“I Believe That We Can Win”: The Christian Right Has Lost Political And Cultural Influence
Investigative journalist Brad Friedman has observed that America is moving in a progressive direction, despite the mainstream media’s “center-right nation” shibboleth. Despite the obstacles that have been placed in the pathway of progressives, Friedman is correct beyond dispute.
Think back to a decade ago. Same-sex marriage was considered an abomination in large parts of the country. Christian fundamentalists were flexing their muscles as never before. Rush Limbaugh and Fox dominated the American media landscape. The Bush administration had launched a war on climate science. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was gay-bashing his way to national prominence.
Today, marriage equality is the law of the land. The Christian Right has lost political and cultural influence. Limbaugh’s career is in freefall, and Fox may soon follow. Pope Francis has called upon the world to fight for climate justice. As for Romney, well…
The signs of progressive power are everywhere: the growing momentum of Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the profound failure of the right-wing effort to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, the increasing acceptance of transgender Americans as full and equal citizens, the smashing success of the fossil-fuel divestment movement.
No, we haven’t reached the promised land yet. There are still so many forces of right-wing depravity in our country–some with positions in Congress, some with platforms on cable, some with pistols in churches. Those forces of depravity will not retreat quietly. However, they can and will be defeated.
We’re moving forward. We’re going to make America into what it should have always been all along: a country were any man or woman can rise to the height of his or her potential regardless of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or income; a country where our public schools never have to lack for adequate funding; a country where we don’t shuffle off to war unless we absolutely have to; a country where we recognize the separation of billionaire and state; a country where we look out for future generations by dramatically reducing our greenhouse gas emissions; a country where a woman can exercise her right to choose in peace; a country where maniacs don’t have easy access to guns; a country where knowledge is embraced and ignorance is scorned.
We’re getting there. Yes, it’s been a long road. We’ve had to endure the racist savagery unleashed by the Southern Strategy. We’ve had to endure that force demonic known as Reaganomics. We’ve had to endure an impeachment over an erection and two stolen elections. We’ve had to endure a lie-based war for oil which left innocent blood on Iraqi soil. We’ve had to endure six years of deranged drama from the bigoted enemies of Barack Obama. It’s been a long time coming…but we’re getting there.
We will leave our children and grandchildren a proud progressive country.
We will repair the damage the right wing has inflicted upon our fair land.
We will remedy the injustices that hurt so many of our fellow citizens.
We will declare independence from ignorance and fidelity to fact.
We will move this country forward forever.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 28, 2015
“Longer And Deeper Than Just A Few Checks”: The 2 Degrees of Separation Between Dylann Roof And The Republican Party
News that Earl Holt, president of the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, has donated $65,000 to Republicans, including Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum, has ricocheted around the media since The Guardian broke it last night. No wonder: It reveals a mere two degrees of separation between the racist murderer Dylann Roof, who says the CCC helped inspire him, and the GOP. It might be unfair to make this link if the support only went one way—after all, politicians can’t be held responsible for the views of everyone who gives them money. But the entanglement between the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Republican Party is longer and deeper than just a few checks, and for many years, it was mutual.
“The public sees the CCC and wants to think of it as an extremist group, which it is, but it’s also a group that’s had a foothold historically in mainstream politics,” says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Before his killing spree, Roof published a half-literate manifesto crediting the CCC for his radicalization. He describes typing “black on White crime” into Google following the Trayvon Martin killing: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.” After Roof’s screed came to light, the CCC didn’t bother to distance itself from the views of its sociopathic admirer. “[W]e utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed,” it says in a statement.
In a phone interview, CCC spokesman Jared Taylor elaborated on this legitimacy. “Let’s say Dylann Roof has a talent for programming. If he goes out to Silicon Valley, he will find that Apple and Intel have set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to hire people who look like anybody but him,” he says. Another “legitimate grievance,” Taylor says, is the “overwhelming amount of black-on-white rather than white-on-black violence,” particularly rape.
Taylor sympathizes with the needs of Republicans like Cruz, who has returned the CCC’s donation, to distance themselves from the group. The presidential candidate, he says, “will come under tremendous pressure if he doesn’t give the money back. It’s not an easy situation.” That pressure has made it harder for Republicans to openly align with the CCC. “From time to time we have Republicans who are interested in our events, but it’s not as common as it has been in the past,” he says.
Indeed, in the past, Southern Republicans regularly patronized CCC gatherings; the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 38 elected officials appeared between 2000 and 2004 alone, including Roger Wicker, now a Mississippi senator, and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a major figure in the Christian right, spoke there in 2001. “Southern politicians going to CCC events is just a reflection of the GOP’s traditional Southern strategy,” says Cohen.
In the last decade, Republican politicians have realized that, in the age of social media, association with the CCC can be dangerous. An inflection point was the 2002 resignation of Senate majority leader Trent Lott—who spoke to the CCC at least five times—after a firestorm caused by his praise of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 third-party presidential campaign, remarks that were amplified by the blogosphere.
But the overlap between the CCC and the GOP has never entirely disappeared, particularly in South Carolina. Two years ago, for example, Roan Garcia-Quintana, a CCC board member and self-described “Confederate Cuban,” resigned his place on Governor Nikki Haley’s campaign steering committee after his links to the group made news. CCC webmaster Kyle Rogers—whose online store, Patriotic-Flags.com, sells the same Rhodesian flag patch worn by Roof in one of his photos—was a member of the Dorchester County Republican Executive Committee. (It’s also worth noting that high-profile conservative pundit Ann Coulter was defending the CCC as recently as 2009.)
This is part of why Republican candidates have been so hesitant to acknowledge that Roof was actually motivated by racism, despite his own unambiguous words. On some level, they realize that if they admit the truth, they will be held politically accountable. And it’s in that context that Holt’s donations are notable. “You can’t help it in this world sometimes who admires you,” says Cohen. “The much more damning thing for the Republican Party historically has been the legitimacy that it has conferred on the CCC.”
By: Michelle Goldberg, The Nation, June 22, 2015
“This Flag Comes Down Today!”: Reciting Prayers, Woman Takes Down Confederate Flag At South Carolina Capitol
A woman publicly took down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina state Capitol grounds early Saturday morning, climbing the pole at the Confederate memorial and removing that flag before she then submitted herself to be arrested. A new Confederate flag was then put back in its place.
The woman has been identified as Brittany “Bree” Newsome, an African-American resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia’s newspaper The State reports. Newsome has been detained on a vandalism offense — and in the hours since, a popular hashtag has emerged on Twitter, called “#FreeBree.”
Governor Nikki Haley (R-SC) called this week for the Confederate flag to come down, in the wake of the massacre at a historic black church in Charleston by a confessed white supremacist. Haley’s statement has in turn kicked off a process of debates and votes in the state legislature, which is still ongoing. That flag has been located at a Confederate war memorial on the Capitol grounds since 2000 — a compromise measure after it had previously flown from the state Capitol Dome itself, placed there in 1962 as a gesture of state defiance against desegregation and the civil rights movement.
In a video posted on YouTube, showing Newsome clad in climbing gear, she grabbed the Confederate flag and cried out: “You come against me with hatred, and oppression and violence — I come against you in the name of God! This flag comes down today!”(http://youtu.be/gr-mt1P94cQ)
Newsome also recited Christian prayers as she descended the pole: “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Who shall I fear?”
As she descended, the pole was surrounded by three police officers. She assured them in a calm and friendly tone of voice: “I’m gonna come, sir. I’m gonna comply. I promise you, I’m coming down. I’m prepared to be arrested.”
Of the three arresting officers, two were black and one white. The arrest appears to have gone smoothly, with Newsome and the officers cooperating to help her over the waist-high iron fence surrounding the flagpole before placing both her and a white male accomplice in handcuffs.
The State also reports:
A member of a group associated with Newsome express disappointment to the paper that the Confederate flag was put back up again: “All they had to do was keep it down.”
By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, June 27, 2015
“Wingnuts’ Confederate Flag Crisis”: Why They Can’t Admit Who’s Really Responsible For Dixie’s Latest Defeat
Even before eBay followed Walmart, Sears and Amazon’s lead by banning “rebel-flagged” items from its giant virtual yard sale, I realized that what I was watching was not a typical consumer revolt.
The Confederate battle flag — that bellicose assertion of a Southern “heritage” otherwise known as “white supremacy,” that defiant, “fuck you” of a symbol in whose honor the blood of far more than nine people has been shed — it wasn’t suddenly toxic because of last week’s massacre in Charleston. Multinational corporations, and the politicians they keep on retainer, weren’t disowning the flag because of a popular movement. The people hadn’t had the time to organize. The pavement on this road to Damascus was still wet.
Instead, what was actually happening, behind the scenes, wasn’t nearly so romantic. No one was breaking from their usual habits. Everyone, in fact, was doing what they always did. The profit-seeking entities were trying to maximize future earnings; and the state-level politicians were following their demands. This wasn’t a case of the powers-that-be doing something they resented. No one was pushed here; everyone was ready to jump.
Not for the first time in 2015, the conservative movement has found itself on the losing side of a culture war battle it once routinely won. And just as was the case in Indiana, when a petty and combative anti-gay law inspired national boycotts and a business-sector backlash, movement conservatives cannot fathom how liberals aren’t to blame. It’s conservatives, after all, who man the ramparts to protect capitalism and big business. As he was ranting about “the left’s” war on the Confederate flag on Tuesday, one could almost hear Rush Limbaugh transform into Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski,” bellowing, “Has the whole world gone crazy?!”
He wasn’t alone, of course. And despite what you might expect, his tribal loyalty to the “Stars and Bars” (a misnomer, by the way) wasn’t exclusive to conservatives of his age. A young woman at Breitbart was similarly incensed by the flag’s sudden toxicity, blaming a “howling mob of both liberals and brown-nosing conservatives” for Amazon’s betrayal of the Confederacy’s trademark. A Generation X editor at the Federalist railed against the media for asking businesses if they planned to stop selling the flag, calling it “heretic hunting” and activism disguised as reporting. An evidently impatient colleague of hers took it one step further, likening calls against romanticizing the Confederacy to the Nazi regime.
As these spasms of inchoate rage overtook movement conservatives, it was almost funny how desperate they were to find someone — anyone — besides capitalists to blame. Bill Kristol, the self-styled Hébert of neoconservatism, trolled his way to sophomoric analogies involving a Cliff Notes version of the French Revolution; and then tumbled into the 19th century, saying,“today’s liberals would surely have been Copperheads.” One of the lesser lights at Hot Air, Michelle Malkin’s former haunt, provided a nice example of the “whataboutism” that became widespread on the right, asking no one in particular how the Confederacy could be bad so long as angsty teenagers still thought Che Guevara was cool?
Beneath their caterwauling and free-floating resentment, though, conservatives evinced a level of disorientation and fear that was in some ways sympathetic. It was like watching a millenarian sect discover the new Jerusalem was actually a suburban cul-de-sac. If liberals could not be blamed for this new dishonor, if it wasn’t liberals’ fault that the cultural norms of 2015 and 1995 were no longer the same, then what was the answer? Lefties might note how, under capitalism, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” and say that the signifiers of the Confederacy were no different. But that’s of little to use to those who’d describe President Obama as a Bolshevik.
Yet for all the right’s professed belief in “common sense,” the reason why businesses were, metaphorically, setting the flag to the flame continued to elude conservatives, even when it was staring them in the face. As CNN, the Associated Press and others reported, the Amazons, eBays, Sears and Walmarts of the world weren’t acting out of fear or sentiment. Their motivations were straightforward, cold, and rational. Walmart wants to shed its reputation as a Red State phenomenon; Sears wants to prove it’s not exclusively for dads; Amazon’s politics are, if anything, probably “liberaltarian”; and it’s hard to imagine eBay’s pro-Confederate market was ever that big.
All of these companies, and the others like them surely to follow, were simply looking at the future; and what they saw was an America where a business implicitly legitimizing the flag had more to lose than to gain. As Jonathan Chait rightly argued, an old understanding of what it means to be American — an understanding profoundly bound to a certain definition of whiteness and constructed on a foundation of racist, revisionist history — is fading. “I know we’re going to lose eventually,” one pro-Confederate South Carolinian told the New York Times. His ranks, and the influence of his kind on the American mainstream, shrink a little more every day.
By: Elias Isquith, Staff Writer, Salon, June 25, 2015
“The South Shall Not Rise Again”: But, Beware When Right-Wing Manipulators Of Historical Memory Offer Reconciliation
Let’s not get carried away here, friends told me yesterday. A flag is just a symbol. When they stop passing voter-ID laws or start passing gun laws, then I’ll be impressed.
This is a sound view, no doubt about that. But if you don’t think symbols matter, think about how tenaciously people fight to hold on to them. And more than that: In terms of our political culture, the pending removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s capitol grounds, and now Mississippi’s state flag—and, don’t forget, from WalMart’s shelves—represents a rare win for North over South since Reconstruction.
This is a history and set of facts that far too few Americans know, and it’s vitally important to understand it in order to grasp the full magnitude of this moment. The South, more than the North, has dominated and defined the limits of America’s political culture for most of the last 140-ish years. The North has the money, the North has Wall Street, and the North runs (most of) our high and popular culture. But the South has run our politics. And this moment that we’re witness to now could be the blessed beginning of the end of all that.
It all started during Reconstruction, when a debate ensued about how the Civil War would be remembered. Our guide through these waters is Yale historian David Blight, whose groundbreaking book Race and Reunion tells this story. He shows masterfully how collectively historical memory is constructed.
According to Blight, there were three competing interpretations of the war. The “emancipationist” one emphasized slavery as the cause of the war and the slaves’ freedom as its great moral accomplishment. The “reconciliationist” view emphasized the common hardships endured by soldiers and citizens who were after all countrymen. There was also a white supremacist version that marginalized the role of slavery as a cause of the conflict (sound familiar?), but the main interpretive battle was between the first two.
It’s a long a complex and quite revolting story about this country we love, and you should read the book. But the gist of it is that in the interest of national reconciliation, the North—where, let’s face it, there was also no shortage of racists in the late 1800s—capitulated to a view of the war with which the South could be comfortable, as a battle that fully and finally unified a country that never really had been.
Gettysburg became organized basically around Pickett’s Charge, the last thrust of the Lost Cause. By the time of Woodrow Wilson—the first Southern-born president since Andrew Johnson had taken over from the slain Lincoln, and a militant segregationist—there was a 50-year commemoration of that battle attended by 50,000 veterans, not one of them black.
Meanwhile, historical memory was morphing into political reality. In Congress, the United States entered the era of the Southern committee barons whose influence on the making of national policy was obscenely out of proportion to either their numbers or the extent to which their views, particularly on race, reflected broader American sentiment. Accruing seniority and working the rules, Southerners (and yes, conservatives, they were all Democrats then; so what?) gained power. By Franklin Roosevelt’s time, of the House’s 10 most important committees, Southerners chaired nine. As for the Senate, all you need to know is this sentence, penned by the journalist William S. White in 1957: “The Senate might be described without too much violence to fact as the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
The Southerners used that power to one end far above all others: keep black people down. But then, starting in 1958, the Senate began to elect some liberals; and outside the halls of power, which is where change actually happens, a certain young charismatic minister was changing white minds and opening white hearts across the country, even a few in the South.
Next came the only years, roughly 1964 to sometime in the mid-1970s, depending on how you measure it, that the North vanquished the South politically since the Civil War. Many chairmanships changed hands; the racists were defeated and changed political parties; accommodation of the South was no longer something most Northerners and Westerners were interested in.
So that was all good, but that of course doesn’t end our story. The South, through the person of Californian Ronald Reagan, who gave a high-profile speech invoking “states’ rights” in the very town where erstwhile states’ righters had murdered Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in 1964, came roaring back. The Christian Coalition became a force. From 1980 until 2008, the Democrats did manage to win two presidential elections, but only because they put forward an all-Southern ticket that talked more about “family values” than most Democrats would have really preferred, even if they did understand the political reality.
Just as Blight observed a post-Civil War era that saw two world views, one fundamentally progressive and the other fundamentally reactionary, competing to interpret the past and thereby define the future, I argue that we’ve been living through something very similar since 1980. And just like the emancipationists and reconciliationists, we’re stuck in the ’60s: They were quarreling about the 1860s, we about the 1960s. And in our political culture for most of the past 35 years, the modern-day version of the reconciliationists has won.
But now that’s changing. Fortunately, the emancipationists control the culture from New York and Hollywood, and they’ve pushed back on the Southerners hard—this too is a huge change from the old days, when for example television networks were extremely careful not to offend Southern tastes. And so even the Southern Baptist Convention has quieted down about same-sex marriage, even if the Republican candidates haven’t.
But this—this flag business is the first instance I can recall of conservative Republican Southern politicians defying their right-wing base on an issue of first-order emotional importance. It’s important that this isn’t some liberal federal judge ordering the flag removed. It’s Republican politicians doing it. I’m not saying that to pat them on the back—they’re at least a decade late to be getting anything resembling credit as far as I’m concerned. I’m just observing it as telling: When future David Blights write about how the South started losing its hold on America’s political culture in 2015, they’ll write about this moment, the first time their leaders said to them, “Your position is just too morally undignified for me to defend anymore.”
For his part, the actual living David Blight isn’t as hopeful about this as I am. In response to my question, he emailed me yesterday: “This may indeed be a rare moment. But if my work shows anything it might be simply to say beware when right-wing manipulators of historical memory offer reconciliation. They are looking for cover for other and perhaps larger matters.”
He’s correct, of course. This massacre is still about guns and terrorism, and it’s about South Carolina’s voter-ID laws too, on which Clementa Pinckney was one of just two favorable votes in the state Senate. All those fights will continue, with the usual achingly slow progress (if progress at all on guns).
But this is still a big deal. It could usher in a second era of conquest over Southern political hegemony. If that happens, those other fights will be easier to win, eventually, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
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