“A Fence That Cannot Be Straddled”: Gingrich’s Praise Of Mandela Rips Open Issue Of Race
Newt Gingrich has been right about very few things during a long political career of hypocrisy, duplicity, narcissism and devotion to the no-holds-barred tactics of bomb-throwing and hyper-partisanship. But ever alert to political trends, he was right about this much: He openly opposed South Africa’s apartheid government back in the 1980s, and he tried to persuade Ronald Reagan to support the stiff sanctions that finally helped to topple the hateful regime.
Gingrich understood that the Republican Party would not be well served if it continued to be identified as a defender of South Africa’s pariah government. When Reagan vetoed legislation that imposed harsh economic penalties against the Pretoria regime, Gingrich helped to lead an effort to override the veto and impose sanctions.
Still, Gingrich has been as guilty as any Republican of using the 21st-century version of the Southern strategy to appeal to the least progressive members of the GOP base. So he shouldn’t be surprised that his recent praise of Nelson Mandela was met with harsh responses by so many of his fans on the right.
The Republican Party has a huge race problem — one that once again broke into the open in the aftermath of the extraordinary South African’s death. American conservatives still find it difficult to celebrate the life of a man who stood against white supremacy. While several Republican politicians were laudatory when reflecting on Mandela’s life, other conservatives were ambivalent.
Bill O’Reilly claimed that Mandela was a “great man” but also insisted he was a “communist.” (South Africa’s economic record under his leadership gives the lie to that.) Similarly, Dick Cheney called Mandela a “great man,” but stubbornly defended his opposition to the sanctions that eventually led to Mandela’s release.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gingrich sparked a firestorm when he released a statement citing Mandela as “one of the greatest leaders of our lifetime.” His Facebook fans unleashed a torrent of hateful comments in response, from chastising Gingrich for supposedly airbrushing Mandela’s past — “Newt, I thought you of all people, a historian, would be true to who this guy really was” — to those more open in their racial antagonism: “He hated America, Newt. Quit pandering to the blacks.”
Gingrich, to his credit, responded with a frank post to conservatives, asking them to consider what they would have done had they been in Mandela’s place. But it hardly quelled the uproar.
For far too long, Republicans have been comfortable playing to the worst instincts of their base, especially those steeped in racial antagonism and uncomfortable with the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. It will take years of hard work in the GOP vineyards to rip away all the kudzu of animus and suspicion toward black and brown citizens.
Since Barry Goldwater ran a 1964 presidential campaign on a platform of states’ rights, the Republican Party has honed a strategy of appealing to disaffected whites — stoking their resentments, fueling their fears, marshaling their paranoia. Every GOP presidential candidate since Goldwater has used that strategy because it reliably delivers certain voters to the polls.
In more recent times, GOP leaders have struggled to try to find a way to broaden the party’s appeal to a more diverse constituency while also continuing to win the hearts and minds of disaffected whites. But it’s a fence that cannot be straddled. Too many Republican voters refuse to acknowledge the toll of their country’s racist past. And too many fear a future wherein whites will no longer constitute a majority.
Gingrich knows that all too well because he pandered to those fears in his 2012 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. He labeled President Obama the “food stamp president,” an appellation designed to conjure up images of indolent black voters dependent on government aid.
The appalling comments he drew after he praised Mandela were simply retributive justice. Like other GOP leaders, he has appealed to the worst instincts of many Republican voters when he needed to — a strategy that will continue to haunt the party as it tries to plot a course to the future.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, December 14, 2013
“The Real Enemies Of Christmas”: Sham “War On Christmas” Overlooks Holiday’s History
Probably seeking more TV appearances and speaking gigs, Sarah Palin has decided to enter the overcrowded “War on Christmas” market sector with a new book. Like all the other screeds on the subject, Palin’s version — Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas – takes up arms against a cast of alleged scoundrels frequently denounced by conservative talking heads.
Is Palin sick of the commercialization that has wrenched the season from its roots? Is she tired of Christmas sales that start before Thanksgiving? Has she had it with the bickering over parking spaces and shoving to get the most popular toy that inevitably accompany shopping at this time of year?
Ah, not so much. As Palin tells it, the gravest threats to the seriousness of the season are atheists who sue over public displays of the creche and shopkeepers who call out “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.” Just like every other right-wing talking head who comes out swinging at this time of year, she sees the problem as Americans who believe in the First Amendment, who speak to Allah when they pray, who understand the difference between public spaces and religious ones.
Her diatribe is not only ridiculously overwrought and paranoid, but it’s also redundant. Hasn’t Bill O’Reilly thoroughly covered this ground?
Still, we’re bound to be subjected to a month-long outcry over school calendars that mention “winter holidays” instead of “Christmas,” so it’s worth repeating the many ways in which Palin and her compatriots are wrong. Let’s start with history.
For the most part, the earliest American Christians did not celebrate Christmas at all. They didn’t believe celebrations were appropriate. The Puritans were a dour bunch who rebelled against the traditional Christmas festivities that had marked the season in 17th-century England: caroling, eating, drinking, carousing.
The Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawed any celebrations of Christmas, fining those who dared show any hint of merry-making. That likely would have included the errant greeting of “Merry Christmas!” (Increase Mather, the Billy Graham of his day, had a point about the December 25 anniversary, which he noted coincided with a pagan Roman celebration. Historians doubt that Jesus was actually born on that date.)
But the far bigger flaw in the “War on Christmas” arguments lies in a fundamental misreading of the U.S. Constitution and its traditions. Palin and her ilk claim to be faithful readers of the founding document, but their view of it — like their interpretation of the Bible — is narrow, limited and eccentric.
The United States was not created as a “Christian” nation. In fact, the Founding Fathers were acutely aware of Europe’s bloody and destabilizing religious wars, and they sought to create a nation that would thrive as a pluralistic republic, allowing all citizens to worship as they chose. That is explicit in a treaty unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 and aimed at ending piracy along the Barbary coast. One of its articles begins, “As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion …”
Thomas Jefferson, who coined the phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” was a believer, but not of the sort that Palin would recognize. While he had great respect for Jesus’ moral teachings, for example, he did not believe in Christ’s divinity.
Jefferson might be surprised by the religious pluralism of the nation he helped to birth, but his wisdom has held up well through the centuries. Government does not endorse any religious view, so public school teachers should not lead public prayers. (Let me also clear up a common misunderstanding: Students are free to pray on their own in public schools, and many do.) Government buildings should not include any Christian inscriptions unless they include those of other religions. Churches, mosques and synagogues, however, are free to display what they like, and they do.
I know many committed Christians who struggle to keep sacred the meaning of the season. But they don’t do that by railing against what they hear clerks say to patrons in the malls. They try to stay out of the malls.
When the “war” focuses on the real enemies of Christmas — endless commercialization and mindless consumerism — I’ll enlist.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 23, 2013
“A Party Full Of Rodeo Clowns”: GOP Flips The Bird To Racial Justice
Republicans haven’t been truly competitive for the African-American vote since Richard Nixon got a third of black voters in 1960 against John F. Kennedy, who spent most of that campaign hedging his bets on civil rights. After that, the party of Lincoln actively drove black people into the ranks of Democrats. The testimony of black Republicans who were sidelined, excluded and even attacked at the 1964 convention in San Francisco, when the party nominated the anti-civil rights Barry Goldwater, is painful to read.
In the post-Reagan years, however, Republicans became more careful about blatantly spurning the support of African-Americans, mainly because an image of racial tolerance, at least, was deemed essential to gaining the support of white moderates and independents; soccer moms, it was said, didn’t like overt racism. Then-Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman’s 2006 speech to the NAACP repudiating the GOP’s ’60s-era “Southern Strategy” wasn’t designed to seriously challenge the Democrats’ lock on black votes, but to give moderates, and maybe even Latinos, a reason to hope the party was evolving on race.
That’s all behind us. As recently as 2007, I believe, it would have been unthinkable that no major Republican leader would accept an invitation to join Wednesday’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. But that’s what happened this week, even though a delusional Bill O’Reilly claimed last night that “no Republicans and no conservatives were invited” to speak. As usual, O’Reilly is wrong: House Speaker John Boehner was washing his hair; wait, he was visiting Wyoming (the sixth whitest state in the U.S., by the way). Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who traveled to Selma with Rep. John Lewis last year, was likewise otherwise engaged. Both Presidents Bush are recuperating from health troubles. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was invited in his brother and father’s stead, but he had other plans. Sen. John McCain also declined.
“We had a very concerted effort, because this is not a political moment,” said Rep. Leah Daughtry, executive producer of the commemoration. “This was about us coming together as a community, so we wanted to be sure that we had all political representations,” Daughtry said. “We attempted very vigorously to have someone from the GOP participate and unfortunately they were unable to find someone who was able to participate.”
RNC chairman Reince Priebus pointed to the fact that Republicans held their own King commemoration Monday, inviting only blacks who are Republicans. Sounds like a fun time — a separate but equal celebration.
The fact that no leading Republican bothered to attend the 50th anniversary commemoration shows how far to the right they’ve moved on race. It’s not just that they’ve thrown in the towel when it comes to appealing to black voters. They also don’t think it’s worth it to make an extra effort to appeal to white voters who flinch at racism.
Thursday morning’s campaign by some Republicans to make march organizers out to be the real racists, because they didn’t invite South Carolina’s appointed black senator, Tim Scott, represents the usual GOP game of racial tit-for-tat. The fact is, the organizers were reaching out to national GOP leaders, and Scott is not one of them. His hostility to everything the Congressional Black Caucus stands for also makes him an unlikely and provocative choice as speaker.
If Scott asked to speak and was rebuffed, we haven’t heard about it. Nothing stopped him, or any other Republican, from wandering down to the Mall to join the throng. Such a move would have attracted media attention and it would almost certainly have been positive. Reporters are desperate to find signs of moderation and decency in today’s Republican Party.
Unfortunately, Republicans aren’t desperate to display such signs. Right now they’re comfortable with the status quo, in which more than 90 percent of self-described GOP voters are white, in a country that’s barely 60 percent white, and getting less white every day. While MSNBC was broadcasting the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech in its entirety, former Sen. Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation was buffoonishly tweeting: “Would MLK have approved of Obamacare?” DeMint couldn’t be bothered to walk to the Mall and talk to any of King’s actual or political heirs. He’s just another rodeo clown in a party that’s teeming with them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 29, 2013
“I Have A Black Friend”: Move Over Climate Deniers, Here Come Racism Deniers
So much for having a national conversation about race.
Conservative commentators claimed they’d welcome an honest discussion about the thorny issue in the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict. But within moments last week of President Obama offering up his personal reflection about the trial and how the killing of Trayvon Martin had been viewed within the African-American community, right-wing voices responded with almost feral anger and resentment.
Among those most incensed by Obama’s thoughtful reflections was Jennifer Rubin, who writes for the Washington Post. She called Obama’s comments “disgusting.” Furious at America’s first black president for discussing the topic of race following a passionate trial verdict (he’s “not a good person,” Rubin stressed), the columnist lashed out at Obama for addressing a problem she claimed is no longer even relevant to the American experience.
Lamenting that Obama’s won’t allow people “get out of this racial archaeology,” Rubin claimed Americans are “held prisoners forever in a past that most Americans have never personally experienced.” (Fact: “Most Americans” haven’t personally experienced anti-Semitism, but that doesn’t stop Rubin from crusading against what she sees as outbreaks of it.)
Rather than addressing the substance of Obama’s comments about how “the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” Rubin simply dismissed the idea that racial prejudice has to be talked about, let alone discouraged, anymore. Like Prohibition and the Red Scare, racism apparently represents a distant chapter in America’s past.
Rubin is hardly alone in her proud and public denial.
That right-wing refutation has been found on the fringes of the conservative movement for years, if not decades. And skeptics have often tried to downplay the significance of the problem, insisting that liberals use the issue to attack their political opponents. But in recent weeks, much the way the denial of global warming has become a conservative cornerstone, the blanket denial of the existence of racism has been mainstreamed and embraced as an empirical far-right truth: Racism against minorities has been relegated to America’s past. It’s now filed under “archeology,” as Rubin put it, something historians and academics might study one day.
Noting the dubious trend, the Chicago Tribune‘s Rex Huppke recently quipped that saying racism is over is the new way of saying you have ‘a black friend.’
That desire to scrub racism from American society, or more precisely the desire to claim racism has been scrubbed from American society, has only accelerated since the completion of the Zimmerman trial. With a not-guilty verdict in hand, commentators have used that as further proof that Zimmerman did nothing wrong the night of the killing and that the whole controversy was a case of drummed-up anger over non-existent racism.
On his Forbes.com blog, Peter Ferrara of the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based conservative think tank, reported “racist attitudes” no longer “have any power or influence in American society.”
None.
During an O’Reilly Factor discussion this week, National Review‘s Heath McDonald attacked the media for being dedicated to the “myth” that racism is “the thing holding blacks back.” On National Review‘s site, McDonald had dismissed as nonsense the claim that the U.S. “criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks.”
And Breitbart’s John Nolte announced on Twitter, “I like living in a country where a black president elected twice complains about racism.”
Yes, that really does capture the purposefully shallow depths of the conservative debate, or “discussion,” about race: Because there are numerous rich and successful black entertainers and athletes (and one U.S. president), that confirms the claims of the racism deniers. (So says Ted Nugent.)
But the fact that the person who now sits in the Oval Office experienced being following around in stores to make sure he didn’t steal things, and who heard car door locks click as he walked by, is indicative of the persistent problem of racism.
By the way, the irony here is thick: The claim that racism in America no longer exist often comes from the same right-wing sites whose comment sections for years have functioned as cauldrons of openly racist commentary and insults. (See the duplicitous ugliness here, here and here.)
Why the recent rise in deniers? Just as climate denial fits a larger political agenda, so too does the denial of racism. In the long term, the denial will likely be used as justification to wallow in even more name-calling and demagoguery by conservatives; to lash out at civil rights leaders as “race hustlers” and “pimps.” After all, they’re trying to eradicate something that doesn’t exist, right?
But it was the circumstances surrounding the Martin killing that forced the deniers to the forefront in the short term. As Orlando Sentinel columnist Beth Kassab wrote last year, there was “no good way for gun proponents to spin the death of an unarmed teenager.” Indeed, the Martin killing didn’t fit the far right’s usual narrative about violence and minorities and how white America is allegedly under physical assault from Obama’s violent African-American base.
So Martin became the conservative media target and the denial charge became central to the 16-month smear campaign against the victim, portraying him as courting a death wish via his allegedly thuggish behavior.
As Michelle Goldberg wrote for Salon last year when the conservative press began blaming the unarmed teenager for being shot, “some on the right are deeply invested in the idea that anti-black racism is no longer much of a problem in the United States, and certainly not a problem on the scale of false accusations of racism.” (Goldberg dubbed these advocates “anti-anti-racists.”)
Consequently, she wrote, “If you don’t want to believe that racism is a problem in the United States, it helps to believe that Martin had it coming.”
Today, a chorus of conservative voices insist racism isn’t a problem and that Martin had it coming.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post, July 26, 2013
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