Discussion for article #241892
That was so sweet!! The one thing GOPers excel at and that is lying
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So basically, National Review writer makes stupid and unsubstantiated point on history he only barely comprehends, is thoroughly refuted by an actual historian, then responds by agreeing with himself and ignoring the historian altogether, pretending like everyone agrees on his main point and there are just silly quibbles around the edges.
Yup, sounds about par for the course, typical of right wing echo-chamber politics at least since the 1990s, and tracing roots back much further than that (not that history before the Clinton Dark Ages actually, you know, counts or anything).
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Twitter and Schooled–two words that should never be used together.
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Thank you Prof. Kruse! Now send some tweets to Joe Scarborough and company.
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Nixon kept a unicorn in the White House and Henry Kissinger commuted to work every day on a rainbow. Refute that, historian!
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Also, Medicare wouldn’t have passed without Ronald Reagan’s strong endorsement of it.
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Geez, next thing you know some pointy-headed “college” professor will be telling us Ronald Reagan didn’t free the slaves. Communists, all of them!
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That was some UFC-style curbstomping shit right there lol
And hey, as long as we’re on the “shit academics shouldn’t even need to tell us” train…
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“…never mind reality, right?”
That Williamson quote should be on the NR masthead.
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I was following this as it was happening live last night. I loved how he started by saying, he wasn’t going to give him the time of day, but then he was like, “what the hell, it’s halftime…”
Great person to follow on Twitter.
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The richest part is that this comes from the idiot hacks at NRO.
Via Brad Delong:
National Review editorial, 8/24/1957, 4:7, pp. 148-9:
…National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numberical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds.
That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously argued that the difference between 20 and 21-year-olds is the difference between slavery and freedom. The residents of the District of Columbia do not vote: and the population of D.C. increases by geometric proportion. Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The great majorit of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could. Overwhelming numbers of White people in the South do not vote. Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendations of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro–and a great many Whites–to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.
The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
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Apparently, National Review’s Kevin Williamson is a member in good standing of the Michele Bachmann Historical Society.
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Williamson isn’t entirely wrong. Republican support for the Civil Rights Act was important in getting to a majority in the House and overcoming the filibuster in the Senate. While Kruse’s statistics about the percentage of votes in both chambers from Republicans in favor of the bill are accurate, they don’t tell the whole story. First, the GOP was in the minority in both chambers, so of course its Yea votes would represent a smaller percentage of the total Yea votes. Second, as noted, Republican votes, particularly from the Northern liberal wing of the GOP (remember them?) were instrumental.
Kruse is certainly correct that the lead on this were two Democratic Presidents, but a combination of Northern Democrats and Northern Republicans pushed it through. And yes, Williamson is misleading when he implies that the GOP nominated Nixon in 1968 and then elected him because of his support for Civil Rights. In fact, his campaign was full of dog whistles to the segregationist South and North. Nixon supported Civil Rights only when it was politically convenient–in particular in 1957-8 when he thought there was an opportunity for the GOP to replace the Democrats as the preferred party of black voters.
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Does Kevin Williamson know about the National Review’s clearly established regard for Jim Crow, as penned by William F. Buckley in 1957? Much later refuted by same, but history is history.
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Well, no.
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To be a Conservative writer you apparently have to check your integrity at the door. No amount of factual evidence or confirmable history can be allowed to shake you from your convictions, apparently.
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Thanks for that. Details matter, don’t they.
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Wait, so, he’s saying it never happened…but then says it did happen, but in the 30’s?
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Williamson doesn’t get that his last tweet gives the whole game away - the shift did begin in the 1930s, as has been well documented, most notably by Nancy Weiss in Farewell to the Party of Lincoln. Black voters realized the Democrats in the North and Midwest favored programs that benefited them economically - and once they received defacto enfranchisement in the South, the shift of white southerners to the GOP was inevitable.
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