It's really funny to listen to some of you act as if you (or rather, your right-wing media conglomerates) have ferreted out some deeply hidden historical fact that should upend everything. What you're really revealing is your own ignorance on the topic. None of this is new or surprising to anyone with even a modicum amount of curiosity and/or education about the civil rights movement. Yet people like Rand Paul lecture the students of Howard as if he can school them on real history. It's a hoot, but also kind of sad. Because, in the larger picture (and I mean outside this little board where I enjoy watching droopy and his ilk blow regular gaskets), I agree with Brackite. It is important to the health of our country that we have two healthy, functioning parties. And right now the republican party is failing.
But back to the dispute at hand - let's take William Buckley as an example. He is a good example in many ways. While there is no doubt that the modern republican party has become home to a certain racist portion of the population who once made their homes with Southern Democrats, there is a much larger coalition that opposed the civil rights movement for other reasons, but which still translated into being on the wrong end of history, as Buckley himself later admitted.
Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."
http://www.claremont.org/publications/c ... detail.aspby the way, this linked article is excellent and as balanced as I've ever seen on the subject.
The problem with Buckley is that he made statements, sometimes at different points in his life, that can be taken to be totally opposed to racism, or tolerant of racism. This section of the linked article deals with this dilemma, and it is instructive for conservatives in general, not just Buckley.
Liberals and Conservatives
It would be unfair to leave the impression that conservatism was uniquely preoccupied with its own agenda as the civil rights cause was gaining salience. Liberals, too, had other fish to fry, such as consolidating and expanding the New Deal, prosecuting the containment doctrine against the Soviet Union, and forestalling any second act to McCarthyism. Adlai Stevenson won two Democratic presidential nominations, and numberless admirers among liberals, despite: selecting an Alabama segregationist, John Sparkman, to be his running mate in 1952; opposing (more forcefully than did President Eisenhower) any federal role in integrating Southern schools in 1956; and denouncing "the reckless assertions that the South is a prison, in which half the people are prisoners and the other half are wardens."
One difference between Eisenhower-era liberals and conservatives is that the former kept their distance from the civil rights movement for practical reasons while the latter did so for principled ones. Democrats would imperil their chances for a majority in the Electoral College and Congress without the Solid South, a reality that constrained both FDR and JFK. Legend has Lyndon Johnson turning to an aide after signing the Civil Rights Act and saying that the Democrats had just lost the South for a generation. Johnson was the least politically naïve man in America, of course; he looked forward to an election victory and beyond it to forging a Great Society coalition that would secure Democratic victories without the New Deal coalition's reliance on the South. Nevertheless, none of this was assured, and liberals have been nearly as reluctant as conservatives to praise the big political risk Johnson took for the sake of a deep moral conviction.
Having embraced the destruction of Jim Crow and the broader cause of promoting black progress, liberals' belief in the federal government's plenary power facilitated their support for any measure that would, or might, promote civil rights. Conservatives opposed to racial discrimination, however, had few obvious ways to act on that belief without abandoning their long, twilight struggle to re-confine the federal government within its historically defined riverbanks after the New Deal had demolished all the levees. Perlstein portrays Goldwater, a member of the NAACP who had fought against segregation in the Phoenix public schools while on the city council, as anguished by the choice between a moral and a constitutional imperative confronting him in the vote on the civil rights bill.
William Buckley's writings, by contrast, leave the impression that he found the choice between civil rights and the Constitution of limited, enumerated powers regrettable but not especially difficult. (It's worth noting that Buckley's father, born in 1881, grew up in Texas, while his mother was born in 1895 and raised in New Orleans. The "cultural coordinates of our household were Southern," Buckley wrote in his mother's obituary.) If the conservative understanding of constitutional government meant that segregation would persist for decades...then segregation would persist. Conservatives "know that some problems are insoluble," Buckley wrote in 1961. "Should we resort to convulsive measures that do violence to the traditions of our system in order to remove the forms of segregation in the South?" he asked. "I say no." Instead, Buckley expressed the hope that when Negroes have finally realized their long dream of attaining to the status of the white man, the white man will still be free; and that depends, in part, on the moderation of those whose inclination it is to build a superstate that will give them Instant Integration.
Forty years later Buckley and Michael Kinsley shared a series of email exchanges with the readers of Slate. The discussion turned to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, about which Kinsley offered the opinion "that using the power of the government to tell people whom they must do business with really is a major imposition on private freedom.... There's no question the imposition is justified—and has been hugely successful—in rectifying the historical injustice to African-Americans." Buckley, in a formulation John Kerry would have done well not to borrow, responded: "I'd have voted against the bill, but if it were out there today, I'd vote for it, precisely for the reason you gave."
In other words, convulsive measures to overturn segregation were necessary. But then again perhaps not, since Buckley immediately goes on to tell Kinsley, "I'd vote with trepidation, however, for the obvious reason that successful results cannot necessarily legitimize the means by which they were brought about." The desegregation omelet was worth making, but the limited government eggs might or might not have been worth breaking.
Buckley had his reasons, then, for opposing the civil rights movement. Even though he ultimately came to regard that movement's initial and unassailable goal—the end of second-class citizenship in both its petty and vicious aspects—as the more compelling imperative, it was always a close call. Buckley never retracted his limited-government arguments against the civil rights agenda, nor did he relinquish the hope that civil rights could be advanced in ways that impinged only slightly on the conservative project of restoring the founders' republic.
Worse than Missing in Action
The constitutional principles at the heart of this project were—are—ones that liberals find laughable, fantastic, and bizarre. Because they cannot take them seriously they reject the possibility that conservatives do. Thus, liberals dismiss "states' rights" as nothing more than a code word for racism. There is no point in conservatives even asking what the code word for states' rights is, because liberals cannot imagine anyone believes this to be a legitimate political concern.
From this viewpoint, conservatism's "reasons" for opposing civil rights were, in fact and from the beginning, excuses for oppressing blacks. Buckley's least judicious writings make it difficult to wave away that allegation. These are moments in conservatism's history where it was, in Goldberg's sense, worse than merely missing in action in the battle for racial equity.
Exhibit A, quoted triumphantly by Paul Krugman in his new book The Conscience of a Liberal, was a 1957 National Review editorial Buckley wrote, "Why the South Must Prevail." In it, Buckley said that the "central question" is neither "parliamentary" nor one "that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal." Rather, it 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?"
And? "The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." In other words, the South "perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own," an intention Buckley approves:
If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, 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.
Buckley's subsequent treatment of civil rights issues was more circumspect. In 1957 he regarded the whites' civilization as more advanced both subjectively and objectively. The South perceives important differences between white and black culture, and the white community is the advanced race and what blacks would bring about is atavistic.
Later, Buckley emphasized only the subjective element. Abandoning the argument that whites were objectively more civilized, however, sometimes led to expressions of solicitude for Southern whites who were conspicuously uncivilized. A 1961 editorial beseeches readers to try to understand those whites who responded to the provocation posed by the Northern "Freedom Riders" by beating the crap out of a few of them. "Jim Crow at the bus stations strikes us as unnecessary, and even wrong," Buckley said, but this is "irrelevant" because it "does not strike the average white Southerner as wrong."
That is what they feel, and they feel that their life is for them to structure; that the Negro has grown up under generally benevolent circumstances, considering where he started and how far he had to go; that he is making progress; that the coexistence of that progress and the Southern way of life demand, for the time being, separation.
This was indeed what the South felt, or at least what it said it felt during the early years of the civil rights movement. Buckley's characterization resembles that of the "Southern Manifesto," signed in 1956 by nearly every senator and representative from the South. The Manifesto charged the Supreme Court's Brown decision with destroying the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.
It's hard for modern readers to decide whether cynicism, or delusion, explains such an assessment.
The single most disturbing thing about Buckley's reactions to the civil rights controversies was the asymmetry of his sympathies—genuine concern for Southern whites beset by integrationists, but more often than not, perfunctory concern for Southern blacks beset by bigots. This disparity culminated in a position on violence committed by whites against blacks and civil rights activists that was reliably equivocal. Like the liberals of the 1960s who didn't condone riots in Watts and Detroit but always understood them, Buckley regularly coupled the obligatory criticism of Southern whites' violent acts with a longer and more fervent denunciation of the provocations that elicited them. Thus, "the nation cannot get away with feigning surprise" when a mob of white students attacks a black woman admitted to the University of Alabama by federal court order in 1956. "For in defiance of constitutional practice, with a total disregard of custom and tradition, the Supreme Court, a year ago, illegalized a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores; and now we are engaged in attempting to enforce our law." Thus, the Freedom Riders went into the South to "challenge with language of unconditional surrender" the whites' "deeply felt" beliefs, and were "met, inevitably, by a spastic response. By violence."
It's an article worth reading for anyone interested in a deeper analysis of the issue than droopy's cartoonish rhetoric. It also demonstrates some of the difficulties conservatives face in trying their minority outreach. The students of Howard are far more aware of this history than buffoons like droopy assume them to be.