Sympathy for (white) Southerners from Jonah Goldberg

Which of the two major American parties do you think of when you see this flag?

Dave Neiwert reports on one of Jonah Goldberg's hissy-fits about those nasty libruls in About Republicans And Race Firedoglake, 07/09/08.

In this one, Goldberg says, "bigotry aimed at the South never ceases to amaze me." The context makes it clear that he means aimed at the white South.

Goldberg is just horrified that libruls think racism might have something to do with Republican politics. Lordy, bring out the smelling salts! The brave (verbal) warriors against Islamunocratofascism are fainting away by the dozens to hear such a shameless claim by those wicked libruls.

Neiwert writes:

So, a brief reality check: Goldberg does not cite any liberals who actually say that "the essence of conservatism is and always has been Dixiecrat-ism" because, frankly, there aren't very many of them. Most liberals and other critics of the American right take a much more nuanced and realistic view - essentially, that not every conservative is a racist, but rather that every actively practicing racist is a conservative; and that this is the case in today's context not just because racists always have been conservatives, but because the conservative movement has made constant accommodations and appeals to them.

This has been so for a long time, but has become even more self-evident as the Republican Party became the party of the Dixiecrats. The Southern Strategy (note that Goldberg evades any mention of this whatsoever) not only was designed to provide wink-and-nudge acknowledgment to racists that the GOP was on their side but to blunt the advancement of minority interests. (my emphasis)

And he continues with an able summary of the consequences of the Nixonian "Southern Strategy". Which, by the way, was a white Southern Strategy.

Neiwert even indulges in a bit of purple prose, uncharacteristic for him, but I'm a real fan of creative purple prose: "Were it not for the ministrations of the GOP to their withering corpse of an ideology, white supremacy would have vanished from the political scene many years ago." And that's not all:

There may have been much more to Jesse Helms - but his bigoted approach to race revealed a narrow, pinched, and mean-spirited mind dedicated ultimately to primitive racial nationalism and willing to inflict injustice and harm on those he considered his lessers, and that manifested itself in a broad array of policy choices. And that, in the end, is exactly what we can say about the Republican Party, too.

You've got to feel sorry for poor Jonah Goldberg, not understanding how those bad libruls get such ideas. I mean, I'm sure the following was just a coincidence, as historian C. Vann Woodward described it in the third revised edition of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1974):

Civil rights was not the only issue in the Presidential election of 1964, but it was the most powerful issue. Johnson's opponent, Barry Goldwater, in savage attacks on the Civil Rights Act left no doubt about his stand. He expected support from the much predicted 'backlash' vote of Northern whites and segregationist South. Riots broke out during July and August in New York, Rochester, Chicago, Philadelphia, and three New Jersey cities. They were not of the magnitude of riots to come in later years, but the looting and violence did augment the 'blacklash' [sic] vote. Nevertheless, Goldwater carried only the five states of the lower South plus Arizona, his own. On the other hand, in spite of a landslide victory, Johnson carried only one state of his native South, his own. (my emphasis)

The Goldwater campaign is generally credited as having given birth to the "conservative movement" as we've known it the last four decades plus. But I'm sure that result had nothing to do with white racism, oh no. It was probably devotion to the abstract principle of "states rights". Sure, that must have been it!

Tags: conservatism, conservative movement, david neiwert, racism, republican party