Rand Paul made such a fool of himself the week before last, that it was understandable folks might miss perhaps the most foolish--and most telling--thing of all that he said. When asked point-blank on NPR if he would say that the Civil Rights Act was "an overreach by the federal government", he didn't just duck the question, he claimed he would have marched with Matrin Luther King " to overturn institutional racism". As became quite clear later in the day on the Rachel Maddow Show, he was really opposed to letting the government do anything about private discrimination, because it violated his libertarian model of freedom for business-owners. And freedom for libertarians is all about property. In this diary, I want to make five basic points:
(1) The Civil Rights Movement was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have marched with Martin Luther King.
(2) The Civil Rights Act was much more involved in fighting private discrimination that Rand Paul acknowledges, which means there is no way that Paul would have supported it.
(3) Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act was largely based on the same broad reasons that Rand Paul has a problem with it.
(4) Private discrimination has played a significant role in conservative politics in the years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, which means it is anything but an historical irrelevancy.
(5) Libertarians have a very different vision of "freedom" from the Civil Rights vision, although they take great pains to obscure the fact. In fact, the libertarian vision of freedom was part of what helped keep slavery in place, as well as what helped justify opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
Let's turn to the record. Here's the passage in the NPR interview:
SIEGEL: You've said that business should have the right to refuse service to anyone, and that the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA, was an overreach by the federal government. Would you say the same by extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Dr. PAUL: What I've always said is that I'm opposed to institutional racism, and I would've, had I've been alive at the time, I think, had the courage to march with Martin Luther King to overturn institutional racism, and I see no place in our society for institutional racism.
SIEGEL: But are you saying that had you been around at the time, you would have hoped that you would have marched with Martin Luther King but voted with Barry Goldwater against the 1964 Civil Rights Act?
Dr. PAUL: Well, actually, I think it's confusing on a lot of cases with what actually was in the civil rights case because, see, a lot of the things that actually were in the bill, I'm in favor of. I'm in favor of everything with regards to ending institutional racism. So I think there's a lot to be desired in the civil rights. And to tell you the truth, I haven't really read all through it because it was passed 40 years ago and hadn't been a real pressing issue in the campaign, on whether we're going to vote for the Civil Rights Act.
SIEGEL: But it's been one of the major developments in American history in the course of your life. I mean, do you think the '64 Civil Rights Act or the ADA for that matter were just overreaches and that business shouldn't be bothered by people with a basis in law to sue them for redress?
Dr. PAUL: Right. I think a lot of things could be handled locally. [Goes on to talk about wheelchair access, etc.]
"If the times aren't ripe, you have to ripen the times" was one of Dorothy Height's favorite quotes and it made sense that it was, because she ripened the times with the best of them. Like Sojourner Truth a century before, Ms. Height stood at the intersection of two great civil rights movements: the movement to end Jim Crow and racial discrimination, and the modern feminist movement. She prodded both movements to do better in fighting on behalf of the other, and she was the living bridge that kept them from ever growing too far apart. She didn't get the headlines the way some of the male civil rights leaders did, but she was every bit as important to building the movement and keeping it going. Another great quote of hers also typified her: "stop worrying about whose name gets in the paper and start doing something about rats and day care and low wages... we must try to take our task more seriously and ourselves more lightly."
As that quote demonstrates, she was focused on the real lives and economic fortunes of the poor and working class people she spent her entire life fighting for. She was in the middle of every major battle for justice in the last 70 years, and fought those battles with dignity and determination. She was insistent but never impatient, and she never whined or gave up hope no matter what the odds and no matter who was making threats.
I was very lucky to get to know Ms. Height a little during the 1990s, mainly because my bsos in the Clinton White House was Alexis Herman, Ms. Height's dear friend. Ms. Height was one of the wisest and kindest people I have ever had the privilege to know, and she was a force of nature, organizing and chairing important meetings into her 90s. She was revered, beloved, and respected by the entire civil rights and progressive community, and could get people to work together on issues when no one else could. Dorothy Height was one of the great figures of American progressivism and American history. Her death is a great loss to us all.
In his book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Yale historian David W. Blight describes in detail how the history of the Civil War-its meaning, cause, purpose and effect-was completely rewritten to reflect the views of Southern racist ideology over a period of 50 years after the war. Blight describes the interactions of three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which contended with one another over time. Eventually, the reconciliationist narrative, which had its roots in revulsion at the sheer horror of the war itself, became completely subsumed by the white supremacist narrative, simply because the South refused reconciliation on any other terms, thus resulting in the virtual elimination of the historically accurate emancipationist narrative, which did not fully re-emerge until the Civil Right era in the 1950s and 60s. I wrote about Blight's book at some length in my December, 2008 diary, "American Amnesia: The Cost of Accommodating The South".
In turn, something very similar to the process Blight describes has been underway to rewrite the history of the Civil Rights Movement itself, and the recent uproar over Harry Reid's clumsy remarks about Obama's appearance and speech is a classic illustration of that process at work. Another example is the Facebook invitation I recently received to attend the Republican Party of Los Angeles County's "first annual" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Awards Dinner. The event description began:
Please join the Republican Party of Los Angeles County as we honor two great Republicans who embody the courage and spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr. - A Republican who stood for individual responsibility and spoke eloquently and boldly in defense of liberty and justice for all.
The dreams of Dr. King live on in scores of Republicans today. This year our first annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Legacy Award will be presented to Star Parker and Walter Allen.
This crude attempt to reinvent King as a conservative Republican is laughable to anyone the least bit familiar with the real King, a democratic socialist well to the left of the entire white political spectrum. Most particularly, as I pointed out in my 1995 MLK Day essay republished here last night, "Martin Luther King - A Different Drum Major", King's concept of character-as reflected in his speech, "The Drum Major Instinct"-was the polar opposite of the acquisitive conservative ideal, touted by the likes of Parker.
I don't want to get too gooshy as we go into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend by giving you all the stuff I'm thankful for, but it does seem like an appropriate moment to be a little more reflective than usual. The thing I want to focus on today is the hope for a better world.
It is very easy to be pessimistic and cynical about the chance for things to get better as we fight our issue and political battles. Wealthy powerful special interests are entrenched and seem able to run everything. Too many politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Well-intentioned organizations are sometimes pretty ineffectual. The establishment's conventional wisdom seems set in stone. And I think we have seen so many things in the last few decades that have made us cynical about our government and questioning about our leaders, it is easy to think that nothing will ever change. I know for me, reading the Church committee report about the CIA, The Pentagon Papers, and the Nixon White House tapes transcripts as a young man was enough to make me very skeptical about the nature of our government at the time.
I think a certain level of healthy skepticism about our government and the establishment is a very good thing, and should be cultivated. The problem arises when skepticism turns cynical and pessimistic, and infects how we view every single thing in life and politics. At the heart of progressivism is the hope that it is possible to make a better world, that progress is indeed within our reach. When Barack Obama ran a campaign with a slogan he borrowed from Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers, Yes We Can, and preached his gospel of hope, he was tapping into a long progressive tradition dating back to our very founding as a country. Heading into that terrible winter at Valley Forge, Tom Paine, wrote: "Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it and repulse it." Lincoln at Gettysburg, at that terrible moment honoring those tens of thousands of fallen soldiers at their gravesites, spoke of the hope "that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Martin Luther King, Jr., in a discouraging moment in his great work, said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it curves toward justice", and the civil rights movement anthem's chorus sang out "We Shall Overcome".
We progressives should embrace the hope that our movement, the progressive movement, has always carried as its banner. It is conservatives who have always feared change and doused the flames of hope, conservatives who said government could not do anything right or make progress for the American people.
I write this because I see too often the deep cynicism of many friends in the progressive movement, the assumption that virtually every politician is corrupted by being an insider, that every compromise in the legislative process is a sleazy one, that every progressive group is a sell-out. I see it in the responses I sometimes get when I write about my hopes for passing legislation that could be improved on in the future, where people ask why I think any piece of legislation will be improved on given that corporations run America. I see it in articles by progressive thinkers like Jamie Galbraith, who wrote on Monday an entire blog post about how hopeless everything was in terms of making changes in economic policy. I see it in progressive talk show hosts and comedians and media figures: a sense of gloom about any prospects for a better future are everywhere I look.
While righteous anger and cynical humor are an important part of our work, progressivism that is at its core cynical and pessimistic doesn't work over the long run. For one thing, it will burn itself out. When I was a young organizer being trained, I was told that you can't organize people if you are too depressed to be hopeful, that if you were feeling burnt out, you should take a vacation or even get into a different line of work. I still believe that to be true. Righteous anger is a great thing, and can feed you for a while, but if it's not leavened with hope, it won't sustain you over the long good fight. But it also doesn't work because the internal contradiction is too great. Telling people that we can change things for the better while being cynical about any hope for change is a self-defeating philosophy.
Albert Camus wrote in The Plague that "once the faint stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague ended." It is our job as progressives not just to attack the powers that be, not just to fight against the establishment, but to breathe life into those faint stirrings of hope, and to believe in them ourselves. It is easy to be a cynic with all the bad things that happen in the world. It takes more courage to believe that we can, someday soon, overcome. It is our hope and optimism that gives us the strength to keep fighting the odds against us, that keeps us going in the face of the money and power of the entrenched special interests. And history is very clear on this point: those with the faith and hope that they could indeed overcome the odds did quite often prevail. The abolitionists won their 40-year battle, the suffragists prevailed after 90 years of struggle, Jim Crow was finally beaten 90 years after African-American rights were abandoned by the North with the end of reconstruction. Through decades of violence, derision, arrests, intimidation, our progressive ancestors never gave into despair and defeatism. We should take their example to heart, and have hope for the future, hope that we can make progress, hope that we can build a more perfect union. Hope and virtue have survived: now let's make them flourish.
(This excellent diary brings a great deal more depth to our understanding of what the term "progressive" means historically, and then shows how that accurate historical understanding illuminates deeper problems with Nate Silver's recent simplistic dichotomization. Lot's to think about here, folks! - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This is a belated follow-up to Paul and David's critiques of Nate Silver's "Rationalist vs. Radical" progressivism. The dichotomies Silver laid out include:
Rationalist vs. Radical
Empirical vs. Normative
Sees politics as a battle of ideas vs. Sees politics as a battle of wills
Technocratic vs. Populist
Prone to elitism vs. Prone to demagoguery
Prone to co-optation vs. Difficult to organize
Optimistic vs. Pessimistic
Conversational vs. Action Oriented
The ensuing discussion focused mostly on how progressives think, or frame the world. I want to look, instead, at something different and potentially more important: how progressives have historically conceptualized ACTION.
In ongoing historical work towards a book I'm calling Social Class, Social Action, and the Failures of Progressive Democracy, I argue that there are actually three distinct forms of progressivism, all drawing from different interrelated aspects of middle-class culture: Administrative, Collaborative, and Personalist progressives. As with any categorizations, these have their own problems, but I think reflect key historical realities.
Not only do Silver's comparisons miss this three-fold complexity, but he also mixes in working-class models of social action as well.
Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history? We asked two dozen writers, thinkers, and historians to answer that question; read their responses below.
I think the most interesting thing about the answers is the degree to which just about everyone sounds ambivalent or confused. It's a very odd array of answers from people who are immersed in politics and history and who should be able to rattle off a compelling rationale for the candidate without any problem, even if they disagree with the notion that it's a movement on par with civil rights or the labor movement.
There are plenty of other things Digby says in this post that I agree with, but there are two things wrong with this part. (1) I think it's clear that the vast majority of folks know the campaign is no movement, and say so in a variety of informative ways. They are neither ambivilent nor confused, though they may disagree with one another somewhat. (2) I don't think any of them saw it as their job to "rattle off a compelling rationale for" Obama, so what's the big deal that they didn't? This isn't an indication of confusion, much less anything else, aside from the question they were trying to answer.
What's more, some of their answers were well worth thinking about--or at least worth reading for some small sense of not being alone. And most surprisingly for me, arguably the best answer came from a somewhat surprising source--one-time "black conservative" Glenn Loury (he once held a very high position in the Reagan Administration), who has had a some fairly dramatic struggles and changes of direction in his life. In contrast, a couple of progressive voices make some rather mundane points, albeit with a flourish. Execrpts and comments, also covering Naomi Klein, Garry Wills and Michael Kazin.
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