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.

Heller and "Select Militias"

The big takeaway for me on the Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller is the description of its history.

Justice Scalia writes intriguingly about what the framers and the people of the 18th century thought about the right to keep and bear arms.

Their memory was the attempt by governments to disarm the people they didn’t like. In the late 17th century their memory was of the British kings Charles II and James II and their “select militias.”

Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.

You can imagine that folks didn’t have a very rosy memory of that time. In the runup to the American Revolution a similar thing occurred, according to Scalia. This time the British king was George III.

In the tumultuous decades of the 1760s and 1770s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms.

Governments don’t disarm the populace out of a noble desire to preserve peace. They do it out of a desire to weaken their opponents.

The situation really isn’t that different today. Liberals want guns out of the hands of conservatives. They see right-wing militias under every bush. Liberals are in charge of education, culture, and the government bureaucracy and they instinctively know that it is not in their interest to have the average conservative householder armed and dangerous. Neither side is going to give up, not without a fight.

Glenn Reynolds makes this point in the New York Post today.

But winning in the Supreme Court is just the beginning of the story. Even the biggest civil-rights victories have taken years to percolate through the lower courts, often in the face of foot-dragging or outright resistance from lower-court judges, states and municipalities.

Seems like the National Rifle Association is still going to need our support.

Heller Doesn't End It

Today the United States Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller upheld the plain meaning of the Second Amendment. But obviously it didn’t end there. The decision was 5-4 in favor of the amendment and it’s likely that the next president will be a liberal.

Anyway, as we know, liberals never stop litigating. So we can see that liberal groups will start moving cases through the court system in the hope that they will ultimately reach the Supreme Court when a couple more liberal justices have been appointed to the bench. Maybe then the Court will see the light and end the slaughter of guns in the streets.

Obviously that is a concern for conservatives. We’d like to think that the gun thing was put to bed, that the Second Amendment means what it says it means, that Americans are free-born people with the rights of a free people. That is: they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and that among these rights are the rights of self-defense.

But we know that liberals really don’t believe in rights for anyone but themselves and their clients. They are against the First Amendment if it means that conservatives can compete in the public square. They are against the Second Amendment if it means that conservatives can defend themselves from liberal-supported criminal predators.

But I am encouraged. I reckon that the attitude to take with would-be liberal challengers to District of Columbia v. Heller is: Go ahead, make my day.

If a liberal court were ever to overturn Heller then conservatives would have a “single issue” that would keep giving and giving for years.

Are You Sure, Dems?

If you scratch a Democrat this year, you will probably find someone who feels like they are waking up out of a bad dream, the bad dream of 28 years of conservative backlash against rational, progressive governance.

To put it another way, Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years. They still believe in top-down expert-led central government programs to organize and direct the commanding heights of the economy, politics, and the culture.

But here’s my prediction. After Barack Obama gets elected president and the Dems increase their majorities in Congress they are going to get a wake-up call. Americans really don’t know what they want, but they don’t want liberals bossing them around.

Here are four issues that show the Dems just don’t get it.

Universal Pre-K It’s not just Hillary Clinton with a lovely wrapped present of universal pre-kindergarten schooling and care. It’s Obama. Writes Terence Jeffrey about Obama’s plan to raise our kids for us:

We used to do it ourselves. Now, convinced we have better things to do, many of us leave the job to others.



Encouraging this flight from parenthood, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has proposed what he calls his "Zero to Five" plan. It is a collection of programs aimed at getting the government involved in the raising of your children from the moment they are born.

Are you really sure about that, Sen Obama? Given what a wonderful job government has done with K-12 education, do you really think that a centralized, top-down, bureaucratic approach to early childhood education is really going to be anything other than a big plum for the education blob?

Energy and Global Warming Sen. Obama has said that $5 per gallon gasoline is inevitable. He just wished it hadn’t happened all of a sudden. As Sheldon Alberts reports, Obama is against “dirty oil” like the Alberta tar sands play that is ramping up north of us in Canada.

Barack Obama on Tuesday vowed he would break America’s addiction to "dirty, dwindling, and dangerously expensive" oil if he is elected U.S. president — and one of his first targets might well be Canada’s oil sands.

Obama says "The possibilities of renewable energy are limitless." Well, yes, Senator. But until renewable energy actually comes in cheaper than fossil fuel it is just a possibility. You can’t commit the people of the United States to a possibility. And that means that you can’t commit the United States to a radical move away from fossil fuels merely on the prediction of advocates that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will have catastrophic results a century from now. What if they are wrong?

What you can do is spend a little here and there on research and on easing the development hurdles for new technologies. But a rigid top-down energy program is going to fail. “Plans are useless, but planning is essential.” That’s what President Eisenhower said about military plans. The same applies to any top down plan. It doesn’t survive the first few minutes of battle, but it’s essential to have thought and planned about the future, so you can adapt when you find out that your assumptions were all wrong.

Fairness Doctrine

Nancy Pelosi told a group of journalists recently that she was in favor of reviving the Fairness Doctrine, according to John Gizzi. It’s understandable that Democrats are frustrated by the success of Rush Limbaugh and talk radio. But the answer isn’t to try and shut them up. The answer is for elite liberals to think seriously about their agenda and about why “liberal” has become a dirty word.

Actually, Rush gives the impression that he is hoping for a revival of the Fairness Doctrine. It would make him the most popular man in America, and probably propel a Republican into the White House.

Universal Health Insurance Democrats still can’t get beyond the century-old idea of cradle-to-grave government-controlled health insurance. What will it solve? Not much. But it will create a crisis in health care that will reverberate through the political system with unknown results.

Raising Tax Rates Senator Obama is promising to raise tax rates on the wealthy, by extending the FICA payroll tax and by increasing capital gains taxes and dividend taxes. Apart from the fact that the rich are already paying a bigger share of income tax than before and the bottom half of taxpayers are paying nothing, there is the international problem. Worldwide, governments are lowering tax rates. Does Obama really think he can raise tax rates in the US without a negative hit to the economy?

All these issues tell me one thing. Democrats haven’t really tried to think about the meaning of the last 30 years of American politics. They just want to forget the nightmare of Reagan and Bush and get back to politics as usual. That means that they are in for a nasty surprise.

What's So Depressing?

Women are twice as likely to be depressed as men, writes Dennis Prager.

If that’s true, then maybe we should do something about it.

But first we have to ask: Why?

Is is patriarchal oppression? Is it the glass ceiling? Is it the lack of affordable child care?

Prager is a conservative, so he’s more likely to suggest that the problem is liberalism. And so he does.

One of the things we’ve done, as ordered by liberals, is to end the traditional culture that pressured men to curb their natural instincts for rape and violence. But we have also curbed the tradition that pressured women to curb their feelings.

Societies and parents also always knew that it was imperative to teach girls to control their natures — in particular their predilection to be ruled by their emotions. Women who allowed their emotions to rule them not only became destructive (to members of their families first and foremost), they became unhappy women.

Then, of course, women have been encouraged to curb their feminity, the natural modesty and chastity of women. Most women, I have noticed, return to femininity as they get older, taking a joy in children, pretty things, and the day-to-day texture of life. But for many, the lost years of “You Go Girl” can never be replaced.

On top of all that is the dearth of “men.” There are plenty of boys around, boys of all ages, on account of the fact that boys aren’t taught to control their boyishness.

You add all this together and what do you get?

[M]any women, untrained in subduing darker aspects of their natures, deprived of the female joy of femininity and increasingly deprived of men (as opposed to boys), are feeling the brunt of these losses. They call it depression.

Could it be? Or is the problem still that women are underrepresented in the sciences and technology?

Wright Was Almost Right

Everyone understands that messages often get garbled in transmission. Teachers demonstrate it by whispering a message to a kid at the front of the class and then getting it back from the kid at the back of the class after it’s been whispered from desk to desk.

Then there’s the old saw about the message sent from the front lines: “Send reinforcements we’re going to advance!” It ended up as “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance!”

So now I understand what Reverend Wright got wrong when he told his flock in Chicago that the US government deliberately injected the black community with AIDS to decimate it.

He garbled the message. What they told him was that government AID is so toxic that it could be compared to an attempt to decimate blacks.

So you could say that Reverend Wright was almost right.

But through a simple error in transmission Reverend Wright is condemning another generation of blacks to a life of blighted dreams.

Maybe Sen. Barack Obama (N-IL) will set it all right.

The Age of Anti-Heroes and Anti-Modesty

At the beginning of his remarkable book Honor: A History James Bowman defines honor.

Honor in men is bravery, the courage to stand in the line with your brothers even unto death. Honor in women is chastity. And if you think all that is old-fashioned then try calling a man a wimp or a woman a whore and see where it gets you.

So why is it that our liberal friends and their willing accomplices in the media and the popular culture make such a big deal about the anti-hero, the man who defines himself by standing against his brothers in the line? And why does it celebrate a “sexual life” for women that celebrates the idea of women acting much like men when it comes to sex?

Media critic L. Brent Bozell III notes the current glut of TV shows glamorizing prostitutes as smart, contemporary women. Writes Showtime of their hooker heroine:

She is smart, strong and confident and, like many modern women, she is struggling to balance her personal and professional life.

My guess that this is all going to collapse into a Return to Modesty. (Wow, that’s the title of a book by Wendy Shalit.)

But for some time I have been wondering what it is that women are advertising with their honor concept of chastity. I’m a man; I understand the honor as courage bit. But chastity?

A couple of nights ago I finally put it together. If you want to understand women then you must understand love. Chastity is the measure of a woman’s love and devotion.

We start with Lord Byron:

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.

But sleeping around doesn’t do anything for a woman, not least because of the “loss” factor. Women mourn and grieve all lost loves, and the pain they cause pretty soon teaches them to love where they are, not where they might hope to be.

That is why Jane Austen in Persuasion makes Anne Elliot’s speech about womanly constancy the climax of the novel.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

The minx says this, of course, in the hearing of the worthy Captain Wentworth into whose arms she will fall within the hour.

Honor for a woman is to faithfully and generously love. All they want is for their love to be appreciated.

And that, boys and girls, is why Christianity goes down big time with women, especially right now in the Global South and in China where two-thirds of Christian adherents are said to be women. You love God and God loves you back. What’s not to like?

And that is also why the present age of anti-heroic men and anti-chaste women is going to go the way of the Dodo. Men love to be heroes, and women love to be chaste. They won’t be denied for long.