and blinkered - American media and academia. That’s why any change is preferred, and that’s the one benefit of our long, pointless crusade in the Middle East: Revulsion to it may provoke fissures in the fabricated reality so relentlessly shoved at us. The American Imperium is their baby - and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?
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San Fernando Curt wrote, ‘The American Imperium is their baby - and if they’re wrong about that, what else are they wrong about?’
You nailed it. You see, if all these fools did not constantly do homage before god Demos, goddess Marianne (Lady Liberty), and the the demigods of the American founding; if they forgot the indisputable nobility of their cause and the indisputable pure evil of all who diverge from it; if they were to forego further cognitive dissonance in the face of logic, evidence, and the lessons of experience and history—why, I do not believe they could sleep at night. They have been sucked in by the propaganda, they secretly enjoyed its benefits, dismissed their consciences, and cannot turn back for fear of what it could mean. They MUST perpetuate this dystopia. If they do not, all the myths by which they lull themselves into the delusion of happiness and virtue would be disproven. And then what ?
Therefore, I think it apropos to recall the maxim “Pride goeth before the fall.” It could, as a lens for certain situations, reveal much about the nature of contemporary régimes.
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As I said in a comment on the other column, it looks like Mr. Gottfried’s assertions do not contradict Douthat’s. Douthat has his own definition of conservative (hey, who doesn’t?), which would almost tautologically include opposition to desegregation. Mr. Gottfried, on the other hand, is talking about “movement” or “self-styled” conservatives.
Also, I don’t really understand the paleo obsession with the neocon’s use of the Martin Luther King myth. I believe you all that the neocon MLK has little resemblance to the true historical person, but so what? Co-opting your opponents’ (i.e., the liberals’) religious symbols looks to me like smart rhetoric, whether the neocons are doing it consciously or not. And the use to which the neocons want to put it seems unobjectionable as well: as far as I can tell, they mostly want to use their symbol against affirmative action and black special-pleading. That is, they’re using it as a rhetorical weapon against the Left’s (more accurate) MLK myth.
That may not be enough for us, and we may not agree with the ultimate neocon ideal of a “color-blind society”, but they’re trying to move things in the right direction. So what’s the big deal with their MLK myth?
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“Based on current rates of first incarceration, an estimated 32% of black males will enter State or Federal prison during their lifetime, compared to 17% of Hispanic males and 5.9% of white males.”
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crimoff.htm
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/cv2.htm
Violent crime is 2 to 4 million incidents per year. About half is by blacks. Over 72 years that means 72 million to 144 million by blacks. There are about 18 million black males. (1/2 o f 12 percent of 300 million)
72 million over 18 million is 4 violent acts in the lifetime of an “average” black male. At the higher range its 8 violent acts per lifetime of each black male.
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I frankly wouldn’t care if they had supported segregation. While I don’t have any enthusiasm for the obsession against miscegenation that prominent segregationists held, it’s undeniable that large swathes of the white working class throughout America were devastated by the mid century influx of blacks into their schools and communities. The places where my grandparents grew up and worked in complete safety are now some of the most violent areas in the country and de facto sun down towns (not that they’re actually safe during the day) for me or any other white person. I know how hard my ancestors worked to build to build these places, which makes it difficult in turn for me to gnash my teeth or pull out my hair because some egghead half a century ago made some substantially correct but racially offensive remarks about the effects of racial integration.
The Ruins of Detroit website ( http://detroityes.com/0tourdetroit.htm#The_Fabulous_Ruins )or similar sites for most large cities with black majorities offers some chilling visuals on the ultimate effects of integration.
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In response to Ploni Almoni’s comment about the harmlessness of having neocons turn MLK into
an American saint, whom we can now celebrate because the actual historical figure has been safely
reconstructed, unfortunately things don’t work that way. First off, King, who sounded much like
Michelle Obama, was too radical a black reformer to be plausibly transformed into the wimpy
centrist that the neocons have created. His written record, on affirmative action, reparations,and
his general revulsion for the American white past stands as testimony to the incompatibility
between what he wanted and what the neocons intend to make of him. Second, when the neocons start
sermonizing about King, they soon start sounding like Sharpton, by dwelling fitfully on how
racist this country was before the black savior came along.
King hagiography is not of the innocent kind, like telling kids that Washington never told a lie.
It is more of a revolutionary myth, like the cult of Lenin that operated in Communist countries.
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For that matter, Dr Gottfried, are the revolutionary myths about the Founding Fathers so innocent ?
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It is often said by learned scholars that the human race has a propensity for violence. Since our history includes frequent determinative violent acts, why not suppose that that propensity is “hardwired” into our DNA.
By the same token, the history of man upon this planet seemingly would indicate that we are “hardwired” for a propensity for racial and other group biases. Amorphous border lands are ALWAYS seething with tensions, while coherent group areas usually only entertain with parochial disputes.
Instead of whimping out before liberal opinion, why not search for a politics that asserts the truth about human nature while giving hope for members of all groups to find fulfillment in thier dual capacities as members of a distinctive group, and as a universal agent of design?
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Seeing as my comment on the other blog was deleted (probably because it was regarded as offensive
to non-Catholics) and as I do not recall exactly what I wrote, I cannot really defend what I said there. Dr. Gottfried, if you have a copy of what I wrote, please post it here so I can read it again.
I do not believe that I said that conservatives generally supported segregation. I thought
I said that if by conservative you mean “one who conserves,” as opposed to he who reforms,
then on the *single issue* of de-segregation, the “conservative” position is to maintain
segregation and the “reform” position is to end it. In terms of that *one issue,* conservatism
-- i.e. conservation of the status quo—is incorrect. Whether people who identify with a
“conservative movement” generally opposed or supported that reform is another issue entirely.
If I took a different position from what I wrote here, I would like to see what I wrote.
There are some paleocons over at Chronicles who defend the moral permissibility of anti-miscegenation laws. Some
of them seem to defend not only the permissibility of such laws but actually seem to support the
laws as such. I have argued with them there. Such laws are wrong. The paleocons who say otherwise
are wrong. Yes, there really are some (and only some) paleocons who think that miscegenation should
be illegal, or that making it illegal would not be inherently immoral. Such conservatism (and that’s
what they call it, by their own lights) is wrong.
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Legal segregation is both rationally and morally defensible, and has happened in some form or another for eons. Conservatives do not need to run from their pro-segregation past.
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Tobias can access his reponse by going online and looking at the rejoinders to Helen R’s
latest blog. Actually T’s comments on the evils of racial segregation and his ascription
of them to some of the current Right are available in his comment above. Note that
I was neither endorsing nor condemning such politically incorrect opinions. I was simply
pointing out their irrelevance for prominent postwar conservative activists and publicists.
Most of the ones I knew had very little interest in what is today called white nationalism;
Moreover, outside the South, these activists did not feel obliged to defend segregated
institutions. But unlike the Left, these conservatives did not think the civil rights
movement would make most Americans freer; and they feared the effect that civil rights legislation
would have on American constitutional government, as they understood it.
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Dr. Gottfried, I already have looked to the Rittelmeyer post—I did so before posting here.
My post there has been deleted, or for some other reason does not appear.
“I was simply pointing out their irrelevance for prominent postwar conservative activists and publicists.
Most of the ones I knew had very little interest in what is today called white nationalism;
Moreover, outside the South, these activists did not feel obliged to defend segregated
institutions.”
Fine, agreed.
“But unlike the Left, these conservatives did not think the civil rights movement would make most Americans freer; and they feared the effect that civil rights legislation would have on American constitutional government, as they understood it.”
Fine, agreed again. Yes, the expansion of civil rights legislation introduced large numbers of radical
voters into the voting booths. It seems to me the solution to this would be property restrictions
or simple bans on radical parties, not indiscriminate bans on people voting due to their skin tone
and national origin.
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“Ross and Tobias are both mostly wrong about how “American conservatives” viewed segregation and desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s.”
I still have no idea what I said that was incorrect.
“American conservatives had behaved immorally about segregation. “
I do not remember making a blanket statement about “American conservatives.” If I did, then
please show me so I can retract or explain it. I made a statement about those conservatives who did behave immorally. I also criticize the liberals of the civil rights movement who also did immoral things, like promote socialism and idiotic egalitarian notions of government, who treated racial inequality as the summum malum. Martin Luther King was a communist, adulterer, and plagiarist and I don’t admire him. I don’t find anything all that
objectionable in what you have written, so I do not see what was objectionable in what I wrote.
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“Actually T’s comments on the evils of racial segregation and his ascription
of them to some of the current Right are available in his comment above.”
What I said is correct. Racial segregation—by which I mean legal, official segregation,
as well as such cultural tendencies as not calling black men “Mr.—was wrong. Secondly,
I have debated with some of the current Right who still support anti-miscegenation laws. I
ascribe that opinion to people who defended that opinion in an argument with me. You say that most
postwar conservatives were not the racists of liberal paranoid fantasies, which is true. I say
that some self-styled conservatives are racists in a meaningful and objectionable sense. The comments
are absolutely compatible. I don’t see anything noteworthy controversial in what I wrote.
Furthermore, this is not a zero-sum game—segregation vs. civil rights legislation/the civil
rights movement. I can object to both. Much of the civil rights movement and much of its legislation in this
country was liberal and leftist and stupid and destructive and wrong. So too with segregation
legislation. I am not constructing some parallel universe in which the only point of certainty is
“racism is wrong” and all other moral claims are relative to that.
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So, maybe I did make a blanket statement about “American conservatives.” If so, I retract it. In
any case, I would still like to see the original comment in context.
And to repeat, in my first post on this thread, I am using the word “conservative” simply to mean
“in favor of the status quo” and I am applying it on an ad hoc basis. Of course, by this standard,
most self-styled liberals are “conservative” on any number of issues, like Roe v. Wade, Title 9,
and federal civil rights legislation, just as self-styled conservatives would be pro-reform on
those issues. I did not introduce this as an obfuscatory motion, but simply to point out that it
will not always be obvious what is “conservative” or if conservative is always correct. Some paleocons
and probably many self-styled Southern conservatives seem to think that bans on miscegenation are in fact conservative policies, and on that issue reform is correct. Not necessarily the reforms that actually
were imposed in the 1960s, simply a refusal to perpetuate the status quo on that issue.
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Not calling a Black man Mr., if that is true, is silly and petty, but how is legal segregation inherently immoral? After the schools were desegregated, North and South, Whites fled and communities were destroyed. Suburbs and private schools flourished as a result. Were those Whites who fled for the sake of their children immoral? Or were just the rational laws that prevented that result immoral?
Also, what is immoral about opposing miscegenation? Only guilt-ridden Whites feel obligated to think it is OK to be bread out of existence.
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1.) Schools were not just desegregated, they were forcefully integrated. There is a difference.
2.) Where did I approve of white flight?
3.) Is it petty not being called Mr.? Imagine no one ever dignified you with “Mr.” and did so out
of principle because of who you are, not out of a general casualness. Apply the Golden Rule.
4.) Legal segregation was the sole alternative to white flight? Why not just segregate out the
dangerous element of both blacks and whites, instead of all blacks? Case by case basis. And I don’t
think the public education system was such a good idea to begin with, though I certainly rue its
destruction through desegregation.
5.) Being bred out of existence? Who said anything about that? Why should a black man and white
woman who want to marry be legally restricted from doing so? That’s not the future of the race,
that’s one couple. But that’s too big a threat for you. I’m not saying that interracial marriage
should be promoted or become normative, just that it shouldn’t be banned by the state. Teach your
kids to marry other whites all you want, just don’t use the police power to prevent willing spouses
from marrying.
6.) Do you call yourself a conservative? Do you think you’re on the Right? If so, then I’ve proven
my case—some conservatives still think that segregation and anti-miscegenation laws were okay.
And they’re wrong—this one particular set of conservatives and that set of laws.
7.) I will not have ANY further communication with you on this blog. I have spoken my peace. If
you don’t like, then I scrape your dust off my feet.
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“just don’t use the police power to prevent willing spouses
from marrying.”
And there is a qualitative difference between this and homosexual “marriage” or polygamy or
that other stuff.
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“And they’re wrong—this one particular set of conservatives and that set of laws.”
So declares Lord Tobias! Well that settles it, I guess.
“Where did I approve of white flight?”
I didn’t say you did. My point was you have to acknowledge white flight and admit that it was destructive of traditional communities and an easily foreseeable outcome of integration or you have to condemn it. I guess you do the latter. Would you have legally prohibited white flight in your effort to socially engineer integration? Assuming you’re White, would you have sent your kids to a majority Black school where they were in the substantial minority? Forcing your kids into a social experiment that is not good for them seems the immoral act to me, but what do I know? I’m not Lord Tobias arbiter of all that is moral.
“I will not have ANY further communication with you on this blog. I have spoken my peace. If you don’t like, then I scrape your dust off my feet.”
So you admit you have been intellectually bested?
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In 1965, a young lawyer in Phoenix, Arizona by the name of William Rehnquist wrote that the problem with segregation was government forcefully keeping people apart. He equally was against government forcefully “congregating” people together as in “integration” for the same reason - government force in place of people’s free choice of associations.
Liberals on the other hand have always objected to segregation for the mere fact of separateness regardless of the reasons. And any method, including using the coercive power of government to forcefully congregate the races was desirable.
This difference in objections to segregation is a divide that has never been bridged between true conservatives and liberals, and defines us all. The liberal, desperate in his self hatred, and exhibiting a pathological wish to destroy whence he came, always has a deep seated goal to attack his birth group. Burnham was right - Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.
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Some additional detail on my post above.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm
“In 2005, offending rates for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites”
Blacks are about 12.5 percent of the population. If you multiply 12.5 by 7 you get 87.5 percent.
So the 1/8 of the population does the same amount of crime as the 7/8. Thus blacks commit about half the 2 to 4 million violent crimes each year.
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Something which I only find in conservatism (and untamed in libertarianism) is the thought that not every evil need be addressed by a law and enforcement. Ought we have shot segregationists? No, but there were laws against murder that should be enforced, and there was the “equal” part of separate but equal (e.g. use the same quizzes to qualify voting for everyone - I think it would be an improvement).
Where the neo-cons and liberals agree is that anything they think evil - Iran or smoking must result in a law at its puritanical worst to address the issue.
I can call the “Jim Crow” laws immoral, but unleashing a bigger leviathan to eat the smaller has resulted in greater evils. Including the destruction of many of our cities with “white flight” - not giving the natural integration time to occur. Forcing it negated it, and added the absurdity of black students being bussed from a local black school to a remote one.
Abortion is a holocaust, but the few who actually do violence against it are condemned. And I don’t think that voting to have someone with a badge do the identical act by proxy is necessarily right. If something like the Abortion Holocaust isn’t the subject of violent action, then segregation also ought not be.
But in either case, some states will be evil. And so will some people. The conservative choice is to let them be evil as the contrary is - to use the recent Narnia film - to summon the White Witch to overthrow the Telmarines - it would work but would unleash a greater evil.
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I think you make some valid points, TZ. But as someone posted over at the Douthat thread,
the Southern states basically invited Leviathan. They wouldn’t use their local and state
rights to do the right thing and behave justly toward blacks, so the feds invaded and
replaced Jim Crow with federal power. Cultural suicide. I know that lynching was not
restricted to the South, and I know that not all victims of vigilante justice were black.
But I also know that a number of Blacks in the South were lynched, and that the juries were
all white, and there was no way to get a fair trial. Those are the signs of barbarism. And
if the South really remembered Reconstruction and learned any lesson from it, they should
have suppressed the Klan and the lynchers on their own instead of waiting for the feds to
come in. They should have treated black applicants at voting booths have an equal shot with
white applicants. All those old Anglo-Saxon values and what-not.
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But as someone posted over at the Douthat thread,
the Southern states basically invited Leviathan.
Nah, it was Lincoln.
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And they invited Lincoln, too, when they seceded. Touche.
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Well, before this blog disappears into oblivion, I would appreciate a response from Dr.
Gottfried. He writes a post in which he says I’m “mostly wrong” even though my original
comments no longer exist on this site (not his fault). I have defended myself at length
and do not see where I merited censure, let alone a post. But I do thank him.
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I do understand how legally enforced segregation can be a constitutional bugaboo, but not a moral one. If legally excluding a group from activities enjoyed by another group is immoral, then modern conservatives, as supporters of the military, are culpable. When I was in the navy as a lowly enlisted man I wasn’t welcome in the Captain’s mess, the officers’ wardroom, the Chief’s mess, or even the first class mess; nor was I welcome in their sleeping areas or clubs. We weren’t welcomed much of anywhere. I understand this isn’t racial segregation, but I do believe that if apartheid is considered at as a principle, that these would be problems. But it gets worse. Every group except whites is permitted some kind of segregation--to exclude whites. Off the top of my head I’ll mention ethnic graduation ceremonies, dormitories, publications, neighborhoods, organizations, etc. Most conservatives are just as hypocritical and unprincipled as the most hesperophobic liberals.
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