“Why The Confederate Flag Fell So Suddenly”: A Fully Engaged, Energized Activated Group Of Voters
Within just a few days of Dylann Roof’s racially motivated murder of 9 African-American worshippers and clergy in Charleston’s historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church, a sea change appeared to be under way with regards to the Confederate flag — this after decades of tense and slow-moving debate about whether the symbol deserves any kind of place in modern public life.
In short order, the governors of South Carolina and Alabama asked for the flag to be taken down from their respective Capitol grounds, other southern states showed a sudden willingness to reduce the visibility of the flag, and Amazon and Walmart stopped selling it. All this occurred against the backdrop of a loud chorus of online activists arguing that it was time to take the flag down once and for all — a few days after the shooting, the #takeitdown hashtag was tweeted 12,000 times in one day. Why all the sudden movement on an issue that had been a sore culture-war sticking point for decades? Yes, Roof’s massacre was horrific, but it obviously wasn’t the first racist violence to have occurred in a state where the Confederate flag flies.
“The pace of this change has been quite staggering,” said Dr. Jonathan Knuckley, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida who studies southern politics. The why ties into some basic, vital aspects of how Americans’ political opinions are formed and expressed. Foremost among them is the idea that most Americans simply aren’t all that informed about most policy issues, and when they do form opinions, they look around for highly visible cues to guide them toward the “right” opinion. (The notion that most Americans simply aren’t savvy when it comes to politics and policy may whiff of elitism, but it’s also one of the more durable findings in political science — in 2011, for example, about a third of Americans couldn’t name the vice-president.)
Dr. Timothy Ryan, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, explained that until recently, this was true of the Confederate flag as well. “The typical citizen, if you asked them what they thought about the Confederate-flag issue in South Carolina two or three weeks ago, they would be making up their opinion on the fly in that moment,” he said. “Whereas now people have had some time to think about it, have had a push to think about it.”
As a result of this push, these voters will use whatever available cues come to mind to generate an opinion — a news segment they saw, a recent conversation with a friend. And those who sit somewhere in the middle and who are giving serious thought to the Confederate-flag issue for the first time are awash in anti-flag sentiments, whether delivered via Twitter, on news reports of anti-flag protests, or on radio spots covering Walmart and Amazon’s decision. These days there are tons of cues to draw upon, and very few of them would nudge one to support the Confederate flag.
Perhaps the most potent of such cues is the now-infamous photograph of Roof posing in front of the Confederate flag. “It doesn’t take much to process,” said Knuckley. “It’s kind of one of those gut, visceral, I-don’t-even-have-to-think-about-this-issue [images].” This cue, and others like it, affects voters on both sides of the issue. “The other side of that coin — it becomes a lot more difficult to be for [the flag],” said Knuckey. “Just a month or so ago, someone could have made a perfectly, in their mind, rational argument. It’s the kind of issue now that’s difficult to be in favor of.”
That doesn’t mean that support for the flag is now going to drop to zero, Knuckey emphasized. Ryan agreed. “I bet you haven’t changed so many minds among the people who are really strong, meaningful supporters,” he said. But that’s not the point — the point is those folks on the middle, say, third of the Confederate-flag-opinion spectrum. Those who supported the flag, but just barely, are now seeing all sorts of highly visible cues indicating that the country is turning against them,while those who were just barely against it will have their preference intensified.
The end result? A shift in polling, perhaps (there haven’t yet been any surveys released that allow for apples-to-apples comparisons on the flag issue from before and after the church attack), but, just as important, a group of “antis” who are much more engaged and vocal than they were before the shooting — in part because they’re feeding off the sense that, nationwide, people are moving against the flag. Political scientists call this “preference intensity,” and it’s incredibly important: A minority of citizens who are stridently opposed to a new bill can, in the right setting, “beat” a majority of voters who are slightly for it but don’t care all that much.
To Knuckey, all this negative attention will likely affect not just voters being surveyed, but southern legislators themselves. Those legislators have always been aware that they represent a loud contingent of pro-flag folks, but now, in the wake of the A.M.E. shooting, they have to factor in the existence of a fully engaged, energized activated group of voters on the other side of the issue as well. So all the negative attention the flag has gotten “makes a vote to take it down easier now than it would have been a month ago,” he said.
In the long run, of course, the AME shooting will fade from the news. And David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, which just released a poll showing the nation to be about evenly divided on the question of whether the flag is racist — it was the first time Suffolk had polled on this issue, and results therefore can’t give any sense of the trajectory of opinion on this issue — said that there’s a chance that opinion will bounce back in favor of the flag. That is, fewer cues could mean a reversion to old, less strongly held opinions.
In the meantime, though, what we’re witnessing isn’t just a shift in opinion, but policy change — albeit minor ones, in some cases — on the part of multiple state houses and huge retailers. Even if public opinion reverts back to where it was before the shooting, a new status quo is in place and it’ll be difficult, in those places that have responded to this sudden surge in anti-Confederate-flag sentiment, for the flag to once again be raised — or sold.
By: Jesse Singal, New York Magazine, July 1, 2015
“Self-Avowed Expert On ‘The Negro'”: Rand Paul Meets With Rogue Rancher Cliven Bundy
Rand Paul met privately with Cliven Bundy on Monday, the Nevada rancher and anti-government activist told POLITICO.
The encounter came after Bundy attended an event for the Kentucky senator’s presidential campaign at the Eureka Casino in Mesquite, Nevada. When the larger group dispersed, Bundy said, he was escorted by Paul’s aides to a back room where he and the Republican 2016 contender spoke for approximately 45 minutes. (“There were no scheduled meetings at Senator Paul’s stop in Mesquite. He spoke to many people who came to this public event, none for 45 minutes and none planned,” Paul spokesman Sergio Gor said.)
The Nevada rancher said that he had expected only to have an opportunity to shake hands with Paul and make small-talk. He was surprised when campaign aides found a private room and allowed Bundy, his wife and son to speak with the candidate for the better part of an hour.
According to Bundy, the two mainly discussed federal land oversight and states’ rights, in addition to education policy — a theme Paul brought up in his speech.
“I don’t think he really understood how land rights really work in the western United States,” Bundy said. “I was happy to be able to sort of teach him.”
According to the Associated Press, Paul told the audience during the main event, “I think almost all land use issues and animal issues, endangered species issues, ought to be handled at the state level.”
“I think that the government shouldn’t interfere with state decisions, so if a state decides to have medical marijuana or something like that, it should be respected as a state decision,” Paul reportedly added.
Bundy said that in their private meeting, Paul brought up the work of the American Lands Council, which raises money from groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity to wrestle land from the federal government and return it to the states via negotiations, legislation and litigation.
“I disagree with that philosophy,” Bundy said of the ALC’s legalistic approach. “My stand is we are already a sovereign state. The federal government doesn’t need to turn this land back to us. It’s already state land.”
“I don’t want to sell this land to private ownership, because I believe I already have stewardship.” He added, “I educated Rand on that point,” and said that the candidate seemed sympathetic to his point of view.
“I don’t claim ownership,” Bundy said. “I claim rights.”
Bundy first made national headlines in the spring of 2014, when the federal government temporarily closed a large swathe of U.S. government-owned land in Clarke County, Nevada, to capture and impound Bundy’s cattle as a penalty for more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. Bundy refused to federal authority on the land where his family had lived for more than 120 years, but federal courts repeatedly sided with the Bureau of Land Management.
Shortly after the BLM closed the land, hundreds of armed militia members — including members of far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the White Mountain Militia — descended on the land outside of Mesquite, Nevada. After a weeklong fight and a twenty-minute standoff where federal agents and protesters pointed guns at one another, the BLM ultimately backed down and returned Bundy’s cattle.
Though the government agency has said that it will continue to work through the courts to exact money owed by Bundy, he told POLITICO that no federal vehicle has returned to the land for more than a year.
“The federal government is off my ranch and off this area of Clark County and they shouldn’t come back,” Bundy said.
After Bundy’s standoff, he briefly became a hero to far-right conservatives, bolstered by coverage on Fox News and praise by prominent Tea Party politicians like Paul and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.).
But his star quickly plummeted after he made inflammatory comments about African Americans being better off under slavery.
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” Bundy told supporters shortly after the standoff, according to video footage captured by an onlooker. He recounted a time he drove past public-housing in Las Vegas “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do? They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom.”
After those comments went public, Paul walked back his support and issued a statement saying Bundy’s “remarks on race are offensive and I wholeheartedly disagree with him.”
Bundy then apologized for the comments, saying at a press conference, “I’m probably one of the most non-racist people in America.”
“I hope I didn’t offend anybody. If I did, I ask for your forgiveness,” he added. “But I meant what I said. It comes from the heart.”
As for Bundy, he said he has not yet made up his mind about who he will support in 2016. He said that he’s focused on which national politicians are most keen to return power to the states and local communities and said that, in their private meeting, Paul seemed keen to do so.
But Democrats, even before word of the private meeting surfaced, attacked Paul for what was first reported as a chance encounter. The Democratic National Committee sent an email to supporters arguing that Paul isn’t as sensitive to African-American issues as he says.
Michael Tyler, the group’s director of African-American Media, wrote, “Remember Rand Paul preaching of broadening the Republican Party’s tent to include communities they typically ignore? Remember Rand Paul claiming he was the perfect candidate to spearhead this outreach? Go ahead and throw that idea out the window.”
“Rand Paul spent his day in Nevada kissing the ring of Cliven Bundy,” Tyler added. “The Cliven Bundy who is a self-avowed expert on ‘the negro.’”
By: Adam B. Lerner, Politico, June 30, 2015
“The Radical Racist Socialism Of The Deep South”: Denials That The Civil War Was About Slavery Are Revisionist And False
With the American South so radically conservative and politically divergent from most of the rest of the country, it’s easy to forget that it was not always so. The American South used to be much more politically nuanced and politically complicated.
Obviously, the legacy of racism and slavery dominates everything. Southern denials that the Civil War was about slavery are revisionist and false, as Ta-Nehisi Coates conclusively demonstrated at The Atlantic.
But if we compartmentalize and set aside the grotesque and horrific injustice of race-based slavery, we can see that the 19th century South was also a hotbed of anti-capitalist economic egalitarian sentiment–with the caveat that only whites were allowed to receive its benefits. Consider these snippets excerpted by Coates: first, the Muscogee Herald in 1856:
Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.
Talk about a hatred of freedom and small business. Or consider this bit of socialism-for-whites-only from traitor-in-chief Jefferson Davis himself:
You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us.
And finally, this remarkable indictment of Yankee capitalism from Hammond’s legendary “Cotton Is King” speech:
The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South…Your [slaves] are white, of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural endowment of intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation.
There are many more examples of this sort of thing in Coates’ piece as well.
It’s easy to focus on the abhorrent racism here. But it’s also instructive to see the anti-capitalist critique of the North, whose laissez-faire robber baronism was admittedly Dickensian in its brutality–not remotely comparable to the evils of slavery, obviously, but it’s easy to see how a twisted racist mind that didn’t see black people as human would see itself as comparatively morally superior to the North by virtue of its white egalitarianism.
This is why the Confederate South was ultimately such a strong base of support for FDR. As long as FDR didn’t prevent lynching and the other modes of de facto enslavement of African-Americans in the post-Reconstruction South–and he shamefully and deliberately avoided doing so–most Southern whites were more than happy to take the benefits of Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the New Deal in general. The benefits of these programs were generally not shared with blacks, so Southern whites found an easy continuation of their economic ideology in sticking it to the Northern capitalists with economic redistribution.
The transformation that occurred in the 1960s was much greater than a simple political realignment in which the vast majority of Southern whites switched from Democrats to Republicans after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act. They also experienced a far more profound shift in their economic politics.
Forced to choose between their virulent racism and their embrace of progressive economic politics, most former Confederate whites chose to keep their racism. Redistributed benefits were all well and good when that egalitarianism extended only to themselves–but extend those same benefits to the hated underclass, and taxation becomes theft and tyranny. FDR socialists became Ayn Rand libertarians essentially overnight.
It’s important to remember that fact when we talk about the legacy of institutional racism in the United States. We’re talking about a hatred so profound that an entire demographic didn’t just switch political parties on a dime: it switched generations of populist economic ideology as well.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 27, 2015
“You’re Not Worthy Of Respect”: Clarence Thomas’s Disgraceful Definition Of Human Dignity
During a break on my reporting trip to Ferguson, Missouri this spring, I visited the museum inside the Old Courthouse, a magnificent, green-domed federal-style building that sits in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch. It houses artifacts and displays relating to the Dred Scott case, tried there in 1847; ten years later, in 1857, the United States Supreme Court would hand Scott—an enslaved man suing for freedom for himself and his family—his final judicial defeat. In arguably the worst decision ever handed down by any American court, in words that are displayed today inside that museum in large, bold, white letters, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that African Americans were “beings of an inferior order,” so much so that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Taney’s statement is anathema to the very idea of equality. But he asserted that the Founding Fathers, as indicated in the Constitution itself, would have thought the same of people who looked like Scott, or me. In historical terms, Taney wasn’t far off. The Constitution needed correcting, and it wasn’t until the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, eleven years after the Scott decision, that this got cleared up.
But I wondered again this morning, as marriage equality became the law of the land, what Constitution Clarence Thomas is reading, and in what America he lives. On Friday, Thomas—a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, a man who should know precisely the meaning of equal protection under the law—issued one of four individual written dissents in the case, Obergefell v. Hodges. It begins in the strict constitutionalist vein that Thomas is known for, but broadens to cover not only the Constitution but also the nation as a whole. For Thomas, the decision isn’t so much about laws as it is about principle:
The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits. The Framers created our Constitution to preserve that understanding of liberty. Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a “liberty” that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea—captured in our Declaration of Independence—that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government.
Let’s consider this passage literally, and let’s consider the kind of liberty that the “Framers” recognized. The Constitution was ratified in 1787, in a new nation in which the enslavement of kidnapped Africans and their descendants—to say nothing of the abuse, murder, and rape they suffered—was already a national institution. Their notion of liberty didn’t include folks who looked like Dred Scott, me, or Thomas himself; Thomas’s “liberty” wasn’t open to gay or lesbian Americans in that day and age, either.
In a paper written in time for the nation’s bicentennial 39 years ago, Louis Crompton noted that homosexuality was punishable by the death when this country began. Its abolition plodded through the states over the next few decades. (In 1792, Thomas Jefferson, Crompton notes, called for the castration of those found guilty of sodomy in a Virginia bill.) Penalties were reduced to imprisonment in most cases; South Carolina, perennially the last state to act in the name of its most vulnerable citizens, was slowest to change, repealing their death penalty only eight years after the Civil War. To use Thomas’s words, I’d argue, strongly, that all of this constitutes the government stripping away the dignity of those suffering legal punishments for being who they are.
Thomas, however, appears to define dignity more strictly, as the quality of being worthy of respect. That’s strange to hear coming from a man who, while the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexually harassed Anita Hill and likened criticism of his reprehensible behavior to a “high-tech lynching.” But I’ll allow that the idea of preserving dignity and therefore proving oneself as worthy of respect is an idea Thomas, a high-achieving student who nonetheless chose to study English literature in college to help him shed the burden of his Gullah dialect, is quite familiar with.
What I can’t stomach, however, is Thomas’s tendency to ignore the systemic effects of prejudice, and in the process serve as an agent to foster them. By not recognizing what plagues so many, he allows hatred and ignorance to swell. Thomas clearly wants marginalized people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, all while he’s committed to taking those same bootstraps away. This is his legacy, a disgraceful sequel to the term of the man he succeeded, Thurgood Marshall. Granted, Thomas sometimes interprets symbols—such as burning crosses or Confederate flags—as offensive. But the actual, institutional bias those symbols promote escapes him. Thomas frequently infuses respectability politics into his rulings, which demonstrates his continued obliviousness to reality: It is not the responsibility of a vulnerable people to convince the powerful they are worth protecting. It is not the duty of the marginalized to prove they have dignity and therefore become worthy of being treated as equals; that task lies squarely across the shoulders of the rulers. And, in this regard, Thomas’s blindness shows. This is a person who, during the demonization of black people in the Reagan era, thought we were the main problem.
He returns to the notion of dignity later in the dissent in a passage that is even more shocking and incorrect. Citing the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal”—a phrase that in an increasingly gender-aware nation, should already raise alarms about a lack of inclusion—he writes:
…human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.
We live in a nation whose industries, cities, and towns grew out of fertile soil wet with the blood and sweat of slaves. The United States has long been full of unmarked geysers of prejudice, blasting their ignorance on continuously marginalized people—including the LGBTQI Americans who in many ways continue to live, despite this ruling, as second-class citizens. Marriage equality does not close the housing, employment, and healthcare disparities that exist between us cisgender straight folks and those who are not. It is only the beginning of another long march.
We live in a nation where a young white man with a racist manifesto can study the Bible with a group of African Americans and then murder them, and in the aftermath the chattering class will engage in debates about whether a racist act has occurred. We live in a place where Matthew Shepard can be slain for being gay in 1998, and Wyoming, the state where he died, can remain one of five without a hate-crime law nearly two decades later. This is a place where, since its founding, the government has had a strong say over just how much dignity a person is allowed. The right of same-sex couples to marry was one that many straight men were not bound to respect, depending upon their state. There are still many of these men, but they cannot remove the dignity the government has today bestowed.
Dignity may be innate, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken away from you. It can become a two-way street. You can consider yourself worthy of honor or respect, as Oxford defines it, all you wish. But if institutional discrimination deprives you of such basic human rights as health care, education, and the right to marry whomever you love, honor and respect is not afforded you. Sometimes, in the course of history, states and people need to be bound by law to respect you. Relying upon human nature, or the Founders’ supposed intentions is ridiculous when you consider yesteryear.
Thomas, having lost the argument over marriage equality, chose to offer a pernicious, unsympathetic dissent that gives short shrift to the forces of discrimination and subjugation legalized by government while further emboldening his self mythology, this legendary story he keeps feeding us. Thomas would have you believe that because he himself could survive the indignities forced upon him by Jim Crow—a system of legal discrimination that eventually came to be made illegal, after a variety of Supreme Court decisions very much like today’s ruling—and that somehow, others should be able to endure something similar without the benefit of the very legal recourse that he can deliver from his perch. Using himself as the basis for a legal argument is asinine. Doing so in the service of discrimination is inexcusable.
By: Jamil Smith, Sr Editor, The New Republic, June 26, 2015
“The Hard, Cold Politics Of Neo-Confederacy”: Now Fly Under The Flag Of “Constitutional Conservatism” With Tricorner Hat Of The Tea Party
Even as a lot of conservatives advanced dumb revisionist histories whereby no Republican had ever expressed sympathy for the Confederacy and its symbols, RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende offered a clear-eyed analysis of the politics of the matter in recent decades, and while I don’t agree with all his conclusions, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Long story short: Trende argues that the “flag” controversy became a big deal during a relatively brief period when the older downscale rural white southerners who care about it were up for grabs (at least in non-presidential contests) between the two parties, and is now coming to an end because Democrats have lost them and Republicans can now take them for granted.
Because Democrats no longer see any electoral payoff in talking to guys with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks, they no longer have any incentive to make even weak gestures toward keeping the flag around. Progressives are freed from their need to keep up their awkward dance with rural Southerners for the sake of maintaining some degree of power in the South (a dance that dates back at least to FDR’s reluctance to endorse anti-lynching laws). Polarization has forced them – and freed them – to explore new paths to power.
At the same time, it’s important to realize that most prominent Southern Republican politicians have roots in either the suburban or old establishment Democrat wings of the party. I doubt if Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal grew up with much affection for the Confederate flag. The same goes for Mitch McConnell – who entered politics in Jefferson County (Louisville), an old Union town whose Republicanism was strong enough that it almost voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932.
The examples Trende offers of this dynamic include one with which I am very familiar: Zell Miller coming out for a “flag” change in 1993 and then losing badly among white rural voters in 1994. Cause and effect are not easy to untangle here, however. Miller was already going to lose a lot of support in rural North Georgia in 1994 because in 1990 he benefited enormously from a “native son” effect–North Georgia had rarely produced governors in a state long dominated politically by South Georgia “black belt” pols–that would not appear a second time. He also had an alternative strategy for a majority, based on his education initiatives, and in fact, he won in 1994 because some of his rural losses were offset by suburban gains. All of this is consistent with Trende’s theory that “polarization” eventually took the “flag” off the table, but real politicians had real risks and decisions to make.
As for Trende’s idea that neither party has had any interest in defending the Confederate heritage once Battle-flag-loving rural whites died off or became part of the GOP “base,” I think he misses the broader resonance of neo-Confederate ideology, which isn’t just about battle flags and whistling Dixie. As I argued at TPMCafe earlier this week, all sorts of notions associated with the Confederacy, from absolute state sovereignty and absolute private property rights to a hostile/paternalistic attitude towards African-Americans, remain active elements of hard-core conservative ideology. That they may now fly under the different, red-white-and-blue flag of “constitutional conservatism”–complete with the tricorner hat of the Tea Party–doesn’t change that.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 25, 2015
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