“Channeling His Inner George Wallace”: Judge Roy Moore Stands On The Wrong Side Of History…Again
In June, it will be 52 years since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.
It happened at the University of Alabama, where two African-American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, were attempting to register. In facing down three federal officials demanding that he stand aside and honor a court order allowing the registration to proceed, the bantam governor of Alabama sought to make good on a noxious promise: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
The upshot is that if you go to UA today and look out from where Wallace stood, you will find yourself staring not at George Wallace Plaza, but rather at Malone-Hood Plaza, erected in honor of the two students, both of whom would go on to earn degrees from the school. Wallace was wrong morally, wrong constitutionally, wrong in the eyes of history. After half a century, his actions remain an indelible stain on the state’s honor.
You’d think Alabama would learn.
And to be fair, many Alabamans have. It’s just that Judge Roy Moore is not one of them.
Last week, apparently channeling his inner George Wallace, Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This was in defiance of a federal court that had struck down as unconstitutional Alabama’s ban on gay unions. Some judges obeyed him, some obeyed the higher court. The result was — apologies to the Temptations — a “ball of confusion” for same-sex couples seeking to be wed.
As you may know, this isn’t the first time Moore has done something like this. In 2001, he surreptitiously installed a granite monument bearing the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state judicial building. “Roy’s Rock” was an unambiguous violation of the First Amendment, but Moore refused to obey a federal court order to remove it.
That Moore, as your humble correspondent once wrote, “isn’t fit to judge a dog show” should be manifestly plain to anyone with eyes. How he became not just a judge but the state’s chief judge, is a mystery on a par with Stonehenge.
That said, there is nothing new here. History reminds us that whenever social change comes too fast for the South’s taste — which is to say, whenever social change comes — there seems to invariably arise some demagogue to decry the “tyranny” of having to obey the law and follow court orders. The South always resists.
That’s what necessitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Freedom Rides of 1961. It’s why federal troops had to march into Little Rock in 1957. For that matter, it’s why they had to march into Richmond in 1865. The demagogues always use the same justification, always say that in denying it the right to discriminate as it sees fit, the federal government steps on the South’s “traditions.”
Beg pardon, but some traditions need stepping on. Among them: the “tradition” of a region arrogantly arrogating unto itself the right to decide whether and when it will obey federal authority.
Of course, “tradition” is just a smokescreen word, like “values,” “heritage,” “faith” and all the other pretty terminology opponents of marriage equality use to justify their increasingly untenable position. In the raw and desperate extremism of Moore’s actions, the smoke is blown away and this much is clear: This was never about those pretty words. It is, and ever has been, only about a single ugly word: bigotry, about planting the force of law behind the belief that some of us are less than.
That’s why George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door. Now Roy Moore stands in the courthouse door, likely to equal effect.
He should ask himself what the view will be when people stand there looking out, 52 years from now.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, February 16, 2015
“The South’s Victim Complex”: How Right-Wing Paranoia Is Driving New Wave Of Radicals
Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.
The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level. It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.
A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.
Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.
Broun, a skilled purveyor of a Southern politics of persecution, was an early alarmist, predicting a violently oppressive, explicitly Hitlerian regime just days after President Obama’s election in 2008. Broun’s repeated evocation of Hitler and Stalin would later find its way into the crass iconography of Tea Party protests. The stakes have always been existential to Broun. In an almost mystical ritual, Broun, a born-again Christian, snuck onto the inaugural stage in 2009 to anoint the door through which Obama would pass with holy oil, entreating God to come to the aid of His besieged and cleanse the new president of his tyrannical evil. Broun’s persecution narrative, dismissed by many at the time as hayseed hyperbole, now forms the basis of conservative arguments on nearly every issue. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, likely 2016 presidential candidate whose star is still rising, adopts the “we want our country back” language and eschatological stakes of the Tea Party. Cruz is joined by newcomer Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rand Paul to form a conservative insurgency in a chamber historically governed by staid and statesmanlike members.
There is a problem, though, for the GOP in the 2014 and subsequent elections: Once the Fort Sumter-like salvo of superlatives and hyperbole is launched, it is likely impossible to quiet the fear and anger of the party’s base. Broun’s successor to represent the shamed land of Sherman’s path brings his own scorched earth rhetoric, sounding more 1860 than 2014. The presumptive successor, Rev. Jody Hice, whose primary win makes November’s general little more than a formality in the heavily conservative district, speaks uniformly in the language of persecution and insurrection. Like, actual insurrection. Hice regularly demands that Americans be permitted the full means of war — e.g., rockets, missiles, etc. — in order to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with the “secular,” “socialist” state. Hice, an evangelical pastor, is an unapologetic theocrat whose persecution complex pervades the entirety of his apocalyptic politics. Hice makes Broun look cuddly by comparison.
The GOP suffers through an internecine fight that shows little sign of slowing. The party’s internal conflict reached its latest peak in primary battles in two prominent Confederate locales: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s historic loss in the old capital of the Confederacy and Sen. Thad Cochran’s controversial victory in Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi, a state whose flag still bears the Confederate battle emblem. Cantor’s primary defeat would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the very fervor stoked by Cantor for what many saw as an eventual run at the speakership metastasized further into an implacable anti-establishment impulse from which even Cantor was not exempt. Cochran, targeted as an establishment senator, had to resort to DEFCON 1 tactics and openly beseech Mississippi’s black Democrats to lift him over Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a move that became something of a right-wing Alamo. In a late primary strategy, Jody Hice went public with the assertion that his opponent, a pro-business, establishment candidate, was courting the enemy in what the Hice campaign called a “Mississippi Strategy.”
A sort of Mason-Dixon line has begun to trace its way along the GOP’s internal fissures, threatening the coalition solidified by Reagan and sustained through the Bush presidency. After more than a generation of cultivating a narrative founded on persecution and insurrection, the GOP runs the risk of falling victim to a Maslow’s hammer-type predicament. If all you have is victimhood, all disagreement starts to look like oppression, even within your own party. The more Southern, rural, Tea Party wing of the GOP is beginning to resemble the People’s Front of Judea from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” whose antipathy toward their Roman oppressors was exceeded only by their hatred for the Judean People’s Front.
Big business and national security Republicans of the party establishment, having benefited from the zeal brought by the martial politics of Southerners, can no longer control the emboldened rogues. The debt ceiling and shutdown episodes, pursued with crusade-like passion by conservative zealots, now frighten big business. Speaker John Boehner revealed the growing rift in a frank press conference after the 2013 shutdown, saying that Tea Party-affiliated groups have “lost all credibility.” Similarly, the intensifying isolationism of politicians like Sen. Rand Paul threatens Republican hawks’ long-standing hold on foreign policy matters.
When he reaches Congress, Rev. Hice will likely be laughed at, just as Broun was. But the politics Broun brought to Washington in 2007 is no longer a joke. The anger in the South is real. Voters along Sherman’s route have their own torches now. Hice’s theocratic, paranoiac and insurrectionist politics should not be scoffed at, if the trajectory charted by Southern politicians like Broun will be bent further with a new wave of radicals and a purging of moderates. The South is finally rising.
By: Matthew Pulver, Salon, September 30, 2014
“Every Republican Must Answer”: Has Barack Obama Really Been Waging A ‘War On Whites’?
Get ’em on record. Every last one of them. That’s what we need to do. Every single Republican presidential hopeful, Congressional leader, hell, any Republican who is running for federal or statewide office this fall needs to answer the question of whether or not there is a “war on whites” being waged right now by President Barack Obama. From where could such a preposterous idea come, you might ask? Where else, but from a House Republican?
“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else…It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”
That’s the truth according to Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who uttered those words in an interview with right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday. This is not a local, county official. This is not one of a half-dozen candidates for a congressional seat. This is a sitting U.S. congressman. Last year Brooks voted for John Boehner to be speaker of the House. Right now, we deserve to know whether Boehner thinks the president started a war on whites back in 2008. But we don’t want to hear just from Boehner. We must hear from all of them.
The time has come for each and every Republican to decide where he or she stands. They must come out into the open and either embrace the race-baiters, or throw them under the campaign bus. But understand this, when an Alabama conservative says that the black president and his party have been waging war against white people, he is channeling the spirit of George Wallace declaring “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He is calling forth hatred. He is all but summoning violence.
Rational people know that there has been no actual legislation either proposed, supported, or passed by this president that has targeted white Americans as a racial group. Furthermore, as I’ve written elsewhere, Barack Obama has, through his words, sought to strengthen the bonds that bring all Americans together across racial lines in a way no previous president has done.
Mo Brooks is a hateful demagogue of the lowest order. That we know. What we don’t know is this: Are there any Republicans out there willing to stand up and reject his hate?
By: Ian Reifowitz, The Huffington Post Blog, August 7, 2014
“Bush Revisionism Is Back”: Why This Latest, Pathetic Attempt Is So Dangerous
When we think of the villains of the civil rights movement, former Alabama Gov. George Wallace — he of the infamous “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” battle cry — is perhaps the first face that comes to mind. It was Wallace, after all, who stood defiantly in the doorway of a University of Alabama building, refusing to allow two African-American students to enter until then-Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach (and a few of his friends in the National Guard) persuaded the diminutive demagogue to give way. When we think of the era’s Dixiecrats, those Southern Democrats who spent decades siding with conservatives in order to maintain white supremacy in their apartheid states, we think of men like Wallace: shameless race-baiters whose entire political identities were inextricably bound to bigotry and hate.
But here’s the funny thing about George Wallace: According to his contemporaries, the man was not personally ill disposed toward African-Americans (at least by the standards of the time). Before he became governor, in fact, Wallace was a judge known for moderate-to-liberal views on segregation and race. It wasn’t until he lost his first race for the governorship — during which he was endorsed by the NAACP — that Wallace decided to forge an iron bond between himself and white supremacy, vowing to “never be out-[N-worded] again.” Yet by his final term in the 1980s, Wallace had appointed a record number of African-Americans to jobs in the state government; and he regretted his role as America’s one-time leading segregationist to his dying day.
Why am I thinking about George Wallace? Not because of Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy or Charles Murray. No, the reason I’ve got Wallace on my mind is less straightforward than that. Blame this foray into recent history on a recent execrable piece from Yahoo!’s national political columnist and former New York Times Magazine scribe Matt Bai. The piece is titled “So George W. Bush isn’t a monster, after all” and it encourages an approach to politicians and politics that, if applied consistently, would have us believe that George Wallace was, at worst, misunderstood.
Bai’s piece is not very long, but here’s the short version, nonetheless: When George W. Bush was president, he was maligned, demonized and turned into a loathsome caricature by a political system that encourages divisive partisanship at the expense of humane treatment of the commander-in-chief. “The truth is,” Bai writes, “that Bush was never anything close to the ogre or the imbecile his most fevered detractors insisted he was.” On the contrary, he was “compassionate and well-intentioned” and “the kind of inclusive conservative you can deal with.” Bush, writes Bai, “is enjoying a public restoration,” a claim he supports by referencing a poll about blame for the poor economy and puff pieces about Bush’s kitschy paintings.
Now, as defenses of George W. Bush go, Bai’s is not only exceptionally weak but also quite strange. At no point does he directly mention any of Bush’s policies or decisions; the focus is entirely on the ex-president’s increasingly cuddly public image, which Bai insists is not the consequence of sympathetic media coverage but “has more to do, really, with how we distort the present.” Instead of judging the man by the wars he started, the torture regime he implemented, the city he left for dead or the economy he helped crater, Bai would have us see Bush as the man wants to be seen, as someone who “really does care deeply about the men and women he sent to war” and “really did want to do good for the country.”
Tens of thousands of people are dead today because of George W. Bush’s choices, but he’s quick to get misty-eyed when thinking of the maimed bodies and shattered lives he left in his wake. Isn’t that what really matters?
In response to this flimsy defense, it’d be understandable if one concluded, as some on Twitter have, that Bai is simply a crypto-Republican who is ready to play his part in the epic quest to rewrite the legacy of the 43rd president. It turns out, however, that Bai’s argument is much more expansive — and destructive — than that. It’s not a mere defense of Bush but rather a condemnation of the way we treat our leaders, how we abuse and ridicule them because “[t]here’s a lot of money to be made writing quickie books and giving speeches about the utter depravity of a president.” Bush’s father, Clinton and Obama, too; all are described by Bai as fundamentally good and likable people. (Carter, curiously, goes unmentioned, despite having an average post-presidential approval rating as of 2013 of 56.) Writing of Obama, but implicitly of both Bushes and Clinton as well, Bai claims “we should all be able to grant that he’s at least a good American.”
I’m not sure what being a “good American” quite means — is it better or worse than being a good Frenchwoman or Nigerian or Swede? — but I get the gist of Bai’s piece, and I think it’s terribly mistaken. For one thing, this is an argument already made relatively recently by National Journal’s Ron Fournier and, as a rule, if your article is a rehash of a Fournier troll-job, you’re probably making a huge mistake. More seriously, this view of what makes a person “good” or “bad” is almost shockingly juvenile on its own, and becomes nearly toxic when used to assess politicians. Ignoring my temptation to break Godwin’s Law, I’ll simply note that Richard Nixon and Francisco Franco, two men few of us would consider exemplars of humanity at its best, also sincerely believed that their actions were for the greater good. For that matter, so did Jefferson Davis and the leaders of the Confederacy. Vanishingly few of us deliberately act in an immoral fashion; we’re all the heroes of our own stories.
The need to focus on consequences rather than intentions is all the more pronounced when it comes to politics, the realm in which a person’s decisions, and their consequences, are the only rational metric the rest of us can use in order to judge their suitability. Particularly in America, where the political spectrum is quite constrained, with no real far left and an often marginalized extreme right, and where some of the most heated debates are ostensibly about how best to achieve mutually agreed upon goals, it’s vital that we focus on results. To take an example less fraught than torture or war, if you were someone who believed everyone should have a good-paying job and health insurance, but you were only allowed to consider what each party says it wants to occur, you’d have no way of choosing between Republicans and Democrats, who both say a wealthy and healthy middle class is their ultimate goal.
Or, to return to my initial example, anyone who followed Bai’s advice would have a real tough time reaching a conclusion about George Wallace that the rest of us wouldn’t find obscene and bizarre. What matters more, the fact that George Wallace stoked racial resentment at a time when it was a force powerful and dangerous enough to murder innocent children; or the fact that, while he did so, he went to bed every night knowing that he was not only a beneficiary of hatred but a charlatan to boot? What matters more, the time George W. Bush wrote Ron Fournier a nice thank you card, or the millions of lives that would be better if he had not decided more than 10 years ago to destabilize the world with a war of choice? If we were talking about people whose professional decisions weren’t literally matters of life and death, Bai’s focus on people skills would be defensible. But we’re not, and it isn’t.
In the end, I can’t tell you any more than Bai can whether or not Bush is a “good” person. To paraphrase the former president’s favorite philosopher, that’s above my pay grade. I wouldn’t even know how to pick the right criteria. What I can tell you is that George Wallace, by the time he died, was a born-again Christian who said he believed all forms of racial discrimination were wicked and wrong; and that George W. Bush, today, most likely remains someone many of us would like to have a beer with. The question, then, is this: Who cares and why does it matter?
By: Elias Isquith, Assistant Editor, Salon, May 10
“The Old World Order”: Are We Still Fighting The Civil War?
Politically speaking, we live by caricature. Particularly in the age of satellite TV news and Internet fulmination, the temptation is to melodrama. So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read a recent article in the online magazine Salon arguing that “even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true.”
Never mind that author Andrew O’Hehir appears to be one of those overheated writers who use the adverb “literally” as an all-purpose intensifier meaning “figuratively.” Salon supposedly has editors. Elsewhere, O’Hehir concedes that the imagined conflict won’t “involve pitched battles in the meadows of Pennsylvania, or hundreds of thousands of dead.”
So it won’t be a war at all then. As a Yankee long resident in the South, maybe I should be grateful for that. O’Hehir also acknowledges that while today’s “fights over abortion and gays and God and guns have a profound moral dimension,” they “don’t quite have the world-historical weight of the slavery question.”
Um, not quite, no.
But then as O’Hehir also categorizes Michigan as a “border state” for the sin of having a Republican governor, it’s hard to know what Democrats there should do. I suppose fleeing across the border into Ontario would be an option.
Is it possible to publish anything more half-baked and foolish? Oh, absolutely. Here in Arkansas, we had more than our share of cartoon-think before the 2012 election. Three would-be Republican state legislators wrote manifestoes in favor of the old Confederacy.
One Rep. Jon Hubbard of Jonesboro delivered himself of a self-published book arguing that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.”
Fellow GOP candidate Charles Fuqua of Batesville—like Jonesboro, a college town—self-produced an e-book entitled God’s Law: The Only Political Solution. In it, he not only called for expelling all Muslims from the United States, but returning to the Biblical practice of stoning disobedient children to death.
Not many stonings, Fuqua thought, would be necessary to restore sexual morality and good table manners among American youth.
Then there was Rep. Loy Mauch of Bismarck. An ardent secessionist, Mauch had written a series of letters to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette arguing that since Jesus never condemned slavery, it had Biblical sanction.
Mauch also condemned Abraham Lincoln as a “fake neurotic Northern war criminal,” frequently likened him to Hitler, and deemed the rebel flag “a symbol of Christian liberty vs. the new world order.”
Comparing Hubbard’s views to those of Robert E. Lee and John C. Calhoun, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed alarm at “the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.”
Ah, but here’s the rest of the story, which Blow barely mentioned: All three “Arkansaw lunkheads,” as Huck Finn might have called them, were not only repudiated by the state Republican Party, but lost badly to Democratic opponents last November in what was otherwise a big year for the GOP here.
Unimpeded by the burdens of office, they can now get back to self-publishing their neo-Confederate hearts out.
The point’s simple: these fools certainly weren’t elected due to their crackpot fulminations, or even in spite of them. Their views were simply unknown. As soon as they became an issue, they became an embarrassment. Now they’re ex-state legislators. The end.
This is not to deny that there’s a strong regional component to the nation’s current political impasse. The New Republic’s John R. Judis did the numbers on the recent “fiscal cliff” vote in the U.S. House of Representatives. Altogether, 85 Republicans voted for the Senate’s resolution, 151 against.
Broken down by region, however, the differences were stark. Republicans outside the South actually voted for the bipartisan compromise, 62-36.
GOP congressmen representing the old Confederacy voted against, 83-10—including unanimous opposition from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. But for Florida, opposition would have been nearly unanimous.
For all the good it did them. Because the Old South is visibly shrinking. Florida and Virginia are already gone; given demographic trends, Texas is on its way. Even Arkansas, which voted for Bill Clinton something like eight times, seems unlikely to become a one-party state.
As for the rest, Mike Tomasky correctly observes that “over time…the South will make itself less relevant and powerful if it keeps behaving this way. As it becomes more of a one-party state [sic] it becomes less of a factor.”
From that perspective, few recent political events have been as telling as the outrage of northeastern Republicans Rep. Peter King and New Jersey governor Chris Christie at the House’s foot-dragging on Hurricane Sandy relief. A few more stunts like that, and the GOP could end up as fragmented and futile as Alabama governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party.
No Civil War necessary.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 9, 2013
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