“Slavery Nostalgia Is Real, And It’s Dangerous”: Yearning For The Past Of Segregation And Slavery Is Neither Quaint Nor Harmless
Northerners may be a little shocked that anyone could feel a bit nostalgic for slavery, in the manner of the government-hating Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy. But in the South, such sentiments are hardly unheard of, even if they are usually muttered in private over a few bourbons rather than spoken at a news conference.
Occasionally, in fact, they are expressed or embraced by public figures. A particularly relevant case started about 14 years ago, when Maurice Bessinger, owner of a chain of South Carolina barbecue restaurants called Maurice’s Piggy Park, began distributing pro-slavery tracts in his stores. One of the tracts, called the “Biblical View of Slavery,” said the practice wasn’t really so bad, because it was permitted in the Bible. It argued that many black slaves in the South “blessed the Lord” for their condition, because it was better than their life in Africa.
When the tract was discovered, Mr. Bessinger was denounced and his restaurants boycotted. Many retail stores pulled his distinctive (to be kind) yellow mustardy barbecue sauce from their shelves.
But one prominent South Carolinian decided to stand up for Mr. Bessinger. Glenn McConnell, then a state senator from Charleston, stocked the sauce in his Confederate “art gallery,” which was loaded with secessionist flags and uniforms, as well as toilet paper bearing the image of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. When a local power utility banned its trucks from the parking lots of Piggie Park, Mr. McConnell threatened a legislative vendetta against the company.
Mr. Bessinger died in February. Mr. McConnell is now the lieutenant governor of South Carolina.
In that state, it is not considered a stain to have fought passionately to keep the Confederate flag flying on top of the Capitol dome, or to have appeared on a notorious white-nationalist radio program in 2007. (All of this is meticulously chronicled on the website of the invaluable Southern Poverty Law Center.)
No reputational damage was done even when Mr. McConnell, a well-known Civil War re-enactor and then president pro-tem of the Senate, appeared in a 2010 photograph dressed as a Confederate general, standing between a black man and a woman dressed as slaves. The man was wearing a floppy hat and holding a washboard; the woman wore an apron and a bandanna. When black leaders protested, Senator McConnell said the photo actually showed how far the state had come in race relations.
“If somebody is trying to be politically correct and use a tunnel vision on it and hook in the slavery issue, they’re on a slippery slope toward narrow-mindedness,” he told the Charleston Post and Courier, using a justification that Mr. Bundy might want to try. “They should extend the charity of understanding. Receive it in the spirit that it is presented.”
A few weeks ago, Mr. McConnell was named the president of the College of Charleston, under pressure from likeminded state legislators who have decided the school is taking academic freedom a little too literally. Religious conservatives in the legislature were angry that the college assigned students to read “Fun Home,” a memoir with gay themes by Alison Bechdel, and tried to cut its budget. Despite a vote of no confidence by the faculty, and no experience running an educational institution, Mr. McConnell will take over the presidency of the school in July.
The College of Charleston had no black students until 1967, having gone private in the 1950s to avoid integration. Even now, once again a public institution, only 6 percent of its students are black, one of the lowest percentages for a college or university in the state. Nostalgia for a past of segregation and slavery is neither quaint nor harmless; it remains a very present danger.
By: David Firestone, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, April 24, 2014
“No, Asshole, You’re Totally Wrong”: What Plantation Is Jim DeMint Living On?
I once had this idea for a play about God, a comedy, in which the audience would be introduced to a series of casuists and charlatans and braggarts and bloviators, and they’d be carrying on, lecturing away on topics large and small with serene self-confidence. There’d be the sound of thunder and perhaps a puff of smoke, and from the wings, God would appear. He or She would, over the course of the three acts, take on numerous corporeal forms—white man, black woman, Asian man, Arab woman, et cetera—but in each guise would admonish the speaker: “No, asshole. You’re totally wrong. How do I know? Because I’m God, and you’re wrong.”
The idea came to me, of course, because of life’s endless pageant of moments when one wishes life really worked that way. But I don’t know if I’ve ever wished it more than I did two days ago, when Jim DeMint, the ex-senator and Heritage Foundation head who defines the words casuist and charlatan and braggart and bloviator and about 262 others that are worse, said that the federal government of the United States did nothing to end slavery. The salient words:
Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately, there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves.
Please, I beg of you, don’t do DeMint the honor of thinking him merely stupid. He’s probably that, in some way. Certainly those sentences add up to a mountain of stupid, a Himalayan range of it. Yet at the same time, a statement this insane can’t be propelled merely by stupidity. A denial of reality this whole, this pure, requires, I think, some thought, some premeditation. Dwell with me on this for the moment.
Today’s radical conservatives like DeMint want to destroy government. This means in the first instance discrediting everything government does in the present. That, we’re all plenty familiar with. It’s a lot of what we fight about all the time.
But the project also includes history—proving that nothing good that ever happened in history was done by the government. Oh, they might grant you a war here or there, these wingers. They’re OK with war (when we win them—when we’ve lost them, that was of course the liberals’ fault). But nothing else.
Often, this is easy enough. Example: The great post-war prosperity boom and middle-class expansion. We on my side say: unionization, massive public investments, a tax rate that kept the coffers full, a few other things. DeMint and his type can’t have that, so they say: American ingenuity, a free-market system that encouraged initiative, no big bloated welfare state yet, etc. That’s a simple one. Left and right offer competing narratives, and to most people, parts of each probably sound plausible.
But then you get to trickier matters. How, as a radical conservative today, and especially a Southern one, and especially one from the state (South Carolina) that started the Civil War (first to advance nullification, first to secede, first shots fired), are you supposed to explain that war? And how are you supposed to explain slavery? Tough ones. If you ever visit any of those crackpot websites I look at sometimes, you’ve seen, for example, the commonly advanced idea that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery, it was about states’ rights and economics and so on. I guarantee you that notion will show up pretty quickly in this very comment thread.
But that explains only the war’s beginning, not its end. I had not heard, until DeMint’s comments here, their theory on the war’s end, and more deliciously on slavery’s. So it was “the conscience of the American people” that ended it. And the Constitution, which “kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights.’” And William Wilberforce. But whatever it was, it wasn’t “big government.”
Interesting interpretation, eh? DeMint’s “conscience of the American people” x’s out of history the Emancipation Proclamation, which strikes me as an act of the federal government (a presidential order); also the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery and, as an amendment to the Constitution, was surely an action of the government. It also x’s out the war itself, fought to the end, no matter what today’s Confederate revisionists say, to wipe out slavery once and for all.
As for the Constitution, well, there’s the fact that the words DeMint quotes appear not in the Constitution but the Declaration of Independence, but there are bigger problems here than that. If Jim DeMint had been alive in 1860, it’s reasonable to assume that he’d have gone with the flow in his state, correct? So he’d have supported secession. And, big cheese that he is, he’d have likely played some role in creating the Confederate States of America. And in turn he’d likely have signed the Confederate Constitution, thus pledging his loyalty to a document that explicitly prohibited the Confederate government or its several states from interfering in slave ownership in any way, including a specific provision stating that any territories the CSA gained via war or any other means would become slaveholding states. That would have been Jim DeMint’s Constitution, not the one you and I heed.
Finally, this Wilberforce business. They love Wilberforce, today’s rad-cons. He was a devout Christian, you see, and a conservative; and yet at the same time a stern abolitionist. What a useful combination! Invoking Wilberforce allows conservatives like DeMint to pretend that he, not Calhoun, is their moral lodestar and inspiration. It’s somewhat problematic for them that while Wilberforce did indeed fight slavery, he did so in England, where he actually lived, not in America. And only up until 1833, when he died. Besides which the fiery abolitionists in America, William Lloyd Garrison and so forth, were quite religious too, but on the political left.
There is such a thing as having a legitimate difference of opinion on a question of history. Was Napoleon the embodiment or the corruption of the French Revolution, to take an obvious example—historians will argue that one till the end of time. But DeMint doesn’t have a legitimate difference of opinion. He has a wholly ideological one, designed not to spur historical debate but to justify his miserly posture toward contemporary politics.
And so every sentence that came out of his mouth was just utter nonsense. But not just that–premeditated, pernicious, and malicious nonsense, spun to serve contemporary ends like fighting the delivery of health coverage to millions. Physicians have boards to answer to, lawyers the local bar; but in politics and media, there’s no panel that can police this drivel and declare DeMint unfit for participation in public discourse. And so he gets to say these utterly insane things but still get quoted in the papers as if he were a serious person. And the rest of us just have to endure him. God, if you’re there, now would be a good time to show up.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 11, 2014
“Drawing Attention To Dog Whistles”: The “New” Old Civil Rights Movement
When I read the headline of the AP story—“Dems slam Cuccinelli comment on slavery, abortion”—I wondered what ol’ Cooch had done to gussy up that ancient RTL chestnut. So I read on:
Nearly eight months before election day the Democratic Party of Virginia released video from last June that shows Cuccinelli addressing a small gathering of religious conservatives meeting in Williamsburg. It continues the Democrats’ strategy of portraying the socially conservative attorney general as too extreme for a swing state.
“Over time, the truth demonstrates its own rightness, and its own righteousness. Our experience as a country has demonstrated that on one issue after another. Start right at the beginning — slavery. Today, abortion,” Cuccinelli said in remarks recorded by a Democratic Party tracker at a Family Foundation event on June 14, 2012.
“History has shown us what the right position was, and those were issues that were attacked by people of faith aggressively to change the course of this country,” he said. “We need to fight for the respect for life, not just for life but for respect for life. One leads to the other.”
Okaaaay. So Cuccinelli had reached into his files or his memory banks and flogged the false analogy between slavery and abortion—and hence between abolitionists and anti-choicers—that’s been utilized offered by anti-choice pols every day for forty years. So why the news flash?
Then I realized: just because I, as a paid connoisseur of right-wing memes for quite some time now, found this stuff familiar didn’t mean the non-anti-choice-activist public did. There’s a reason this sort of thing is so often called a “dog whistle.” When during the 2004 presidential candidate debates George W. Bush said he’d never appoint a Supreme Court Justice who would condone the Dred Scott decision, he was talking about abortion, not slavery, though an awful lot of viewers—even journalists—didn’t seem to get it.
So Virginia Democrats are right to draw maximum attention to this habit, particularly among African-American voters who might not be aware that the anti-choice forces have been referring to themselves as “the new civil rights movement” for ages. Indeed, it’s a good bet that pols like Ken Cuccinelli have rarely if ever made any reference to the struggle for African-American emancipation and equal rights in any context other than as an analogy for the battle to repeal reproductive rights. So to hell with dog whistles: let’s hear it loud and clear!
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 20, 2013
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