Reflections  

The Race War — From about 1968 to 1992, liberals were against war. Then they went wholehog for intervention in Bosnia.

"Bosnia turned these liberals into hawks," writes George Packer in "The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq," The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 8. "People who, from Vietnam on, had never met an American military involvement they liked now were calling for U.S. air strikes to defend a multiethnic democracy against Serbian ethnic aggression. Suddenly the model was no longer Vietnam. It was World War II and armed American power was all that stood in the way of genocide."

Liberals supported military interventions in Haiti, East Timor, and Kosovo, and itched for intervention in Rwanda. They mostly supported the post-Sept. 11 move into Afghanistan, which Packer says was a war of national security but had human rights as a side benefit. For liberals, the overrunning of al Qaeda training camps was less important than the videos of happy, unshrouded women.

Now comes an invasion of Iraq, Packer says, and the liberals are suspicious but unsure.

All this surprises me, because liberals are almost my mirror opposite. I was for most of the struggles of the Cold War, because communism was a worldwide movement that ultimately laid a political claim to me. But Serbian nationalism never was, nor was Indonesian nationalism. I had no stake in who won in Kosovo or who ruled Haiti, East Timor, or Rwanda. As a rule, when their interest is involved, liberals want to run and hide, it's only when they are disinterested that they want to fight.

Well, I think I have figured them out. What motivates them is ethnicity and race. We all think about these things, but liberals and leftists think about them more. To them, South Africa in 1985 had a much more evil government than Burma, because it was whites oppressing blacks, whereas in Burma it was Asians oppressing Asians. It was not important to liberals that there was considerable freedom of the press in South Africa but none at all in Burma, or that there was some democracy in South Africa and none in Burma. Nor were liberals interested in blacks oppressing blacks in Africa — at least not until the open butchery in Rwanda. And they have had little to say about the recent chaos in Nigeria.

It seems the reason for this is that the cause that inspires liberals and anoints them with moral superiority is civil rights for black Americans. Any issue that can be fitted into that mold will be their issue. The other mold they use, as Packer says, is World War II, which they see as a crusade to stop the Holocaust.

Each involves collective guilt and collective redemption, which are the core tenets of modern liberal ideology. Some liberals seem to think these are at the core of their opponents' ideologies as well. That is, deep down their opponents must be motivated by racism, sexism, backlash, anger, and hate.

It is a false assumption. Your opponent is rarely a mirror image of you. And one illustration of this is the similarity of thinking by liberals and libertarians about a war on Iraq.

This may be the first issue in years about which I agree with Al Gore. And maybe the last. — Bruce Ramsey

Lott thought he felt he didn't agree — The old saw about America having two parties — an evil party and a stupid party — was richly confirmed by the Trent Lott debacle.

Lott, Republican pretender to majority leadership of the United States Senate, went to the 100th birthday celebration for retiring Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond. Fifty-four years earlier, Thurmond had bolted the Democratic Party and campaigned for president on the States Rights ticket. His motive was opposition to President Truman's proposed civil-rights legislation, which intended, among other things, to eliminate racial discrimination in federally funded jobs. In context, the States Rights Party stood for the maintenance of racial segregation in the South.

Thurmond, who is said to have been the first senator to hire a black aide, long ago made his peace with the civil rights movement. He is respected by both blacks and whites in his home state of South Carolina. Lott, however, could not leave the events of 1948 alone. He insisted on saying that he was happy that his own state, Mississippi, had voted for Thurmond, and that "if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years."

What did that mean? It didn't mean anything. It certainly didn't mean that Lott, one of the biggest buckets of political pabulum that has ever caused the American palate to shrink away in disgust, was announcing his support of resegregation. Even if Lott believed in that, it's the last thing he would ever come out and say. The fact that he said what he said is the best possible evidence that he didn't mean it.

Naturally, however, the high-volume spokesmen of the evil party, the Democrats, started publicly interpreting Lott's remarks — his "racist statement" (Albert Arnold Gore Jr.) — as a revelation of the fact that he spent every night in sympathetic analysis of the early speeches of Adolf Hitler. The Democrats knew better, of course. I am certain that not one of these people ever seriously entertained the thought that Lott was a racist. But they saw their political opportunity, and they took it.

Of course, Lott began explaining and regretting and explaining again and regretting still more, and the affair got worse and worse, because this leading spokesman of the Grand Old Party can't talk his way out of a paper bag. Besides, he looks exactly like a used-car salesman. I know they said that about Nixon, but this time, it's true. He might not be able to help looking like that, but he does. It's impossible to listen closely to what he's saying, because you're always thinking how much he looks like a used-car salesman.

And now, with apologies to any actual used-car salesmen who may be reading this, I'll continue.

To me, the most interesting of Lott's explanations and regrets was the one he came up with second. He said that his "words were terrible," but that the mistake he had made was a "mistake of the head and not of the heart, because I don't accept those policies of the past, not at all."

In other words, "Please forgive me — I can't THINK."

Or, alternatively, "Please forgive me — I THOUGHT that segregation was a good idea; then I realized that I didn't FEEL that way."

Take your pick. The only thing more pathetic than this alternative is the alternative faced by every person who walks into a voting booth in America. Will it be Evil today — or Stupid? — Stephen Cox

The axis of dumb — Could the international situation get any more confusing? Bush's foreign policy team is supposed to be brilliant. I guess they'd have to be to follow this web of intrigue.

After a bunch of Arabs crashed airplanes into American landmarks, the U.S. invaded largely Pashtun Afghanistan to depose the Taliban. In order to take out the Taliban, the U.S. made common cause with Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan. Pakistan is run by a military dictator and has nuclear weapons with which it menaces its neighbor, India. We've subsequently discovered that Pakistan's secret service all but invented the Taliban in order to pacify its basket-case neighbor. With friends like these . . .

Now the U.S. has mounted a campaign against Iraq, which is run by a military dictator who may have weapons of mass destruction he might use to menace his neighbor, Israel. But, as the Bushies press all the diplomatic flesh they can lay hands on in order to forge an anti-Iraq alliance, lo and behold, North Korea announces it has weapons of mass destruction which Pakistan helped it to produce.

Pakistan continues to play a vital role in our pacification of Afghanistan. I suppose it follows that the next step in the War on Terror is we reoccupy Germany with help from Saudi Arabia because the Sept. 11 criminals came from Hamburg. — Brien Bartels

One cheer for Al Sharpton — Trent Lott's recent statement that "we wouldn't have had all these problems" if the segregationist candidate, Strom Thurmond, had won the presidency, reflects badly enough on Lott. But the reaction among Republicans is far more upsetting. Rush Limbaugh and others dismissed the gravity of Lott's remarks as though their offensiveness was a trumped-up charge. That's understandable. Bigots like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have made careers of going about with a racism gun, shooting everything in sight. Their credibility further is weakened by the vein of racism running through the Civil Rights Establishment. But, this time, they were right. Lott did not "misspeak." Presumably accustomed to whispered jokes among Southern paleo-cons, Lott didn't even really apologize. Segregation, he said, was a "discarded practice of the past" — apparently, of no more moral significance than a 1984 Chevy Nova.

Never did Lott address the circumstances leading up to Thurmond's 1948 run for the presidency. In 1946, on a roadside in Monroe, Ga., a white mob murdered a black World War II veteran, his wife, and two of their friends. One of the corpses was found with 180 bullet holes in it. President Truman was so horrified, he began a campaign to pass new civil rights laws and more vigorously enforce those already existing. In retaliation, Thurmond and a handful of others split from the party, denouncing Truman for trying to undermine the "Southern way of life."

The desegregation movement was a great moment in American history because it represented a rededication to the principles of the Declaration of Independence: all men are created equal and it is wrong for the government to distinguish between individuals because of their race. But it should come as no surprise that a prominent Republican soullessly mouths the words of regret over his seeming to endorse the "discarded policies of the past." Conservatives simply do not believe in the Declaration's principles.

In 1993, Russell Kirk (who preceded Robert Bork as America's leading conservative intellectual) told a Heritage Foundation audience: "don't I believe in equality of opportunity? No, friends, I do not. The thing is not possible. First of all, genetic differences cannot be surmounted between individual and individual. Thomas Jefferson and the whole school of 'created free and equal' knew nothing whatsoever of human genetics. Inequality is the natural condition of human beings. Charity may assist those not favored by nature, but attempts to impose an artificial equality of condition and intellect, although in the long run they fail, meanwhile can work great mischief in any society and — still worse — damage human nature itself."

Kirk and his supporters may dissemble, but the racial tinge of such words is undeniable. Compare them, for instance, to the "cornerstone speech" of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens: "Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo. It was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? . . . With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro."

Republicans are absolutely right to cry "Double Standard!" Former KKK dragon and Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, for instance, sails neatly by while Jackson and Sharpton say nothing. But it would be even greater hypocrisy for our leaders to demand that, say, Yasser Arafat denounce terrorism in every speech, while minimizing the offensiveness of a Mississippi good ol' boy who tells his audience that things wouldabin bettah if thar hain't bin nunna dat dee-seg-ruh-gay-shun. — Timothy Sandefur

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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