One Utah

Over at Orcinus, Dave takes on the ongoing effort of Republicans and conservatives to convince the world that they’re really not racists at all - history recent and not be damned. Dave writes:

It’s been kind of amusing watching conservatives reposition themselves on racial issues in anticipation of their upcoming electoral battle with Barack Obama, which seems to be growing likelier by the day.

Mostly they’ve been trying to revise the history of conservatism and the GOP in the past half-century, generally by omitting that whole sordid business about the Southern Strategy — or at least wholly redefining what that means.

The GOP’s patented Southern Strategy is simply enough pandering to Southern whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic parties embrace of Civil Rights. The outcome has been things like the dog whistle politics Ronald Reagan practiced with is “welfare queen” comments - the use of code words that the target audience knew meant black people. (FWIW, “welfare queen” was one of the more effective examples of this hateful practice; apparently that term was more effective at raising racial animus among whites than almost any other term especially more obviously racist language. Scary huh?)

Part of this is the not so quaint Southern tendency to try to pretend that some how the “States’ Rights” argument had nothing to do with slavery in the lead up to the Civil War and that it has had nothing to do with racism since. As is common, these arguments are combined with a rhetorically muscular America First Chauvinism that we’re supposed to believe is all about some set of core values that we degraded modern Americans have forgotten and for which the mythical Confederacy of the argument stood, for example (as quoted by Dave at Orcinus):

. . . what you never hear from these Democrat demagogues is what the Confederacy brought to America that has LONG since been lost in the short list of things that matter when it comes to being an American.

As a down-line Confederate, I know of a reverence for God, a deep-rooted respect for my elders, a conviction that a Government is only as good as the independent and strong-willed people who fight FOR her, and a belief that the Federal Government is BEST that governs States the LEAST - this being emblematic of a Republic that was founded with the intention of ensuring as much for her citizens. . . . The Confederate flag might have flown over some dark days of this republic, but that’s not to suggest that the ideals of the Confederacy, beyond the darkness of slavery, should be lost in the translation. That flag flew to represent an America that stood up for a people and a belief that a Federal Government had no place in deciding the business of the States’ right to determine their futures. Millions of dead later, the ideals are unchanged - do with that what you will.

Sounds innocuous enough doesn’t it? The Confederacy was really about freedom . . . if you were white. Historians have been pointing out for years and years now that the right the Southern states wanted to preserve was the right to own humans beings as chattel. Simple enough.

Defenders of this mythical Confederacy expect us to believe that racism is long dead, and that we should conveniently ignore the history of racism in the US. A think I quoted him, but a while back, Thomas Cahill was on Bill Moyers and he said “Racism is America’s nightmare . . .” it is our original sin, one that we codified into the constitution with things like the 3/5s compromise. The modern conservative movement got its start in opposing the Civil Rights movement. The conservative Christian subculture in the US began when white people didn’t want their kids sitting next to little black kids in schools and so they created “Christian” schools that were racially segregated.

The worst, overt forms of racism are largely gone from our society and that’s no small accomplishment. Jim Crow (at least as it applied to African-Americans) is gone. Conservatives tell us that means we’ve moved beyond racism. But the very existence and success of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” gives lie to that assertion. And attempts to resist national reforms in the name of States’ Rights is nothing more than the continuation of an old racist strategy designed to keep slavery legal.

The other night, Gone With the Wind was on TCM. I suspect more people think of the Confederacy as it is portrayed in GWtW than as it actually was - a virulently racist, nasty nation fighting to preserve one thing and one thing only and rightfully consigned to the garbage pit of history. The myth of the lost cause, the noble Southerner fighting for his nation’s freedom, is exactly that - a myth and one it’s time we as a nation put to rest.

This entry was posted Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 7:29 am and is filed under American History, Bigotry, Conservatives, Religious Fundamentalism, Republicans, Richard Nixon, Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority, White Supremacy. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.