As an adult, I saw racism revealed over and over again. I found a common thread in political views running through every racist that I encountered. All of them held conservative views. None of them held Liberal views on any subject. Conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order becoming self-conscious and reflective when other ways of life and thought appear on the scene, against which it is compelled to take up arms in an ideological struggle.
Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their defense.
Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter. Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their defenders to articulate conservative values.
The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the existing institutions of the time, and conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense ideological and social conflict. The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only considered to be 3/ 5’ s of a human being, now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea, is a direct challenge to a long held social concept . It denied the idea of white supremacy as legitimate. It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to extreme lengths to perpetuate it. The idea that a person that could have been your slave at one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. White supremacy as an institution is renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law itself including those that proposed it and passed it.
Thus, hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the conservative. Letting go of the past is difficult to do. An entire race of people becomes an easy scapegoat for one’s own failures. Hate is passed on from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children to hate. The cure for hate is education, so every attempt to keep schools segregated was an important factor. Every attempt to desegregate schools was blocked.
Integrated schools are a way of leveling the playing field and a sign of equality and equality is a challenge to the social fabric. The more narrow the view point, the more ignorant the person becomes and the easier it is to promote fear and fear promotes hate. Fear always promotes hate. The conservative mind embraces a narrow point of view. It doesn’t like being challenged. It resists new information. A liberal mind by definition is open to change, but change always threatens the existing order, so the liberal is not to be trusted. He is feared, and hated because he challenges the existing order.
Another glaring problem is that the conservative knows there is no rational justification for his racism. He knows that it’s wrong, intellectually, but he’s imprisoned by an ideology without a basis, and this ideology appeals to his “Gut” and not his brain. As Charles Pierce wrote, “The Gut is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it knows how it feels”. Richard Hofstadter points to this when he says, “Intellect is pitted against feeling”, he writes, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical”.
The Conservatives entire set of values is wrapped in a theory of rationality that was handed to him by somebody else with a nice big bow. His way of life is now threatened by a truth that contradicts his beliefs. To admit that it was flawed and without any basis, is to admit that, foundationally, everything he believed in is flawed and that means that he could be wrong about something. And that also means that there is no justification for the pain and suffering that his ideology has inflicted on others. An entire war was fought and over 600,000 lives were lost in order to continue a way of life that was baseless. Rather than admit that his beliefs were in error, he clings to the ideology of hate and directs that hate toward the object that is the very cause of the hate: The Black Man. The Black Man is a constant reminder that his ideology is flawed, a reminder that his hatred is baseless. Holding on to an ideology with no basis is irrational. Rather than dump this irrational way of thinking, he embraces irrationality as a way of life. He becomes a justificationist, and looks for anything that will justify his flawed ideology. He looks for passages in the Bible as a justification for slavery and therefore a justification for his beliefs. He finds a refuge in the Bible and religion, (conservatives a very religious bunch) and this becomes the foundation that he “feels” he can stand on. But he fails to recognize that the Bible cannot be its own basis. That’s circular reasoning. A Criteria cannot be its own criteria. If we claim a basis gives us truth, we then are making the implicit claim that truth requires bases. But then it is plainly obvious our own basis lacks a basis, as it cannot be its own basis. The Bible might justify slavery, but what justifies the Bible? Well… it’s the inspired word of God. According to whom? According to the Bible. That’s circular reasoning. That’s a logical fallacy.
Clinging to a logical fallacy , when you know it’s a logical fallacy is irrational. Conservatives insist on a foundationalist way of thinking, and the basis, the foundation of this idea all rests on something claiming itself as its own foundation. So… what is the foundation for the foundation, or the basis for the basis? They don’t like being pressed on this because that requires defending a stated position based on something, and that leads to an infinite regress vs. their dogma. Trying to justify a basis leads to more justification for yet another basis and that leads into a black hole of one justification after another. There is no exit. Conservatives oppose the “liberal agenda”. But what is that “agenda”? Liberalism challenges the status-quo. Conservatism opposes any challenge to the status-quo. And there you have it. But what is the justification for the status-quo, especially one that keeps an entire race of people suppressed because of an ideology without a basis? African-Americans are fully aware of this attitude coming from conservatives, which is why so few align themselves to this ideology.
Conservatives talk about trying to reach out to the African-American community, but fail to understand that nobody wants to hang with people that hate you. Blacks understand the source of this hatred, and are not likely to embrace it. Until conservatism renounces racism and purges racists from the Republican Party, they’ll never reach the African-American in any significant numbers. As pointed out by Professor Robert C. Smith, “African American thought has always been mainly a system-challenging, dissident thought. However, until the 1950s and 1960s this thought had not been linked to a powerful mass movement. And the mere articulation of a dissident ideology does not produce conservatism until the ideology is embraced by significant social groups. Once it appeared that the black movement presented “a clear and present danger” to the existing order, a self-conscious conservative movement would necessarily emerge, and it would also necessarily be for the most part a racist movement”.
It was in the 1950’ s that the Conservative Movement had its beginnings as a backlash to the challenges presented by African American thought. In my previous book, Political Logic, I pointed to Russell Kirk and his book The Conservative Mind: “In his lecture on “The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement” given to the Heritage Foundation in 2003, Dr. Lee Edwards cited Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind as providing the central idea upon which American conservatism is essentially based, calling it ordered liberty”.
Kirk described six basic “canons” or principles of conservatism:
1. A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
2. Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
3. Civilized society requires orders and classes;
4. Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
5. Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
6. Society must alter slowly.
Edwards states that “the work established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name. Lest we minimize the writings of Kirk, we should point out that one of his biggest supporters was “Mr.Conservative”, President Ronald Reagan. Reagan said this of Kirk:
“As the prophet of American conservatism, Russell Kirk has taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation. From . . . Piety Hill, he reached deep into the roots of American values, writing and editing central works of political philosophy. His intellectual contribution has been a profound act of patriotism. I look forward to the future with anticipation that his work will continue to exert a profound influence in the defense of our values and our cherished civilization.” —Ronald Reagan, 1981
For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing. Dr.Kirks conservative credentials are established. He is a conservative. He is qualified to speak on the meaning of conservatism. This prompted me to examine a few of Kirks ideas which he put forth as his 10 principles of conservatism, in addition to his 6 “canons”. Kirk begins with his first principle as being that “the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order”.
He states, “Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand”.
The problem of order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics. Putting it mildly, Plato’s view was that we are ineradicably social, and that the individual person was not, and could not, be self-sufficient. In fact, Plato offered up humans like so many animals that could do nothing for themselves unless they had constant and detailed direction from those who were to be their leaders:
“... And even in the smallest manner ... [one] should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals ... only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently ... There will be no end to the troubles of states , or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world , or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” (The Republic.)
In his chapter on southern conservatism, Kirk writes “
that while human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon, yet the wild demands and expectations of the abolitionists were quite as slippery a foundation for political decency”.
Describing “Negroes” as “the menace of debased, ignorant and abysmally poor folk” he argued they “must tend to produce in the minds of the dominant people an anxiety to preserve every detail of the present structure, and an ultra-vigilant suspicion of innovation”.
Ok… so this is the guy that influenced Ronald Reagan. His views were also more or less adapted by William F. Buckley, National Review , and other conservatives after Brown v Board of Education.
Professor Robert Smith of the University of San Francisco writes; “Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Buckley and National Review opposed the civil rights movement. In 1957, Buckley wrote an editorial entitled “Why the South Must Prevail”.
He wrote; “National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, and then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of minority, in which case it may give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence”.
This sentence stands out to me: “It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority”. It appears that Mr. Buckley had Kenya in mind with this comment. “The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.” Actually, the question becomes, how civilized is a society that enforces racist White Supremacy? Is Mr. Buckley defining “civilized standards” for all of us, including those living under the suppression of a racist overlord? I seriously doubt that anybody living under Jim Crow thought they were living under civilized standards. Being denied the most basic human rights including the right to vote, to an education, to being on a street after sundown, and facing the prospects of being lynched if you defied the norms of this kind of community hardly paints a picture of a civilized society to these eyes.
This led me to Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Ronald Reagan began his campaign, not with a speech on supply side economics. He began it with a speech supporting “states’ rights” (?) just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi at the Neshoba County Fair, the very community where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. This was a deliberate appeal to white racists that he was on their side and was part of a Republican strategy going back to the 1960’ s to build a conservative majority on the basis of racism.
This is not a way to attract blacks to the conservative movement. But that was never the intention. The conservative isn’t looking to appeal to Blacks. They’re looking to suppress them. I found this an outrageous move on the part of Ronald Reagan. Of all the locations in the United States to launch a campaign… he picks this one? What did he think that would say to the African American community? It’s pretty clear whose votes he was courting.
According to Smith; “The South is and always has been the most conservative part of America, conservative in an almost militant promotion of Lockean principles and institutions, and the only part of the country that claimed some kind of Burkean aristocratic conservatism. The South has also always been the most racist part of the country. This is probably the most direct connection between racism and conservatism in America; despite all the denials of southern intellectuals and politicians, past and present, the South’s militant conservatism was rooted fundamentally in its hyper-racism”. “The schizophrenia that is part of “southern thought”, is that while it embraced John Locke for whites, it denied Locke to blacks. But at the same time, many of the South’s leading thinkers rejected Locke because slavery could not be squared with his idea of inalienable natural rights. It was one thing to deny Africans civil rights as northern whites did, but to deny them liberty and their property in their labor was more difficult, leading to a full-bore embrace of a bastardized Burkean Aristocracy”. “Southern conservatism is an integral part of American conservatism. And if one looks at it, you’ll find racism at its core. Its militant laissez-faire capitalism, it’s emphasis on the soil, limited government, states’ rights, concurrent majorities, tradition, and all the rest are little more than reactions to modernity and to anti-racist movements.”
The justification that is most used by the Conservative for policies that deny civil rights to minorities is the call for so –called “States Rights”. And Conservatives generally look to the 10th Amendment for their support. Why they do this, I have no idea. The Constitution actually has very little to say about states' rights. It says that no state can be deprived of its two senators, and no state can be forced to give up territory without its consent.
But, when people talk about states' rights, they tend to point not to those provisions, but to the Tenth Amendment. That says that the powers not delegated to the federal government or prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states or the people.
Amendment X
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
The 10th as anybody that can read clearly refers to “Powers”. NOT Rights. Powers and Rights are two different things.
The Supreme Court has at times relied on this as a source of states' rights. The federal government can't control the wages that states pay their employees at one set, or the hours that they work. Some essential state functions, it said, are immune from federal regulation. But it only said this for about ten years, from 1974 to 1985.
In 1985, it gave up on the idea of states' rights in the form of these immunities. Why? Because it couldn't figure out which states' rights were important enough to protect.
So, there's an interesting comparison to make here between individual rights, which sometimes get protected, even though they aren't in the words of the Constitution, and states' rights, which generally don't. It's interesting to think about whether the court is wrong in treating them differently in this way.
And one thing to think about there, is whether states' right and individual rights are different in important ways. Now, some people say individual rights are more important, they're valuable in and of themselves. States' rights are valuable only to the extent that they make individuals better off. The Constitution is there for the benefit of “We the People”, not “we the states”. And other people say no, the states are sovereigns within our constitutional system. Their dignity is important, their rights matter in and of themselves.
The Tenth Amendment doesn't actually say anything about rights. The Ninth Amendment does, it is about individual rights.
Amendment IX
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
But the Tenth Amendment is about state powers, not states' rights.
This bears repeating: The 10th Amendment refers to State Powers, NOT States Rights.
So…what is the basis for the argument for States Rights? Where does it appear in the Constitution? How can the Conservative make an argument against Civil Rights, by citing a fictitious claim of a non-existent Constitutional principle? How can they point to the 10th Amendment as their authority, when there is nothing in the Amendment to support the claim?
Dog Whistle Politics
On Sunday, Jan. 13, 2013, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Former Secretary of State, General Colin Powell condemned the GOP’s “dark vein of intolerance” and the party’s repeated use of racial code words to oppose President Obama and rally white conservative voters. Without mentioning names, Powell singled out former Mitt Romney surrogate and New Hampshire Gov . John Sununu for calling Obama “lazy” and Sarah Palin, who, Powell charged, used slavery-era terms to describe Obama:
POWELL: “There’s also a dark — a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that, that they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that?” “When I see a former governor say that the President is “shuckin, and jivin”, that’s a racial era slave term. When I see another former Governor after the president’s first debate, where he didn’t do very well, say that the president is “lazy”. He didn’t say that he was “tired” or He didn’t do well. He said he was “lazy”. Now it may not mean much to most Americans, but to those of us who are African/Americans, the second word is “shiftless”, and then there’s a third word that goes with it.
Powell noted that the Republican Party is having an identity crisis, noting that its significant shift to the right has produced two losing campaigns. He said if the Republican Party does not change along with the demographics of the country, they’ll be in trouble.
Apparently the former Secretary of State; an African/American, is able to see pretty clearly the racist attitudes that seem to consume his own party.
One group of alleged coded words in the US is claimed to appeal to racism of the intended audience. The phrase; State’s Rights, although literally referring to the powers of individual state governments in the US, was described by David Greenberg in Slate, as “code words” for institutionalized segregation and racism.
In 1981, former Republican Strategist Lee Atwater, when giving an interview discussing the GOP’s Southern Strategy said:
“You start out in 1954 by saying N**, N*, N*. By 1968 you can’t say N** - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is that blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I am saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying we want to cut this is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than N**, N**.”
This was taken directly from a recorded interview with Atwater. He apologized for his views shortly before he died.
In Martin Luther King’s autobiography, he wrote of the 1964 election and specifically the Republican Convention in San Francisco.
From Dr. King’s Autobiography:
The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right.
While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy. [King, Jr., Martin Luther; Carson, Clayborne (1998). The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.]
African/Americans have overwhelmingly rejected the Republican Party ever since. Racism is deeply embedded into conservative ideology. Racists and extremists found an ally in Goldwater, and the Republican Party, and later with Reagan and his own appeal to the Southern Strategy. The Southern DixieCrats voted for him. All those that opposed Civil Rights voted for him. All those that supported segregation voted for him.
When a Democratic president (Johnson) signed the CRA and the VRA in opposition to the southern members of his own party, those members over time, left the party and became Republicans. Today, what was once solidly Democratic is now solidly Republican. They changed parties, but they never changed their conservative ideology, and the racism that permeated it at that time, still exists today, although not as overtly as it did then. Today it must be hidden in coded dog whistles and legislation that targets minorities with the intentions of minimizing their participation in the US economy or even the electoral process itself.
Are we “post-racial” today? Does the election of Barack Obama demonstrate racism as a thing of the past? No. Emphatically no. If anything it has brought what was thought of as latent, to the surface. Will we ever see racism as over in America? Probably not. Not as long as it’s promoted in the home and in the churches. Those attitudes are handed down and reinforced very often in the church which can find Biblical justification how to treat your slaves in Bible verse.
Although Racism and bigotry is aimed at many minorities including religious bigotry, probably the biggest problem with the issue of racism rests with the fact of slavery. In American history, one minority was enslaved and viewed in our founding documents as 3/5’s of a person. It literally took a Civil War ( these people were serious about preserving the beloved institution of slavery ), a series of Amendments (13,14, and 15) to change all of that, and then 100 years later another Act of Congress to insure civil rights and voting rights to African/Americans being denied those very things by Jim Crow laws. That has proved to be an enormous hurdle in race relations, because even though the practice of slavery ended 150 years ago, the Jim Crow laws that followed reconstruction demonstrate that the attitudes directed at the former “slave race” have not gone away. A way of life was ended in the South with the end of the Civil War. A huge cultural shift would now take place (in a very forceful manner) in a region that was willing to go to war, to maintain its culture of White Supremacy, and also hates being forced to do something it doesn’t want to do by the Federal Government. A true conservative always supports traditional values and those values have been challenged. But those values haven’t changed. They’re conservative values and conservatives hold their values as uncompromising. And they don’t like them being challenged. And they can be as self-righteous in their cruelty as ISIS.
That tension between black and white, will most likely continue. No other minority has had to deal with that fact of life in America. Has that created a gigantic “chip” on the shoulder of the African/American? Probably. Is it justified? Yeah, considering that he can still hear the dog whistles, and experience the profiling, among other things, including racial slurs. A white person would probably say no. After all, he had nothing to do with slavery. But the Black person would argue differently. Until the attitudes that promoted slavery, bigotry, hate and discriminatory legislation, are purged from the political policies coming out of conservatism , racism will be here to stay. You can’t legislate attitudes from people. Despite the laws, people will continue to hold views that promote their bigotry. Especially when those people see the Federal Government as their enemy, forcing something upon them that they don’t want. Seeing a person as Black, or white, or Latino, or Arab, isn’t racist, any more than seeing that a person is blond, blue eyed, brown eyed, or black haired. What makes it racist is thinking that it matters.
Amazingly, just recently the entire world was horrified at the execution of a Jordanian pilot at the hands of the terrorist group called ISIS, in what virtually all humans with a pulse condemned as an act of sadistic savagery that doesn't even qualify as human. It was the burning alive of the pilot while being held captive in a cage. Lest we think that we are above such savagery, examine the actions of the people of Texas that could teach ISIS what real cruelty looks like.
http://youtu.be/...