Bigots

Mark Hemingway waxes indignant for National Review:

Krugman's mentioned the Reagan/Nashoba incident four previous times over the last two years; Bob Herbert has mentioned it eight previous times going back to 1997. Enough already. Nobody believes Reagan is a bigot.

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of emails pointing out that of course people believe Reagan was a bigot. Let me clarify what I meant — nobody who has seriously examined the man and his political career believes that Reagan is a bigot.

This is a dodge. For one thing, it would hardly be shocked for a white man born in 1911 to have held some prejudiced views about African-Americans at some point in his life. But more importantly, none of us can know what Reagan's subjective feelings about black people were. But since he was consistently involved in public affairs throughout the second half of the twentieth century, we can evaluate his record -- a record of opposition to the Voting Rights Act, of support for Barry Goldwater's anti-civil rights presidential campaign, of hostility to fair housing legislation in California, of support for tax deductions for segregated universities, avowed advocacy of "states rights," etc. Maybe Reagan had warm and friendly feelings about black people. Maybe he was consistently hostile to civil rights legislation because of sincere libertarian convictions. Maybe he didn't involve himself in anti-segregation activism in the 1950s because he was greedy and only interested in causes that GE would pay him to espouse. Who knows?

But the issue is his record on civil rights issues, a record that I find deplorable, though no more deplorable than National Review's record on these same issues.

Comments

nobody who has seriously examined the man and his political career believes that Reagan is a bigot.

I thought the issue was not whether Reagan was a bigot, but whether he casually tapped into bigotry for political advantage - that latter is demonstrably true.

Oddly enough, there's a current eerie parallel with a certain unnammed politician (the only one who can save America!) who's also tapping into bigotry, sending certain clear signals, while his devoted followers frantically spin, denying the obvious, and accuse those who point out the obvious of engaging in smears (rather than asking the candidate to - I don't know - return the money).

Posted by SoCalJustice | November 14, 2007 10:34 AM

Forget it Matt. These guys don't have enough of a "moral compass" to know when they should be ashamed. They want wealth and power for their class, and they don't care about much else.

Posted by David in NY | November 14, 2007 10:34 AM

Having examined Reagan's public record, and having lived as an adult voter throughout the same era, I am comfortable in saying that Reagan, without a doubt, was a rascist bigot.

Posted by ken | November 14, 2007 10:35 AM

The Neshoba County evidence clearly supports the real question that SoCalJustice points out: "whether he casually tapped into bigotry for political advantage - that latter is demonstrably true."

Remember the Neshoba context. Carter had won the whole South and border states in 1976, except Virginia, and Reagan had to win some of them in 1980. So the very first thing he did was to go to the murderous center of the segregationist movement and state his allegiance to "states' rights," which had been a pro-segregationist term even since Strom Thurmond won Mississippi for the "States' Rights Democratic Party" in 1948. A pox on these ignorant, deceitful apologists for Reagan.

Posted by David in NY | November 14, 2007 10:41 AM

National Review, 1957:

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal— is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

Posted by Neil the Ethical Werewolf | November 14, 2007 10:43 AM

Again that qualifier "serious." Which would presumably include Dinesh "Osama Bin Laden has a point!" D'Souza.

Posted by Jim M | November 14, 2007 10:43 AM

One thing that I notice, standing just over the border and watching the Great American Denunciation Game, is Rule 2:

Rule 2.1.a - If a Republican does, says or believes something loathsome, it is permitted to be mentioned once and denounced once. Any further negative mention of it is an unwarrantable liberty.
Rule 2.1.b - The limitation found in 2.1.a does not apply to contesting the act or defence of the act, both of which can continue indefinitely.
Rule 2.1.c - Rebuttals of any contestation or defence of the act by mentioning the act or providing further evidence for it are not permitted, pursuant to 2.1.a and 2.1.b.

Rule 2.2.a - If a Democrat does, says or believes something loathsome, it is permitted to be mentioned indefinitely and denounced forever. Any restriction of that right is an unwarrantable liberty.
Rule 2.2.b - The lack of objective truth or even existence of the act alleged in 2.2.a shall not be deemed a bar to the rights exercised under 2.2.a.
Rule 2.2.c - The lack of objective truth or even existence of the act alleged in 2.2.a and the exercise of the rights found therein or 2.2.b shall not be deemed a waiver of the restrictions provided for under 2.2.a nor shall it be deemed to create a right of rebuttal to rights exercised under 2.2.b.

Posted by seeker6079 | November 14, 2007 10:44 AM

As to the question of whether Reagan was a racist or not...

You personally may not have anything against blacks; you may like and respect them and see them as your equals and just like you. But if you go out to a bunch of racists at the site of their most cherished murders and say, in effect, "I'm with you", then you are a racist. Period.

The subjective cannot salvage the objective.

Posted by seeker6079 | November 14, 2007 10:48 AM

am i the only one to notice that they refer to reagan in the present tense. i know they want him to run every election but this is getting a little sad.

Posted by ben | November 14, 2007 10:50 AM

"his record on civil rights issues, a record that I find deplorable, though no more deplorable than National Review's record on these same issues."

a record which provides ample evidence of the bigotry of both reagan and the national review.

Posted by kid bitzer | November 14, 2007 10:51 AM

1. I don't have a problem with saying that Reagan was probably somewhat involved at one point in the "Southern Strategy."

2. It is also true that everything that is known about him personally indicates that he bore no animus to those of other races. We know about his parents and the football players. We know that he was a good friend of Willie Brown (seriously!).

3. I suppose if you wanted to analogize: you could compare him to Dubya's (only in this respect!) personal treatment of gays as compared to his politics.

Posted by Nathan | November 14, 2007 10:52 AM

Politicians from both parties will usually say whatever it takes to get elected by the various constituencies. (Obama seems to be a rare exception to this rule.) It's more germane, if less morally satisfying, to examine Reagan's record while in office. And by that standard...he was effectively a bigoted old cuss. Not to mention a stupid, phlegmatic old cuss.

Posted by Bill | November 14, 2007 10:52 AM

to be fair to NR, they have explicitly stated that they were wrong on the civil rights movement.

Posted by Nathan | November 14, 2007 10:54 AM

This is a dodge. For one thing, it would hardly be shocked for a white man born in 1911 to have held some prejudiced views about African-Americans at some point in his life.

It would hardly be shocking for a white man born in 1981 to have held "some prejudiced views about African-Americans" at some point in his life. In fact, I'd be shocked if a white man born in either 1911 or 1981 hold absolutely no prejudiced views about African-Americans.

Posted by Al | November 14, 2007 11:02 AM

I thought the issue was not whether Reagan was a bigot, but whether he casually tapped into bigotry for political advantage - that latter is demonstrably true.

As is the case with every single politician of both parties ever to have run for office.

The real question is whether Reagan did so in a manner worse than other politicians. And there isn't any evidence that I've seen that that's the case.

Posted by Al | November 14, 2007 11:07 AM

Sequence of events:

1. Paul Krugman argues in his new book that the salient political shift which led to the ascendancy of the Republican Party was the switch of Southern white men to the GOP after 1965, due to the "Southern strategy"'s appeal to racism. Among many other things, Krugman notes the racial tinge in Reagan's campaigns, including his "states' rights" speech at Neshoba in 1980.

2. David Brooks claims that Reagan's mention of "states' rights" at Neshoba was just an accident and that Reagan didn't openly appeal to racism in that speech.

3. David Brooks is roundly refuted by a series of columnists and academic historians.

4. Mark Hemingway retorts that nobody seriously thinks Reagan was a bigot.

If I understand this correctly, the argument is that the conservative revolution's electoral success was not rooted in Southern racism because Ronald Reagan was not a bigot? QED?

Posted by brooksfoe | November 14, 2007 11:10 AM

As is the case with every single politician of both parties ever to have run for office.

Every single one? Wow. A sweeping condemnation.

The real question is whether Reagan did so in a manner worse than other politicians. And there isn't any evidence that I've seen that that's the case.

So every single candidate in both parties that has ever run for office has tapped into bigotry on the same level as going to a county fair in Mississipi and speaking in racially charged code?

Sure.

Posted by SoCalJustice | November 14, 2007 11:13 AM

During the civil rights era the Democratic Party made a choice to become the party of equal rights and the Republic Party made the choice to become the party opposed to equal rights.

If you were a bigot you would have become increasingly uncomfortable with the Democrats and increasingly comfortable with the Republicas. This was due to not only to the diverging rhetoric of the two parties but due to the diverging policies. This is why rascist bigots are typical of the right wing conservatives in this country.

Put simply the Democrats were the good guys and the Republicas were the bad guys. This is still true today with regard to racial matters.

Posted by ken | November 14, 2007 11:15 AM

I guess nobody else posting on this or other sites on this issue was living in California in the early 60's. Somebody should pay attention to the significance of the (clearly racist) opposition to the Rumford Act (California fair housing) and proposition 14 (the initiative repeal of it) in creating the atmosphere that enabled Reagan (in fact a fairly competent governor, if a lousy president) to beat Pat Brown, arguably the best governor of any state in the 20th century, in the 1966 gubernatorial election.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | November 14, 2007 11:20 AM

In this case -- and especially in the case of the uberboys at the Corner -- it takes one to not know one.

Posted by gregor | November 14, 2007 11:33 AM

But but but, he was friends with Pearl Bailey!

Posted by cb | November 14, 2007 12:19 PM

Al quotes and writes: " 'I thought the issue was not whether Reagan was a bigot, but whether he casually tapped into bigotry for political advantage - that latter is demonstrably true.'

As is the case with every single politician of both parties ever to have run for office.

The real question is whether Reagan did so in a manner worse than other politicians. And there isn't any evidence that I've seen that that's the case."

You mean there's no evidence that you would accept. You're an apologist for bigots, Al, and you always will be. You could watch video of Reagan burning a cross on Bill Cosby's lawn and you'd say he was just trying to keep warm.

Reagan probably was not a rabid bigot himself, but he damn well gave aid and comfort to plenty of them. As for your "every single politician" line, you're completely full of elephant poop.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 14, 2007 1:01 PM

It is completely unfair and out of bounds for anyone to presume to remember any actual facts with regard to Ronald Reagan, his staff, or his activities in office.

This country was doing just fine falsely remembering Reagan as the man who dug the Grand Canyon, invented the automobile, and single-handedly destroyed the Nazis and the Soviets with one pistol, two bullets, and a winning smile.

Why would anyone want to ruin that?

Posted by El Cid | November 14, 2007 1:03 PM

I don't think it's fair to infer that Goldwater was a bigot. That is part of Matt's premise here.

Posted by edmundburkenator | November 14, 2007 1:24 PM

"I don't think it's fair to infer that Goldwater was a bigot."

If you are opposed to laws (i.e. civil rights laws) that prohibit enforced separate drinking fountains, public bathrooms, etc. for black people, you're a bigot. And an asshole. Even if you remember your mom on her birthday.

Posted by BlueStreak | November 14, 2007 1:39 PM

I thought the issue was not whether Reagan was a bigot, but whether he casually tapped into bigotry for political advantage - that latter is demonstrably true.

Mm-hm. Which would make him a, yeah, you got it, bigot.

Oh, and pay no attention to the paid shills.

Posted by ed | November 14, 2007 1:41 PM

Shorter Mark Hemingway: "Reagan was no more of a racist than the rest of us conservatives."

Shorter Krugman/blogosphere/assorted non-racist people: "Precisely."

Posted by Chris | November 14, 2007 1:45 PM

Reagan wasn't a RACIST bigot per se -- he simply hated poor people. And the thought of being one.

Posted by Don Williams | November 14, 2007 1:59 PM

The real question is whether Reagan did so in a manner worse than other politicians. And there isn't any evidence that I've seen that that's the case.

I'm guessing you mean Republican politicians since Democrats, other than Dixiecrats, were the party that supported civil rights, at least by the time Reagan was speechifying about states' rights in Mississippi. As Krugman and Herbert noted, Congress overrode some of his vetoes, such as his veto of sanctions on apartheid South Africa, so a fair number of Republicans were better than him on these issues too (not sure how many since Democrats were not too far from a supermajority in those years).

Posted by ibid | November 14, 2007 2:01 PM

What the National Review means is that Reagan wasn't an unpleasant, socially-graceless, slavering bigot. His bigotry was pleasantly diffused around other platitudes.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 14, 2007 3:11 PM

BlueStreak, I'm sure you know that Goldwater integrated the National Guard in his state long before other states and supported other Civil Rights legislation.

Don't be so quick to categorize people because they were on the wrong side of this particular piece of legislation out of concerns for its constitutionality (related to powers of commerce).

Posted by edmundburkenator | November 14, 2007 3:13 PM

BTW, if the National Review and its elk would quit trying to turn Reagan into the be-all and end-all of human existence, the people irked by the truth about Reagan wouldn't have so many opportunities to say "Yes, but ..."

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 14, 2007 3:13 PM

ROFL. White folks' "plausible deniability" defense whittled down to its core: You can never prove what a person thinks, therefore you can never know that someone is a bigot.

It's hiliarious in its asininity, to actually maintain that internal states can be so thoroughly divorced from the outward representation in behavior. Note that mutatis mutandis, you can never know:

if somebody likes you,
if somebody thinks you're funny
or pretty much ANYTHING about another person.

I love it - let's christen this "The Cartesian Defense of Racism".

Posted by sherifffruitfly | November 14, 2007 3:14 PM

What exactly is it that a "serious examination" of Reagan and his career would turn up to convince us that he wasn't a racist bigot? We've already got plenty of evidence on the other side just from a quick look at some well-known facts.

Posted by SqueakyRat | November 14, 2007 3:27 PM

Jeffrey Davis writes: "BTW, if the National Review and its elk would quit trying to turn Reagan into the be-all and end-all of human existence, the people irked by the truth about Reagan wouldn't have so many opportunities to say "Yes, but ...""

I didn't even know the National Review had an elk, but that does begin to explain the huge piles of shit that contribute to it.

(That one over there with a little blood on it is called "Jonah.")

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 14, 2007 3:46 PM

"nobody who has seriously examined the man and his political career believes that Reagan is a bigot."

Nobody who knows that Reagan is dead believes that Reagan *is* a bigot. The question is whether he *was* a bigot.

Posted by K | November 14, 2007 3:52 PM

"Sequence of events:

1. Paul Krugman argues in his new book that the salient political shift which led to the ascendancy of the Republican Party was the switch of Southern white men to the GOP after 1965, due to the "Southern strategy"'s appeal to racism. Among many other things, Krugman notes the racial tinge in Reagan's campaigns, including his "states' rights" speech at Neshoba in 1980."

And Krugman's wishful thinking and self-serving take on the last few decades of American history is risible. Here's David Kennedy on Krugman's book in the NYT:

"For this dismal state of affairs [the Reagan realignment] the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”

A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety."

Ah yes, it wasn't the Democratic Party's embrace of abortion on demand, its post-Vietnam paralysis, its coddling of criminals, etc. that fueled the Republican ascendancy. No, it was because southern whites began voting Republican, and because of Rambo. Got it. So that's why Reagan won over 500 electoral votes in 1984 in capturing 49 states. Because he had successfully cultivated the inner racist in most Americans, and they voted accordingly. Reality-based!

2. "David Brooks claims that Reagan's mention of "states' rights" at Neshoba was just an accident and that Reagan didn't openly appeal to racism in that speech."

Wrong. David Brooks gave ample evidence that, contra Krugman, Reagan did not deliberately open his general election campaign by courting the racist vote. As Brooks wrote, in the first week after Reagan's nomination, he visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital, he met with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines, and he gave a policy speech at the Urban League.

His speech in Philadelpia was: "...mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

Wow, what a terrilbe thing to say. Clearly this speech was written by a member of the Klan.

The reality-based crowd pretends that Reagan did not actually visit the Urban League, Vernon Jordan, etc. (or that if he did, his single line at Philadelphia somehow overshadows this) and that his line promoting federalism and limited government in Philadelphia was in fact a sign to the Klan that he was really on their side. Splendid.

Krugman proceeded to ignore Brooks's points and shift to other examples of where Reagan allegedly said or did racist things throughout his political career. But given Krugman's sneering non-response to Brooks on the issue at hand, it would be better to read from someone who has some intellectual honesty and integrity, rather than from someone who actually thinks that racism is the sole reason why Reagan was so popular.

3. "David Brooks is roundly refuted by a series of columnists and academic historians."

Not on the issue at hand, he wasn't. None of them responded to Brooks's points about Reagan's other stops that first week of the campaign. To suggest that visiting Vernon Jordan in the hospital, the Urban League, and the boards of Ebony and Jet is part of some sort of effort to court the racist vote is bizarre.

4. "Mark Hemingway retorts that nobody seriously thinks Reagan was a bigot."

Not exactly. He wrote that no one who has seriously examined Reagan's life and record would conclude that he was a bigot. One thing that Matt did not include in the pasted item is the fact that Krugman was part of the White House's Council of Economic Advisors in 1982, under President Reagan. If Reagan was the bigot that Krugman claims he is, then why didn't Krugman resign from his lofty position?

"If I understand this correctly, the argument is that the conservative revolution's electoral success was not rooted in Southern racism because Ronald Reagan was not a bigot? QED?"

This latest spat by lefties about racism being the primary reason why conservatives have had some success over the last few decades is pathetic. Reagan beat Carter easily, trounced Mondale, and left office with very high approval ratings, while lefties, who cannot bear to consider the notion that the American people might have actually preferred conservative policies at this point, respond by chalking it up to racism. This is absolutely childish. In this mode of "thinking" no one could possibly deviate from liberalism unless they were evil, and Republicans just happened to capitalize on an excessively evil moment in American history with regards to race.

Alright fine. If I wanted to play this lame game, I could remind everyone that when racism was much more prevalent, say back before WWII, Democrats were only too happy to have racists as part of their New Deal coaltion. A coalition that brought us a larger government, Social Security, stricter environmental laws, etc. Krugman cherishes this part of American history, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the coalition that brought us the New Deal included lots of racists, who had historically been comfortable in the Democratic party. The Klan was originally the terrorist wing of the Democratic party after all.

And it won't do to make the party/ideology distinction either, as progressives (see most of the Ivy League schools) enthusiastically advocated eugenics in the early part of the 20th century. Woodrow Wilson was another racist progressive. But this game is tiresome, and again, childish.

Posted by torourke | November 14, 2007 3:56 PM

And don't forget, he signed the Mulford Act in response to the Black Panthers.

Posted by Royko | November 14, 2007 4:02 PM

Now that the entire Reaganite movement that has dominated US politics for 30 years is finally falling apart after an extended decay, it's going to be really weird watching all these right wing turds who worshipped Saint Ronnie freak out because no one believes in their myths anymore.

"We'll always have Neshoba..."

Posted by El Cid | November 14, 2007 4:12 PM

Strawman arguments, false dichotomies, red herrings, deliberate misinterpretation...I don't think torourke left a single logical fallacy unused in his post. Bravo!

Posted by C.L. | November 14, 2007 4:12 PM

Here's a snippet from Gerard Alexander's article in the Claremont Review of Books (2004) that addresses much of the mud-slinging in here:

The mythmakers [people like Krugman] typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. To be persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which is which. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

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."

It's also name-calling. If people on the left really think that opposition to busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform can only be held for racist reasons, then it's not at all surprising that ordinary Americans rejected them at the polls. If you despise the average American, don't be surprised when you lose come election day.

Posted by torourke | November 14, 2007 4:13 PM

Thanks C.L. If you want to provide any examples, that would be helpful.

Posted by torourke | November 14, 2007 4:18 PM

Personally, I believethat while Reagan wasn't a racist himself, he did use racially charged code words and symbols to get elected. This makes him just another politician with a pragmatic (read: cynical) streak. While that's not terribly shocking in and of itself, it does tear down some of the Reagan myth. Given that most conservatives hew to mythology and not history, that is practically a capital offense to them, hence the outrage.

Posted by Shawn | November 14, 2007 4:40 PM

What the National Review means is that Reagan wasn't an unpleasant, socially-graceless, slavering bigot. His bigotry was pleasantly diffused around other platitudes.

IOW, his racial bigotry was, on the whole, of the Northern, plutocratic variety (reflected in the Ethical Werewolf's NR quote, above), rather than the Southern, swaggering type.

Posted by urbino | November 14, 2007 5:01 PM

"Barry Goldwater's anti-civil rights presidential campaign"

Strictly speaking, Barry Goldwater wasn't against civil rights. He was against the pretense that you have a civil right to compel another private citizen to hire you or serve you dinner. You do not.

Read the 14th amendment some time. On the face of it, it does not apply to, and does not extend to Congress authority over, private acts, only acts of government. That's just flat out what the words mean, no matter how much you might wish otherwise, and no matter how willing judges are to pretend otherwise.

Now, somebody who understands what the term "civil rights" actually refers to, (Our rights relative to government.) might think that a restaurant owner was entitled, as a matter of right, not to serve blacks. But still think that refusal despicable. A bigot, on the other hand, would think that the restaurant owner shouldn't serve blacks. And would, historically, probably be willing to outlaw serving them.

It's a sad reflection on how the civil rights movement went wrong, that we went straight from legally mandated racial discrimination, to legally prohibited racial discrimination, (And later segued back into mandating it again...) without pausing to see what people would do if they were free.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 14, 2007 5:55 PM

I could remind everyone that when racism was much more prevalent, say back before WWII, Democrats were only too happy to have racists as part of their New Deal coaltion.

And the Republicans were against racism before they were for it.

Unfortunately for the GOP, that means the Dems moved in the right direction (even did it knowing it would cost them votes, as LBJ famously observed), while the GOP moved in the wrong direction.

Racism was, as you observe, "much more prevalent" before WWII precisely because the Democratic Party eventually -- belatedly -- threw its weight behind the Civil Rights Movement.

You're right that nobody has a clean history on race in America. But at least the Dems moved in the right direction, not the wrong one. The GOP used to have this issue right (or closer to it, anyway), but made a cynical calculation that going retrograde would be electorally beneficial. It is the tragic moral failure that made your party what it is today, it is an ongoing failure, and yes, Reagan participated in it.

Posted by urbino | November 14, 2007 6:59 PM

I well remember the era. Reagan along with the entire Republican party embraced racsism. There is no getting around this.

Bigots were made welcome in the Republican Party by the rhotoric of the leaders, like Reagan, and were comforted by its policies which were in opposition to any attempt to ensure equal rights to all citizens.

Bigoted rascists felt threatened and the republican party gave them a haven and respectability beyond what a Wallace third party could offer.

Posted by ken | November 14, 2007 7:30 PM

The Democratic party is "much less racist" today, because you've defined racism for your own purposes, so that it doesn't apply to anything YOU want to do. Racial quotas? Not racist if they're the quotas YOU want. Blacks spewing racial epithets? Not racist, 'minorities' can't be "racist". And so on, and so forth.

If the public actually accepted these tendentious definitions that get you off the hook, you'd have nothing to fear from the likes of Ward Connerly, and his ballot proposals. But the public is perfectly capable of recognizing that hiring and admissions on the basis of race are racist even if it's a racism Democrats approve of.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 14, 2007 7:47 PM

If you want to provide any examples, that would be helpful.

Well, for one thing, you conflate what Krugman wrote about the Republican party with what he wrote about Reagan specifically. He didn't say Reagan won because he made racist gestures, he said he embraced the racially divisive strategy that made the GOP the dominant party in the South. Just because Reagan would have won without the South doesn't mean the party would have had the same success without the Southern strategy, or that Reagan didn't contribute to it.

After that I decided not to waste my time reading the rest.

Posted by ibid | November 14, 2007 7:57 PM

The Democratic party is "much less racist" today, because you've defined racism for your own purposes, so that it doesn't apply to anything YOU want to do.

What a knucklehead.

The Democratic Party has, if I may reclaim my own words, moved in the right direction on race because it no longer imposes Jim Crow, winks at violence against blacks, works to disenfranchise blacks, endorses racial jury rigging, or generally oppresses blacks. The Democratic Party has moved in the right direction on race because, at least at the national level, it no longer welcomes the likes of Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or George Wallace. Bob Byrd has remained a Democrat, but at the expense of renouncing his previous racism. The Democratic Party has moved in the right direction on race because it now tries to undo some of the damage it did to black people for all those decades before the Civil Rights Movement.

The GOP, meanwhile, has moved in the wrong direction on race because it welcomed the likes of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, continues to endorse them, and continues to trade on the same symbolism they used to speak to racist whites. The GOP has moved in the wrong direction on race because, where it once worked to enfranchise blacks, it now does everything it can to disenfranchise them. The GOP has moved in the wrong direction on race because, where it once appealed to "the better angels" of people's nature, it now appeals to their fears and prejudices. The GOP has moved in the wrong direction on race because, where it once worked to promote the education and professional advancement of blacks to help counteract the country's history, it now fights those same efforts.

Indeed, under the view of the modern GOP, even Republican President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would be anathema, since it wasn't "color blind" -- the new language of choice for keeping the Negroes in their place. Forty acres and a mule would be anathema because it was a racially preferential intervention in the free market and, in good Goldwater fashion, dependent on an unwarranted expansion of the Commerce Clause. Actually, virtually every Reconstruction GOP policy aimed at helping the freed slaves would be denounced from the mountain tops by the modern GOP.

That, you knucklehead, is why the Dems have moved in the right direction on race, while the GOP has moved in the wrong direction.

Posted by urbino | November 14, 2007 8:26 PM

"The Democratic Party has, if I may reclaim my own words, moved in the right direction on race because it no longer imposes Jim Crow, winks at violence against blacks, works to disenfranchise blacks, endorses racial jury rigging, or generally oppresses blacks."

Pathetic. You've proven my point about defining Democratic racism away: Do you really think only blacks can be the victims of racism? Do you think anything goes as long as it's not meant to harm blacks?

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 14, 2007 9:03 PM

Democratic Party has moved in the right direction on race because, at least at the national level, it no longer welcomes the likes of Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or George Wallace.

OR Ronald Reagan. I'm a little surprised nobody mentioned the fact that Reagan switched from the Democrats to the Republicans at about the same time as Ol' Strom did.

Reagan is to Thurmond what Intelligent Design is to Creationism.

Posted by Just Karl | November 14, 2007 9:13 PM

Ibid wrote:

Well, for one thing, you conflate what Krugman wrote about the Republican party with what he wrote about Reagan specifically. He didn't say Reagan won because he made racist gestures, he said he embraced the racially divisive strategy that made the GOP the dominant party in the South. Just because Reagan would have won without the South doesn't mean the party would have had the same success without the Southern strategy, or that Reagan didn't contribute to it."

This is complete nonsense. So Reagan did not make any racist gestures, he just embraced a racially divisive strategy that was able to flip the South to the GOP at the presidential level (the South remained Democratic at the state level) while somehow winning the North and West too. I guess he was just magically able to communicate secret Klan-like messages that revved up the South while keeping these messages hidden from the North and West. What Reagan had to offer these latter states that led them to overwhelmingly support him, welI I guess lefties like Krugman would just rather not think about that. It might force them to confront the fact that everyday Americans increasingly rejected liberalism throughout the 1970's and 1980's. No, it's much easier to suggest that the people on the other side were evil racists, and somehow Reagan was able to tap into this to the tune of 49 states and 500+ electoral votes.

"After that I decided not to waste my time reading the rest."

And yet, you read my most recent post. But you skipped everything in between? Well gee, that's too bad. I guess you'll be spared from some actual thinking of why Republicans have been the dominant party over the last few decades. I mean, other than the notion that they're evil racists.

Posted by torourke | November 14, 2007 10:15 PM

Do you really think only blacks can be the victims of racism?

No. But aside from Native Americans, blacks are the only minority this country systematically, legally, institutionally, by-every-mechanism-available discriminated against over the course of centuries. Therefore, that is where our primary debt lies.

Moreover, national political appeals based on racism have been -- again, with the exception of Native Americans -- based entirely on racism against blacks. There were electoral appeals to prejudice against the Irish, and local ones out West against the Chinese and against Mexicans, but none were on anything like the scale of such appeals to prejudice against blacks. And unlike Irish-Americans and Chinese-Americans, African-Americans are still suffering the consequences of both America's historic bigotry against them and the GOP's continuing perpetuation of it (to which Ronald Reagan was a Republican contributor, whatever his private, personal views might or might not have been).

Sorry to burst your bubble, but no national campaign has ever been won on appeals to fear and hatred of whites. I know a lot of folks on your distant end of the political spectrum like to think the Left has been doing that for the past 30 years, but, bless your poor bleeding hearts, it just ain't so.

Someday you'll all be big boys and girls, and realize that.

Posted by urbino | November 14, 2007 10:26 PM

I don't see how a Republican can argue that his party did not pursue strategy that used race as a wedge issue when the Republican National Committee chairman admitted it and apologized for it. The Democratic party's record on race is far from clean, but in the last 40 years, it's light years ahead of the Republican party's.

Posted by Gus | November 14, 2007 10:34 PM

I wasn't saying he didn't make racist gestures, I was saying he didn't win just because he made racist gestures. I can see how my wording was imprecise there.

On the larger issue, it would certainly be possible to make coded racist appeals in the South and still win in other parts of the country. Racist appeals didn't have the same effect in other parts of the country, but racial equality was not a top priority for most people either, even if they were generally in favor of it.

Different people vote for the same candidate for different reasons. Some people rejected liberalism. Some people were disappointed with Carter and Mondale. Some people liked Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign. And some people saw opposition to voting rights and praise of states' rights in Philadelphia and knew that Reagan and the GOP was on their side when it came to issues of race.

Yes, I read your one sentence post after I skipped the rest of your lengthy first post. Not sure what you are suggesting by pointing that out. I'm sure your extended thoughts would have been revelatory though. My loss I guess.

Posted by ibid | November 14, 2007 11:02 PM

"But aside from Native Americans, blacks are the only minority this country systematically, legally, institutionally, by-every-mechanism-available discriminated against over the course of centuries."

Not true, (The Chinese had it bad for a long while, and still do when it comes to admissions quotas at a lot of colleges.) but not particularly relevant, either, unless you're going to cough up some several hundred year old slaves, and some several hundred year old slave owners to pay them restitution.

What IS relevant is that we've got real, honest to goodness racial discrimination in hiring and school admissions, happening to people TODAY. And it's primarily Democrats who are defending it. Insisting on it, and branding anybody who objects a "racist".

Look, I live in a state where slavery was never legal, that fought on the Union side of the civil war, am descended of immigrants who came to this country long after that civil war, and I categorically reject the idea that I owe anybody anything over sins committed before my birth by other people's ancestors. I'm not billing the British for starving my folks out of Ireland during the potato famine, anybody who wants to bill me for the lingering consequences of slavery can stuff their demands where the sun don't shine.

As I've said, this only makes sense if you embrace a kind of crude racial collective guilt that is insanely dangerous if it ever becomes popularly accepted.

You want my solution? You don't end a feud by evening up the score, you end it by ceasing to shoot. The solution to racism is to not be racist, and to shun anyone who persists at it.

NOT to pretend that racism is alright if you mean well by it, and that the people suffering the collateral damage from your discrimination are bigots if they complain.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 14, 2007 11:15 PM

What IS relevant is that we've got real, honest to goodness racial discrimination in hiring and school admissions, happening to people TODAY.

What job did you lose for being white? If that happened to you in this country, you are just a complete loser and need to suck it up.

Posted by Ed Marshall | November 14, 2007 11:33 PM

Racist appeals didn't have the same effect in other parts of the country,

Where do you get this idea? Reagan was twice elected Governor of California in part by openly opposing civil rights and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Reagan opposed "forced busing", which were the code words in the North for those who resisted integration of the schools. It's fairly evident that Reagan appealed to racists where ever he could. You're right to claim that the South didn't play a key role in getting him elected President, but you are wrong to believe that his appeals to racists were overlooked in the North and West. They were obviously quite successful and he used them throughout his career.

Posted by Just Karl | November 14, 2007 11:38 PM

On the larger issue, it would certainly be possible to make coded racist appeals in the South and still win in other parts of the country. Racist appeals didn't have the same effect in other parts of the country, but racial equality was not a top priority for most people either, even if they were generally in favor of it.

I haven't been reading torourke's longer comments, either, but if he's suggesting that appeals by Reagan to Southern racism would've cost him large numbers of votes in the North, it's a silly argument.

Racism was and is as much a problem in the North as in the South. The difference -- since the end of Jim Crow, anyway -- is merely a stylistic one.

That's my experience, anyway, from having lived in lots of different parts of the country and visited many more. I saw more open racism in my first month of living in NYC than I did in the previous 20 yrs. growing up in the South. I encountered redneckery in Illinois every bit as ripe as in Mississippi. Michigan, too. A quick look at the Northern experiences of Southern blacks who moved to Northern cities to escape Jim Crow confirms that.

Swaggering, boldfaced appeals to racism that might play in the South would be considered impolite and inappropriate in the North, but not necessarily wrong on the substance. The kind of symbolic, encoded racism Reagan engaged in at Neshoba might've cost him a few popular votes in the North, but not enough to cost him any electoral votes. And having grown up in IL and Iowa, he knew that.

Posted by urbino | November 14, 2007 11:41 PM

Krugman responds to more Reagan-worshiping idiocy:

November 14, 2007, 6:20 pm
Signs of desperation

This [Hemingway in NRO] represents a level of misunderstanding that has to be deliberate:

Enough already. Nobody believes Reagan is a bigot.

That is, of course, not the question. Reagan’s personal attitude is of no consequence. The question is whether he deliberately appealed to bigots, as a political tactic. And he did.

Posted by El Cid | November 14, 2007 11:53 PM

I categorically reject the idea that I owe anybody anything over sins committed before my birth by other people's ancestors.

Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, Christ, what's wrong with those people? If they can't overcome 300 yrs. of pervasive, legalized discrimination (ca. 1640-1965) in a generation or two, clearly their's something wrong with them.

No, wait. I'm not with you. Your reaction is, again, that of a petulant child.

I don't know how old you are, but the sins you refer to certainly didn't stop before my birth, in the late 1960s. Moreover, they weren't committed by "other people's ancestors," and it matters not one bit when your family got here or that you live in a state that never legalized slavery. Those sins were committed by America; therefore, as an American, you do have the responsibility for trying to set things right, along with all the rest of us Americans.

We as a country committed these sins, and we as a country have to try to help put things right.

Posted by urbino | November 15, 2007 12:01 AM

torourke:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - 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 byproduct 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'm 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 'Nigger, nigger.'

Reagan didn't go to the Urban League because he expected to win black votes. He was neither a lunatic nor a political novice. He went to the Urban League to do two things: first, to quiet cries that he was running a racist campaign. As the character in Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" puts it: Lindbergh doesn't go to the conservative Southern Rabbi to court the Jewish vote. He goes to the Rabbi in order to "kosher Lindbergh for the goys" -- to make it okay for goys who don't consider themselves anti-semites to vote for him. Reagan wanted to make it okay for non-racist whites to vote for him -- and, as we can still see in this debate, he succeeded.

Second, Reagan wanted to force Carter to campaign for the black vote. Blacks in 1980 were unhappy with Carter. They had a recession, and no new big government jobs or aid programs; Carter was fighting inflation, and had cut the budget deficit in half by cutting spending. But for Carter to campaign for the black vote, he had to do and say a lot of things that would hurt him with Southern whites.

Your point here is basically that you agree with Atwater -- that by making racial hostility coded, one is effectively doing away with it. I would say that the fact that George Bush, running on the same strategy 24 years later, still handily wins white Southern males and gets under 10% of the black vote shows that turning racial animosity coded does not in fact end it. And I don't think Lee Atwater, a brilliant man, actually believed what he was saying, and I don't think he cared, though he repented of it on his deathbed.

Again, the question is not whether Reagan was a racist. The question is whether the Reagan campaign run by Lee Atwater deliberately took advantage of white Southern racism. Nobody can seriously believe that it didn't. From TIME, at the time:

On his way home to California, Reagan stopped in Chicago for another bit of theater, this time a visit with Civil Rights Leader Jesse Jackson, a Carter supporter. Again, the basic plan backfired. After their private chat, Jackson escorted Reagan to his car. When they got within view of TV cameras, Jackson, an old showman himself, suddenly asked Reagan to repudiate the recent endorsement of him by the Ku Klux Klan. Reagan claimed ignorance of the endorsement (though it had been widely reported) and then said he had "no tolerance whatsoever for what the Klan represents."

But Reagan had no way to recover from Jackson's second maneuver: giving reporters a detailed critique of the candidate's speech to the Urban League. Jackson rapped Reagan, who wants to transfer many federal functions to state and local governments, for not recognizing the fact that the Federal Government has been black America's chief bulwark against discrimination. Said Jackson: "For black people, 'states' rights' has historically meant 'states' wrongs.' "

So don't claim he didn't know what it meant to say "states' rights" in Neshoba a few weeks later. He knew perfectly well what that meant to blacks. They'd just told him what it meant. He didn't care to listen.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 1:02 AM

To put this another way: 90 percent of black voters in 1980 voted for Carter. Was Ronald Reagan a dumb politician? An incompetent one? I don't think so.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 1:16 AM

Hey, Brett Bellmore --- before we get to the matter of you conflating "moving in the right direction on race" with "being absolutely perfect and living in a state of pure race-blindness," I just want to ask you, do you think that the perniciousness of the racism in affirmative action quotas is within an order of magnitude of the perniciousness of the racism in pre-Civil Rights-era America?

Posted by Gabbo | November 15, 2007 1:19 AM

GOP Head Apologizes for "Southern Strategy"

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong." - Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the GOP, July 14, 2005, speaking to the NAACP.

But of course Ronald Reagan going to the Neshoba County Fair and talking about "states' rights" couldn't have been any part of that Southern Strategy. That was just poor word choice.

You would have to be a fool to believe this stuff.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 5:31 AM

Can somebody explain to me how Goldwater integrated the Arizona national guard without being at any time a government official in Arizona? And did he integrate the guard prior to the integration of the armed forces by Truman? Or is the claim just that Arizona integrated its national guard prior to southern states?

Posted by IM | November 15, 2007 5:32 AM

Nobody has suffered from 300 years of pervasive, legal discrimination. In order to do that, you'd have to be 300 years old.

What blacks are suffering from today, and 300 years of pervasive, legal discrimination certainly contributed to it, is a damaged, self-destructive culture. That's why black immigrants from relatively poor countries do so much better than blacks who grew up locally, part of the American black culture: Because they're not self-sabotaged by a culture that disdains academic success, among other things.

The bottom line here is that most of what's holding blacks down today is not racism, and can't be addressed by fighting racism. In fact, that pretty much gets things backwards. For other discriminated against minorities, such as the Irish, the end of discrimination didn't cause success, it resulted from success. This will be true for blacks, too.

This presents a real problem for Democrats. This multi-cultural obsession with the idea that there are no bad cultures prevents you from acknowledging the nature of the problem, let alone proposing effective solutions. You're absolutely committed to finding the cause of African-Americans' present-day problems outside them, and addressing them by changing other peoples' behavior.

And that just isn't going to work.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 15, 2007 7:07 AM

Brett Bellmore: you are defeating yourself handily. The claim is: "The GOP deliberately exploited Southern white racism by opposing Democratic support for black civil rights. Reagan's 'states' rights' speech at the Neshoba county fair was an instance of this strategy. The shift of Southern whites from the Democrats to the GOP is the single largest factor in Republican Presidential victories from 1968 to 2004."

Your response is: "Black people have no one but themselves to blame for their problems."

Clearly, racial polarization is no longer an issue in the US.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 15, 2007 8:30 AM

Part of what constituted "success" for Irish-Americans was that they stopped classifying themselves as different from WASPs and starting aggressively classifying themselves as white. Similarly, Jewish-Americans were partly able to succeed due to perceived whiteness, such as "think Yiddish, dress British." In addition, it's not like the Irish mob didn't exist as a social force to collect a lot of money illicitly into Irish hands. Talk to just about anyone over 45 in Boston about it and they'll have stories to tell (hell, the FBI worked with the Massachusetts Irish mob to help drive out the Italian mafia). A similar social change happened with Italian-Americans. When Italian-Americans were closer socially in the 19th-century to African-Americans (bound by ties of discrimination), Italian-Americans were the second-most commonly lynched ethnic group in America.

In addition, we shouldn't discount the role the mafia played also in gathering money into Italian hands. Even an anti-mafia guy like Giuliani had family that ran with the mob. Crime has played a larger role in solidifying certain families into positions of wealth (Kennedy and bootlegging, Forbes and opium, which you can actually get members of the Forbes family to admit to if you move in the right circles, etc.). However, it has only worked for groups that later became classified as white. Chris Rock probably put it best (paraphrasing) "In America, if you aren't white you can succeed. However, if anyone is harmed, you will be destroyed. Only the white man can profit from pain."

Posted by Reality Man | November 15, 2007 9:01 AM

Matt--

you should preserve emphasis in your quotations.

Posted by jayackroyd | November 15, 2007 11:00 AM

What a bozo. Hemingway provides us -- in his update -- with a crystalline example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy (actually a whole passle of fallacies roped into one big fallacous equivocaton). As explained by David Flew, who coined the term, it goes as follows:

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Press and Journal and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Press and Journal again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."

Posted by Sebastian Dangerfield | November 15, 2007 1:08 PM

Ibid:

Fair enough. I agree with most of what you wrote, and to the extent that Reagan courted the racist vote, then it's a black mark on his record and a shameful part of his legacy. I still think it's quite a bit cynical to view his speech at Philadelphia as proof positive that he set out to run a racist campaign given everything else he did that week. But he should have rejected the Klan endorsement right away instead of waiting to be challenged on it.

I think you understate though to a large degree the extent to which people were disgusted with Carter, but that's a more reasonable disagreement. My main problem is with people like Krugman who see the rise of conservatism only through the lens of the southern strategy, as if Reagan simply continued the policies of liberals like Carter but threw in a few coded racial appeals in order to be successful. Many Americans, and yes even Americans in the South, were fed up with stagflation, soaring crime rates, the Iranian humiliation, etc. They came to prefer Reagan's positions on these issues more than the policies of Carter and Mondale, and that is why Reagan was so overwhlemingly popular. In Krugman's world, the southern white male was all race all the time. The Cold War? The economy? Nah.

It oversimplifies the era and the South (I'm not even from there either), and it's irritating.

Posted by torourke | November 15, 2007 2:40 PM

Brooksfoe:

I'm not surprised you disagree with Brooks's take on the Philadelphia incident given your moniker. I still don't find the Philadelphia incident convincing, given that the quote was very consistent with his belief in limited government, a belief that he had held for decades in the mold of Goldwater (who believed in limited government but was not a racist). But there is other evidence, some of which you listed, that Reagan did court the racist vote throughout his career (not rejecting the Klan endorsement soon enough stands out), whether is was allowing surrogates to make the appeals or doing it so himself. And as I wrote above to Ibid, that stands as a black mark on his legacy.

The problem is what you write later: "The claim is: "The GOP deliberately exploited Southern white racism by opposing Democratic support for black civil rights.

It would be better if you substituted liberal for Democratic, since Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in larger percentages than Democrats did. So if this is a claim that you yourself make (this was a little unclear), then it's wrong.

"Reagan's 'states' rights' speech at the Neshoba county fair was an instance of this strategy.

Again, I think you pointed to better instances of this strategy, but let's move on...

The shift of Southern whites from the Democrats to the GOP is the single largest factor in Republican Presidential victories from 1968 to 2004."

This is flat out ludicrous. NIxon won 49 states in 1972 and again Reagan won 49 states in 1984. The GOP would have won those elections even without the South, and it is mostly because America was rejecting far-left Democrats, period.

Your response is: "Black people have no one but themselves to blame for their problems."

Clearly, racial polarization is no longer an issue in the US."

No, it is still obviously an issue in the US. But what are you saying? Are you suggesting that white racism is the primary reason why blacks continue to lag behind everyone else? I don't want to misinterpret you here.

Posted by torourke | November 15, 2007 3:24 PM

Urbino,

I'm interested in what you think we need to do in order to atone for the sins of our fathers. What do you think we need to do lift black America out of its doldrums? More affirmative action? More government? I'm curious.

What can we do to reverse the 70% illegitimacy rate in black America, that is the primary cause of black poverty? It was less than 30% in the 1960's, when there was much more racism, so we can't chalk up the problem of illegitimacy in black America to white racism. Asian-Americans, who are the highest earners in this country, have illegitimacy rates in the single digits. It seems to me that we need black Americans to start approaching marriage and parenthood the same way that Asian-Americans do. But how do we do this? Do you think that government programs can solve the problems that stem from the fact that most black children growing up in our inner cities have no fathers? Blaming whitey and the GOP and the South only works for so long.

Posted by torourke | November 15, 2007 3:44 PM

Who were the ones who decided on segregated housing in cities where we now call black-majority areas "the inner city?" Oh yeah, white people. Even today inner-city economies are not integrated into the wider city and local economies, instead operating under a segregated system. Such economies have been denied entry into the local economy due to social factors. Sure African-American individuals who do things like abandon their children take their own share of responsibility for the poor socioeconomic status of black Americans in general today, but to claim that white racism isn't a major contributing factor is just nonsense. People with no connection to inner city communities underestimate the degree to which hopelessness, the belief that white America will never accept you that builds up with the many racial injustices on faces in life, is a contributing factor to social problems in the black community. Why do you think it is that people like Aaron MacGruder, who can be extremely self-critical when it comes to social problems among African-Americans, don't exactly let white racism off scot-free? We also shouldn't underestimate the role that the War on Drugs has taken its toll on inner city communities and economies. Think how many black men we have in prison on such BS crimes as "possession of a controlled substance [pot] with the intent to sell?" A lot of the black men in jail in America today aren't there for being assassins or serial killers or something, but for being caught with pot. You try getting hired for a good job when you're a black guy that just got out of prison for pot.

Posted by Reality Man | November 16, 2007 9:15 AM