“I See The Problem”: Martin Luther King vs. Today’s Conservatives
Yes, I know you hate the fact that the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is (1) being treated as a civic, rather than a factional, event and (2) that the speakers at the anniversary rally, and the accompanying news coverage, stressed liberal themes such as voting rights and health care.
Well, as the guy being guillotined said, I think I see your problem. Since MLK is now officially a hero, you’d like him to be a civic hero rather than a hero of the faction opposed to yours. But while he was alive, and for some time after his death, your faction hated him, and everything he stood for, and tried to defame him. No prominent conservative or libertarian politician, writer, or thinker supported the civil rights movement he led.
The factional split was not identical to the partisan split. There were (mostly Southern) Democratic racists who opposed the civil rights movement; they were known as Dixiecrats or “conservative Democrats,” and their heirs followed Strom Thurmond into the Republican Party, which they now dominate. There were also Republican supporters of civil rights; they were called “liberal Republicans” (I voted for a few of them) and your faction now calls people like them RINOs and has successfully purged them from the Republican Party.
Your faction was, adamantly and unanimously, on the wrong side of history, as spectacularly as the small share of progressives who supported the Soviet dictatorship. Even today, I have failed to find a single libertarian or conservative prepared to speak out against gutting the Voting Rights Act.
Martin Luther King died while on a campaign to support a public-sector labor union. You’re entitled to say that he was a bad man and a Communist, as your faction did while he was alive, and that his assassination was the natural result of his use of civil disobedience, which is what Ronald Reagan said at the time. You’re entitled to say that he was a great man but that his thoughts are no longer applicable to the current political situation. But what you’re not entitled to do is to pretend that, if he were alive today, MLK would not be fighting against you and everything you stand for. He would.
By: Mark Kleiman, Washington Monthly Ten Miles Square, August 28, 2013
“Skepticism Of Conservative Ideas Requires No Bias”: When Will Conservatives Get Over The Liberal Media Myth?
It’s the perfect recipe for conservative apoplexy: On the one hand you have the Politico reporting that journalists are dissatisfied with their access to the president and, on the other, you have Chuck Todd saying the media isn’t liberal.
The response has been predictable. “Are you kidding me?” conservatives say. “What difference does access make when you agree with everything the president says? And your kneejerk agreement is proof enough that you are biased.”
It’s a line of reasoning that folds neatly into a larger conservative narrative: If only the media were doing its job and accurately reporting on the White House we all would be as disenchanted with the administration as they are. If that argument seems familiar to you, it should. We’ve been hearing it from conservatives for a long, long time.
Back in 1944 Gunnar Myrdal wrote a book on American race relations. One of his theses was that change would come to the segregated South when journalists began reporting on the conditions there. Myrdal’s notion was that most Americans didn’t understand just how bad things were for African-Americans under segregation, but that once they learned they wouldn’t be able to ignore it.
You can argue the merits of Myrdal’s work, but one thing that proved prescient was his understanding of the role the media would play in changing public attitudes about segregation. When Northern press turned its attention to the civil rights movement, the stories and photos they published helped shape the national debate about Jim Crow and arguably hastened its end.
The reaction of Southern conservatives to these news reports, however, was a little different. The problem, they said, isn’t segregation, it’s the way a Northern press infected with integrationist sympathies reports it. Of course, that was hogwash. Segregation was exposed and, eventually, ended. But in the embers of an ideological defeat, conservatives found a handy bit of linguistic Jujitsu. If the facts prove inconvenient, don’t argue them. Instead, shift the focus and question the integrity of the fact-finder. If you’re successful, then in one broad stroke you may be able to disqualify the facts without ever having to argue them on the merits.
Impugning the motives of those we’ve entrusted with separating fiction from fact has proven an effective strategy for the right. Don’t agree with a judicial decision? Blame the “activist” judge. Think an academic paper might be damaging to your cause? No worries. Academia is “liberal” and “elitist.” Worried that global warming might prove nettlesome? It’s the product of scientists harboring a “hidden agenda.”
And today a news media that might otherwise be making reasoned judgments about what’s news and what isn’t has become so cowed by conservative complaints that just about any allegation, no matter how outlandish, must receive “equal time.” Donald Trump’s birther claims are a terrific example. Trump has all the credibility of a squirrel monkey. And the charges he mounted in 2011 were completely bereft of anything resembling a fact. Yet when he was pressing his “questions” about the president’s place of birth, the media felt compelled to put him on the air in an endless loop, and to book guests to argue “both sides” of the “controversy.” Ridiculous.
But suggest that the media might not be so liberal after all, and you elicit ferocious conservative push-back. Just ask Chuck Todd. Last week, when he said media bias was a myth, the conservative response was perhaps best typified by Greg Gutfeld’s 90 second uninterrupted monologue on Fox, which I think can be fairly boiled down to: The media is liberal because the media is liberal and it’s preposterous to think otherwise.
There’s another way of looking at this, of course. As hard as this may be for conservatives to swallow, it may be that 65 million people voted for the president precisely because they have a clear understanding of his record, and what he wants to do—and they agree with it.
Look, in my work, I have found many occasions to be frustrated with reporters. Sometimes they do a good job and sometimes they don’t. But clinging to the notion that they are wittingly or unwittingly involved in some kind of mass liberal conspiracy is a little nutty.
If that’s the case, you may ask, how can it be that I sometimes find unflattering coverage of conservative ideas? Well, one might ask in return, have you taken a look at the ideas conservatives have championed over the years? Segregation is the way to go. Women shouldn’t work. The government is filled with hidden communists. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum are there because they are lazy. Cutting taxes for the rich is the best economic program for everyone. America is one step removed from becoming a totalitarian state. Etc.
In other words, my conservative friends, it may finally be time to come to terms with the following: Its your ideas that leave something to be desired, not the media’s coverage of them.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, February 28, 2013
The “Joshua Generation”: Cory, Artur, And Harold, Reflecting The Media’s Wishes?
There’s a piece at Buzzfeed that groups the above troika–Cory, Artur, and Harold, respectively–into the “Joshua generation” and notes that they were “born too late to participate in the Civil Rights movement, and late enough to benefit from it with blue chip educations and direct paths to power. They were free of the urban machines that had defined black politics in America, and ready for a different and more hopeful sort of politics of race.”
The real lesson about these guys is that they have all reflected the media’s wish for and infatuation with a “different” kind of black man. They all have Ivy League credentials as undergraduates or graduates. They first hit the scene–and timing, as they say, is everything–had grown sick and tired of old-line pols like David Dinkins who came up through the black clubhouses and so forth. So this narrative was created: These are the new African American leaders who aren’t hung up on the old racial mau-mau stuff, etc.
There is some truth to this. Inside each of them, and others like them who are lesser-known, there probably exists some internal reflex against being too predictable, being too like the generation that preceded them. That of course can be admirable, but it can be carried to extremes.
Davis is really the most extreme case. He voted against Obama’s health-care bill, apparently lost in some delusion that the people of Alabama might actually elect him their governor. He lost. Not the general election. The primary. By just a little bit. Like, 62 to 38 percent. He could have become a birther and performed a song-and-dance tribute to George Wallace, and maybe he’d have brought it to single-digits. And remember, that’s among Democrats. This seems to have left Davis feeling pretty bitter about Democrats. But does he think he’d have somehow done better among Republicans?
Ford kind of almost won a Senate seat, but he was race-baited at the end (“Harold, call me!” said a cute blone in a last-minute ad, as she winked at the camera). He just seems these days like he’s interested in making a lot of money, and good for him, but he’s not actually a spokesman for anything anymore, except that he’s useful to the right in situations like the current one, and he seems happy to oblige.
Booker, as I wrote yesterday, is likely preparing for his own Senate run, when he’ll be going to private-equity people for donations. He used his appearance on Rachel Maddow last night to mount a pretty full retreat, so he may yet be able to show his face at the convention.
These are different men, but I suspect they have in common that they bought into their early press, and they know what it is that gets them press: deviating from the expected black-liberal party line. And so that’s what they do. And, of course, they may all just be jealous of Obama, who won the big derby before they did.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 22
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