Conservatives Obtuse on '60s Civil Rights

Why was it that Sen. Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act? A majority of Republicans in both Houses of Congress voted for it. But Mr. Conservative voted against.

William Voegeli tells how it came about.

The fact is that Bill Buckley and the National Review crowd were so anxious to roll back the New Deal and Big Government that they were blind to the need for federal brute force to end the power of the segregationist South. They hoped that the South would evolve away from Jim Crow. And they wrote cringingly embarrassing stuff about whites being for now at least “the advanced race.”

When the Civil Rights Act came up for passage two young lawyers, William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, briefed Sen. Goldwater to vote against the bill. The rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually, Bill Buckley realized that he had been wrong.

Asked by Time in 2004 whether he regretted any positions he had taken in the past, Buckley said simply, "Yes. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary."

It was, writes Voegeli, “a textbook example of letting the best be the enemy of the good” and conservatives have paid for their sorry obtuseness in spades, as blacks have never after 1960 voted more than 10 percent for a Republican presidential candidate and liberals have seen the civil-rights template as the first, best, and only appropriate way to deal with social problems.

Yes, but, conservatives may retort.

But nothing. With an African American man the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, liberals can be justly proud of their courage back in the 1960s.

President Johnson in 1964 is said to have told an aide that Democrats had probably lost the South for a generation, and he probably thought they would lose the presidency as well. In other words, he understood that passing the Civil Rights Acts would have untold consequences, many of which could hurt his party. But he did it any way because it was the right thing to do.

Whenever conservatives get a little cocky about their noble virtue versus the eternal perfidy of the liberals, it wouldn’t hurt to remember their foolishness and pusillanimity back in the decisive decade of civil rights.