As a former Republican, I can’t help noticing the dark irony in the abandonment of rogue Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy by Republican politicians and right-wing media figures on the heels of his incendiary comments last week about “the Negro.”
Bigotry is never funny, as Los Angeles Clippers owner — and (contrary to right-wing media misinformation) registered Republican — Donald Sterling has proven. However, one can’t help chuckling over the fact that right-wingers tried to wash their hands of Cliven the Cretinous just a few days after they celebrated a US Supreme Court ruling limiting affirmative-action efforts in higher education.
The two issues are connected, though not in the way one might think…
Younger readers of The BRAD BLOG may not be aware of just how contentious the issue of affirmative action was in the 1990s. While strong criticism — from right-wingers and even some “centrists” — of federal efforts to ameliorate past discrimination against non-whites was prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, it reached a fever pitch in the early 1990s, after the release of Shelby Steele’s anti-affirmative action book The Content of Our Character and affirmative-action opponent Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the US Supreme Court. The growing backlash against affirmative action consumed the GOP, outliers such as Colin Powell notwithstanding. Numerous legislative and court challenges to public-sector affirmative-action programs cropped up in the mid-1990s, many of which were supported by right-wing ideologues and interest groups; future Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) was one of the “funding fathers” of the anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 ballot initiative in California in 1996.
As a young conservative Republican, I was fully in favor of these anti-affirmative action efforts. At the time, I agreed wholeheartedly with Steele and his punditry pals Thomas Sowell and Jeff Jacoby that “quotas, set-asides and racial preferences” worsened racial tensions, filling working-class whites with resentment and filling people of color with defensiveness. I applauded when the late Boston talk-radio host David Brudnoy denounced affirmative action as “active retribution” against whites. In addition, I wrote numerous letters to the editor denouncing defenders of affirmative-action policies, one of which was published in the New York Times in 1997, just before my 20th birthday.
Five years later, when then-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) praised the segregationist campaign of 1948 third-party Presidential candidate and Senate colleague Strom Thurmond (R-NC), I was mortified; by spouting off, Lott had compromised the conservative case for colorblindness. Lott’s praise of Thurmond’s racist campaign set back the anti-affirmative-action cause, giving the impression that the political allies of affirmative-action opponents wanted to turn the clock back to the Jim Crow past, instead of moving forward to a truly colorblind future. I was not the only one to notice this problem: Abigail Thernstrom, then a fellow at the Koch Brothers-funded Manhattan Institute and the co-author of the controversial 1997 book America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, denounced Lott’s remarks in a December 2002 New York Times piece, strongly implying that Lott’s loose language would make it harder for Republicans to make a moral case against affirmative-action and in favor of private school vouchers.
I can’t imagine Thernstrom being pleased by the right-wing’s recent bonding with Bundy. (She certainly wasn’t pleased by the right’s obsession with the New Black Panther Party four years ago.) However, her 2002 logic certainly applies to 2014. How can the right proclaim a commitment to colorblindness one moment, and buddy up to Bundy, George Zimmerman and Donald Trump the next?
While the late Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY) had a number of flaws — climate-change denial among them — he at least understood that the GOP had to have some degree of credibility on racial issues in order to, you know, talk about them. Indeed, in a syndicated column written just a few months before his May 2009 passing, Kemp declared: “The party of Lincoln, (i.e., the GOP), needs to rethink and revisit its historic roots as a party of emancipation, liberation, civil rights and equality of opportunity for all.” Instead of doing so, of course, the party decided to embrace “birtherism,” voter suppression, and extremists such as Bundy.
The right’s self-created credibility issues aren’t going away anytime soon. Set aside race for a second, and ask yourself this: didn’t the right condemn then-Senator Barack Obama six years ago for supposedly “palling around” with a domestic radical who denounced the government? Didn’t the right condemn President Obama five years ago for allegedly besmirching the integrity of law enforcement?
Let’s hope that Obamacare covers treatment for short-term memory loss.
D.R. Tucker is a Massachusetts-based freelance writer and a former contributor to the conservative website Human Events Online. He has also written for the Huffington Post, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, ClimateCrocks.com, FrumForum.com, the Ripon Forum, Truth-Out.org, TheNextRight.com, and BookerRising.com. In addition, he hosted a Blog Talk Radio program, The Notes, from August 2009 to June, 2010. You can follow him on Twitter here: @DRTucker.
When LBJ “lost the south” for the Democrats with the passing of Civil Rights laws and alienating the Dixie-crats, thus setting the stage for the “Southern Strategy”, he began the fall of the Republican party (not the rise as many historians claim). The Democrats kept the Dixie-crats under their wing because the southerners had nowhere to go (with their not wanting to associate with the party that emancipated slaves), but the southerners were tearing the party apart over 19th century mindsets in the 20th century. With the raising and squaring of the rights of southern blacks, southern whites fled from the party of their ancestors to the party that was willing to compromise its origins to expand their party base. Because the Republicans were willing to forget that their party was initially a one issue party on the Emancipation of slaves, they began their downfall. The only way for the Republicans to regain their status is to remove the destructive cancer that is the racist elements of their party.
To fix this political dilemma both major parties must be willing to exclude the racist tendencies of the southern white voting block (an ever decreasing percentage of the population in those states, as can be supported by the increasing voter suppression tactics) in their platforms. Then they can both battle for the ideals of the growing minority populations of this country. Both parties can grow and be able to defend socially constructive ideologies instead of ones that should have been discarded at the end of the 19th century.
As long as southern whites continue to maintain a significant part of their political ideology that excludes minorities (no matter what talking points you use), and there is a political party that is willing to give up a significant amount of its core beliefs in order for that party to have more influence, the political nuclear (or as they would say nucular) bomb that is the conservative southern white voting block will continue to have a disproportionate influence nationally and force a socially regressive ideology on the nation. The Republicans should have left them with George Wallace and the American Independent Party. Until the Ds and Rs can agree that southern white racist voting block should not be a group to court in elections, we will continue to have embarrassing developments like these. Until both parties mature and insist that racist ideology is not welcome, we will continue this battle.
Correction: Strom Thurman was a Republican from SC not NC.
Our culture lies to us as it raises us like a village raises a child.
It effectively says “I am not a racist.”
I assume by palling around with a “domestic radical who denounced the government” you mean “domestic terrorist who admittedly bombed government buildings”. Kinda funny how that “minor” fact is glossed over, as is the fact that there was a complete condemnation of Bundy and his racist views by the GOP once those views came to light. Immediately.
WingnutSteve –
What?! You come out from your bunker for the first time in months and don’t mention the IRS or Benghazi even once?!
You okay, dude?
I’d like to be able to search your archives and see how many times I’ve ever mentioned benghazi, bet you could count that on one hand. IRS was, and still is, my thing. You should also be wary of the power of the government using its most feared arm against citizens, despite whether you agree or disagree with those citizens. And now of course think progress.org has sewed it all up nice and as neat as their point about you being a conspiricy theorist
I merely pointed out pertinent information which Mr. “I always start my pieces off by pointing out that I used to be a republican so i certainly have insight no one else has” Tucker conveniently forgot to point out in his most excellent hit piece.
The split-screen image at the top of the post says it all, even if it’s contrived, unless Clarence Thomas thinks he’d be better off in the cotton fields.
I like William Rivers Pitt’s Op-Ed at “Truthout” yesterday which says:
But, the Op-Ed isn’t all that funny when you read the whole thing.
WingnutSteve reliably wingnutted @ 6:
You mean citizens, like yourself, who allowed themselves to be conned by desperate, partisan snake-oil men into believing that Obama ordered his IRS to politically target certain citizens because of their political belief? Yes, I would be very wary of such a thing, if there was any evidence at all that it had ever occurred under this administration, just as I was wary of it when evidence strongly suggested that it actually DID occur under previous administrations. (I know you’re still “outraged” about that, right?)
That said, given all of the evidence available, I am far more concerned about the fact that Obama’s IRS is not following the law, by allowing certain groups to bastardize the tax code in order to corrupt our entire electoral system. I’m shocked that you don’t seem “wary” of that, or even concerned about it in the least, and have preferred, ever since the pretend IRS “scandal” erupted, to concern yourself with the pretend scandal instead of the very real one that it helped highlight, and which adversely affects you every single day.
I’m glad, however, that you noticed ThinkProgress finally discovered the information we reported on here months ago — back when you were pounding your shoe on the desk about the IRS “scandal” not being pretend. It’s fun that you’re still banging that same shoe, amigo! 🙂
Heheh…Of course, I know the reason he does that, but clearly you don’t, cause it has nothing to do with what you suggest. Nonetheless, knowing what you’re talking about before you start actually talking about it has never been a big thing for you, as the years of your archived please-sir-may-I-have-another comments here pretty clearly document.
Also. I can’t believe that you’re just letting that whole Fast & Furious thing slip away! Also, New Black Panthers! Get on it!
Just because certain words are on a BOLO list doesn’t mean they received the same scrutiny. I’ve yet to hear of progressive groups showing how they had their application held up for years assome conservative groups have. But hey, there must be a whole bunch of ’em out there just keeping their moths shut waiting for their “gotcha” moment!
And my initial point is still that there are pertinent facts to this piece which were glossed over or ignored. Had I done similar in a comment here you would say i was willfully spreading disinformation.
But that kind of bias is expected at bradblog, and may be a strong indicator of why so few (based on the lack of comments) actually read it.
Some Right Wing TV/Radio show hosts distanced themselves from Bundy because they know that not doing so would lessen their ratings. And many of those same people have been party to the “there is no racism” in America schtick as well, which is weird, because if so, then where did/do people like Bundy come from?
The answer is obvious: Bigots are a product of the Right Wing. The Right Wing creates people like Bundy. I don’t mean to say that all Conservatives are bigots, but that all bigots are Conservatives.
Bigots are Conservatives.
I am wondering: What do you call someone who hates a certain person’s writing and yet continues day in and day out to read that person’s writing?
Sadist? Masochist? Glutton for punishment? …
Weird? Sad? Pathetic? …
“But that kind of bias is expected at bradblog, and may be a strong indicator of why so few (based on the lack of comments) actually read it.”
Re last comment: Why do you read? Why? We know why you post, to disrupt and to redirect the comments away from the topic at hand. I.e. You are a Troll. That is what trolls do. (And I am feeding it.)
It is a kind of sickness, isn’t it? This feeling of inadequacy you have, in that you must (and can only apparently) insult and otherwise just piss and moan and stomp your feet like a six year old who lost his favorite crayon.
Do you think you’re smart? That you are being perceived as smart? Do you really think that you are swaying anyone? Do you really think that you are completely un-biased and near perfect in your discourse? That your shit doesn’t stink?
You should be embarrassed if you just spent a few minutes upon reflection of what you have been doing here for so long.
And this is the Troll’s goal: To disrupt so to make people not want to comment.
(Sorry for feeding this Troll, Brad. I will stop.)