Geoffrey Nunberg: Talking Right

Geoffrey Nunberg: Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism Into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Holywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (2006; paperback, 2007, Public Affairs)

One of several books to pick apart the right's remarkable success at framing public discourse on political issues. (George Lakoff has pushed this argument further, but he has his own idiosyncratic way of framing things, which makes him less useful as a critic.)

(pp. 7-8):

You can see why Democrats would look to language to explain their electoral failures. Ever sine the Republicans first began to woo Southern and working-class voters during the Nixon years, the decisive factor in American politics has been voters' apparent willingness to subordinate substantive interests to symbolic ones. In poll after poll, a majority of middle-class voters acknowledge that the Democrats would d oa better job on most of the issues that affect their daily lives, from Social Security and taxes to the environment and education. But when it comes to the crunch, a significant number of voters seem to ignore their own best interests and make their choices on the basis of patriotic appeals and cultural issues, only to be rewarded with policies that favor the rich and powerful at their expense. How could the right get away with that, Democrats ask, unless the Republicans have been turning voters' heads with a snappy line of patter? If voters can't see where their interests lie, it must be because the Democrats aren't telling their story well enough.

(pp. 14-16):

But people have different ideas about what it means for the Democrats to have a "narrative." For Robert Reich, it implies the need to evoke basic American myths and archetypes, according to a kind of political Golden Bough. Reich argues that the Democrats have to anchor their appeal in what he identifies as four "essential American stories": The Triumphant Individual, The Benevolent Community (neighbors rolling up their sleeves for the common good), The Mob at the Gates (the United States as "a beacon light of virtue" in a world threatened by barbarian forces), and The Rot at the Top ("the malevolence of powerful elites"). For the American Prospect's Robert Kuttner, it's a question of rediscovering the Democrats' populist roots: as Robert Kuttner says, "It's still a tale of two Americas, and Democrats need to tell it more convincingly."

For centrists, on the other hand, "having a narrative" tends to be a matter of making an accommodation, real or rhetorical, to some of the concerns of middle-American voters. According to Brad Carson, the Democratic representative who ran a surprisingly strong Senate race in Oklahoma in 2004, Democrats can win votes in red states only if they position themselves as a party of reform and "move away from any hope of bringing peace to irreconcilable moral disputes. Instead, Democrats should create a meta-message, one based on hope, values, and strength, that can be offered to voters everywhere." And Will Marshall, of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, insists that Democrats must be "comfortable using the language of faith" with heartland voters, so as to dispel the idea that "bicoastal elites look down on them as Bible-thumping primitives."

As varied as they are, those proposals all have the virtue of acknowledging that the Democrats' communication problems go deeper than anything that can be implemented simply by doing a global search-and-replace to substitute new phraseology for old. But while a lot of people recognize that the party needs more than a mere shift in vocabulary, few have understood how deep and pervasive the problem is. The fact is that "having a narrative" involves something more than fashioning new campaign themes, even broadly coordinated ones -- it means making that story part of the fabric of American political discourse. And while this isn't chiefly a matter of words, words matter to it. A large part of the Republicans' successes over the past thirty years or so is attributable to their ability to change the political subject -- diverting resentments that have their roots in economic inequalities to debates over "values," making programs that chiefly benefit the wealthy sound like they're aimed at benefitting the middle class, turning government into a term of abuse, and making reservations about the direction of American foreign policy sound like signs of weakness of purpose or questionable loyalty. The right couldn't have achieved all of that except by bending the meanings of words to their purposes and by getting Americans to accept those new meanings.

(pp. 28-29):

The words of our final vocabularies don't mean; they evoke. Like proverbs, they draw their power from their ability to call up scenarios, images, or moral tales. How do you teach someone the meaning of appeasement? You could read her the dictionary definition: "The policy of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace," as the American Heritage puts it. That would be a reasonable thing to do if the word in question were palliate or placate, say. But if that definition were all there is to the meaning of appeasement, you could use it as a fair description of the Bush administration's policies toward North Korea or Iran -- literally speaking, after all, appeasement is just a matter of trying to cut a deal to avoid a destructive confrontation. That's how people used to use the word, often in an approving way -- Churchill himself advocated a policy of "prudence and appeasement" toward the Turks when they went to war with the Greeks in 1919.

But after Munich in 1938, appeasement could only stand in for pusillanimous capitulation to the insatiable demands of a tyrant. The word comes with a series of stills attached to it: Neville Chamberlain with his silly high collar, striped pants, and drooping mustache; Hitler's face superimposed over goose-stepping German troops; Churchill glaring defiantly over his cigar. When Condoleezza Rice used the word on Meet the Press to describe the French and German reluctance to go to war over Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, it wasn't a charge anyone could answer by arguing that the historical analogy wasn't really very apt (Churchill didn't actually advocate going to war with Hitler in 1938, for one thing). It was simply part of a semantic blitzkrieg aimed at seizing the moral high ground for the administration, and there was no way to counter it except with an equally potent symbol that connoted rash bellicosity.

(p. 31):

But precisely because they're so vague and general, those basic symbol-words are particularly subject to manipulation. As Lippman noted in his satirical remark on the politics of subway fares, it's in the nature of political discourse to draw those words as expansively as possible, so as to reduce the details of an issue to the purely emotional response that items like freedom or values can evoke. As the writers of a recent book on political language put it: "Words like patriotism and terrorism do not let us breathe. They exhaust the air around us. We reason less well in their presence. . . ." And when words become purely connotative or evocative, it can be easy to extend their auras by manipulating their meanings or applying them to things they didn't originally refer to.

(p. 49):

Like much of the new language of the right, the redefinition of liberal goes back to the Nixon years, as liberalism was coming under attack, and Vietnam and the fallout of the civil rights movement were opening new fissures in American society. Or I should really say the Agnew years, since it was Nixon's vice president Spiro Agnew who pioneered the new populist tone of Republican rhetoric. Agnew's phraseology was impishly sui generis -- it's hard to imagine Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes describing his press critics as the "nattering nabobs of negativism" or "pusillanimous pussyfooters." But with his coded appeals to "law and order" and his attacks on the "liberal intellectuals" who were destroying the country's strength, the student radicals and hippies, and the "effete corps of impudent snobs" of the media, he became the Mrs. O'Leary's cow of the culture wars.

(p. 50):

The Republicans realized, though, that they could harness the same resentments that Wallace had spoken for, turning themselves into what the historian Michael Kazin has described as "a counter-elite, a welcome home for white refugees from the liberal crackup." To accomplish this, however, they had to blur and broaden Wallace's target audience, transforming it into the "silent majority" of whites who were frustrated by what they took to be liberal indifference to their anger about crime, race, and the counterculture. In Kazin's words: "As liberalism crumbled, astute minds in the party recognized that the defense of middle-class values -- diligent toil, moral piety, self-governing communities -- could now bridge gaps of income and occupation that the GOP had been unable to cross sine the Great Depression."

(p. 53):

David Brooks argues that "income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America," since Americans "have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich. . . ." Brooks went on: "Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm. Democratic politicians proposing to take from the rich are just bashing the dreams of our imminent selves."

That's a popular argument in the corridors of Washington's right-wing think tanks, but you have to be pretty remote from Main Street to take it seriously. True, there are some working Americans who intend to wind up rich some day and who have already packed the appropriate political attitudes into their hope chests. But for the majority, wealth is a fantasy, not a hope.

(pp. 73-74):

The very superficiality of conservatives' incessant references to brands and lifestyle is crucial to the way they've delineated the adversaries in the "culture war." As it happens, that phrase appeared around the same time that "Volvo liberal" did, exploiting some of the ambiguities that had crept into the word culture over the preceding decades. When people first started to talk about "culture wars" around 1980, they were referring to the controversies over PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the "Great Books" requirements at universities, and the multicultural curriculum -- that is, battles over "culture" in the sense that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "the intellectual size of civilization." But before long the phrase was being used to refer to a war between cultures in the anthropologists' sense, which was being fought over issues like abortion, gun control, and the teaching of "creation science" in the schools. That was what Pat Buchanan was getting at when he spoke of a "cultural war" in a famously provocative speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention:

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

There's no question that the kind of "cultural war" that Buchanan was referring to was and remains a very real feature of American public life. But Republicans realized that the armed conflict that Buchanan was talking about wasn't a struggle they could build broad middle-class coalitions around.

(p. 80):

Whether you examine political attitudes, social values, or lifestyle, in short, it's simply hallucinatory to believe that there's a "cultural divide" in America that bears comparison with the economic division between rich and poor in Victorian England or the political divisions of the Civil War -- or for that matter with the cultural division between the North and South of fifty years ago. But it's precisely the vagueness and superficiality of the right's cultural stereotypes that make them so useful: they create an illusion of shared experience among people whose actual commonalities don't extend to much more than the products on their shelves and a general sense of grievance. You get a sense of just how blurry and expansive the boundaries of "red-state culture" are when you hear right-wing writers proclaiming their identification with middle-American voters, even if they actually have no more in common with the longneck-drinking, pickup-driving classes than Paris Hilton does. Take the way radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham begins her book Shut Up and Sing by castigating "elite Americans":

They think we're stupid. They think our patriotism is stupid. They think our chruchgoing is stupid. They think having more than two children is stupid. They think where we live -- anywhere but near or in a few major cities -- is stupid. They think our SUVs are stupid. They think owning a gun is stupid. They think our abiding belief in the goodness of America and its founding principles is stupid.

The most significant word in those passages is we. How abstract must the notion of "red-state culture" be if it entitles Ingraham -- who is the daughter of a Connecticut lawyer, and who went to Dartmouth and the University of Virginia Law School and now lives in Washington, D.C. -- to claim the right to share a first-person plural pronoun with a Pentecostal deer hunter from Oklahoma? And Ann Coulter, another Ivy-educated second-generation lawyer from Connecticut (and with the vowels to prove it), goes on about red-state denizens with the effusiveness of a fifth-grader reporting on a zoo visit. "I loved Kansas City! It's my favorite place in the world . . . It's the opposite of this town. They're Americans, they're so great, they're rooting for America!" "I love Texas Republicans! . . . Americans are so cool!" "Queens, baseball games -- those are my people. American people." It's as if all differences of class and background have been swept aside, leaving Coulter, Ted Nugent, and Johnny Ramone to swill in a communion of Clinton-hating ectomorphy.

(pp. 108-109):

The problem isn't just that the Democrat's value-talk smacks of defensive me-tooism, but that it betrays a certain semantic cluelessness. Values "works" for the right because it evokes the narratives that underlie its populist strategy. When conservatives present themselves as the defenders of values, they don't mean simply that their views are principled, but that they will uphold the views of "ordinary Americans" whose religious views and standards of personal morality have been mocked and traduced by out-of-touch elite liberals. Values is charged with the indignation and displaced class resentments that the right has been battening on for the last forty years.

(pp. 122-123):

Americans have always been ambivalent about government. It may be, as political scientist Samuel Huntington has said, that distrust of government is "as American as apple pie," but people have also looked to government to play a constructive role in their lives. The traditional debate over government took a new form in the early twentieth century, as first the Progressives and then the Democrats introduced new measures to regulate employment and commerce, and conservatives countered with attacks on centralization and growing government power. Addressing proposals to have Washington regulate the railroads in 1906, the Republican Speak of the House "Uncle Joe" Cannon warned, "If the Federal Government continues to centralize, we will soon find that we will have a vast bureaucratic Government, which will prove inefficient if not corrupt." At the time, the word bureaucracy was still a word that Americans tended to associate with the undemocratic regimes of countries like Germany, Austria, and Russia. But over the following decades, it became a staple disparagement in conservative criticisms of domestic programs. "The new despotism is bureaucracy," the Wall Street Journal thundered in 1935, and over the course of the decade the Journal cited the threat of bureaucratic intrusion as its reason for opposing child labor laws, Social Security, the minimum wage, and public works like the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1940, the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie contributed "big government," which was coined as a turn on "big business." Willkie acknowledged that government intervention had been necessary to correct "abuses on the part of some American businessmen and financiers" in the 1920s. Alas, he added, the New Deal had failed to "replace this corporate tyranny with a truly liberal faith. Today it is not Big Business that we have to fear. It is big government."

(p. 128):

The "big government" charge, in short, is mostly just prejudice tricked out as philosophy -- it can't be answered simply by pointing to the reductions in the deficit you've achieved or the number of jobs or departments you've eliminated. And because the phrase is suffused with the ideology of the right, George Bush can freely invoke it to criticize the Democrats, whatever their actual positions, in the same way he can talk about "faith" and "values" with confidence that his audience will understand the phrases in a sympathetic way. "On issue after issue," Bush said during the 2004 campaign, "from Medicare without choices to schools with less accountability to higher taxes on working Americans, my opponent takes the side of more centralized control and bigger government." And Bush has tried to exploit mistrust of government to argue for moving payroll taxes into private accounts, where "the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away."

(p. 131):

But as the historian Eric Foner has written in his History of American Freedom, freedom is a word that is "deeply embedded in the record of our history and the language of everyday life" and is "fundamental to Americans' sense of themselves." Foner documents the way most of the major political debates in American history have been waged over dueling definitions of freedom, even as other nations often framed the very same issues in terms of notions like equality or community. Just over the last half century, redefinitions of freedom have been central in the Cold War, the civil rights struggle, feminism, the New Left, the personal liberation and self-expression movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the Reagan revolution, and the war on terror. No group or movement has been able to establish its moral authority in America without being able to claim freedom for its own.

(pp. 133-134):

From the late nineteenth century onward, conservatives have attacked virtually all of the reforms and regulations advocated by Progressives and later the New Deal Democrats as encroachments on individual liberty, a theme you can trace in the Wall Street Journal's editorials over the past eighty years. In the 1920s, the Journal warned against the threats to freedom that were implicit in minimum wage laws, the child labor amendment to the Constitution ("an assault upon the economic independence of the family"), and laws permitting peaceful union picketing ("attacks on the Constitutional rights of the employer," the Journal said, adding that "peaceful picketing is a contradiction in terms"). In the 1930s, it used the same rhetoric to attack Social Security ("a vast system of socialized thrift") and public works projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority (which "threaten to engulf us in totalitarianism"). In 1943, the Journal warned that it would be a mistake for the government to promise full employment when the war was over: "Hitler gave full employment. Mussolini gave full employment. . . . What they took in exchange was men's freedom."

And so on. When national attention turned to women int he workforce in the 1960s, the Journal opined that "[t]he vision of millions o women parking their kids at subsidized [day-care] centers and rushing off to the day's grind looks less like America than Russia, where the State has done so much to disrupt family life." It denounced the fair employment and public accommodations sections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act as an "aggrandizement of the police power . . . of doubtful Constitutionality." And in 1970, it argued that pollution was first and foremost a social problem that would be easily manageable through voluntary action and education and warned that government regulation would "force a solution without waiting for the social and psychological change, sacrificing cherished traditions of personal freedom for the sake of survival."

(p. 140):

But free-market ideologues tend to embrace the inequities of the market, as if the body counts that capitalism exacts were proof of its moral superiority. When the Enron meltdown threw thousands of people out of work and devastated their pensions, Bush's economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay called the collapse a "tribute to American capitalism" and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made the point even more fulsomely: "The genius of capitalism is people get to make good decisions or bad decisions,and they get to pay the consequence or to enjoy the fruits of their decisions. That's the way the system works."

(pp. 143-144):

That sort of talk is what passes for "tough-mindedness" in a lot of right-wing common rooms. Conservative rhetoric has always been susceptible to a strain of macho indifference to the misfortunes of others -- its object, as the conservative writer Peter Viereck wrote disapprovingly in 1962, is to "make people ashamed of generous social impulses." But most Americans, including many conservatives, were apt to find that tone disturbingly unChristian. Once the failed relief effort had become a public relations disaster, even George Bush knew better than to imply that the victims were to blame for their misfortunes. The reason for coining "compassionate conservatism" in the first place was to try to allay the suspicion that conservatives are temperamentally hard-hearted. That may be personally unfair to most conservatives, but it's a natural reaction to their rhetoric. Epithets like "bleeding-heart" have taken their toll on liberals, but they also tend to discredit the people who use them. We may be wary of soft-hearted sentimentality, but we're also apt to be wary of people who get off on deriding it.

(p. 170):

Like a lot of the right's rhetoric, complaints about the liberal bias of the media first became prominent in the Nixon era, when Spiro Agnew led the administration's campaign against the "small unelected elite" who were tilting the news in a liberal direction. In a speech in 1969 that became an instant sensation, Agnew charged that the networks were selective in their news coverage and invariably emphasized bad news over good and gave excessive attention to black extremists and anti-war demonstrators. And living in the "unrepresentative communities" of Washington, D.C., and New York, they were out of touch with the American people: "perhaps it is time that the networks were made more responsive to the views of the nation." Over the following years, the Nixon administration continued its campaign against the media; in 1972, Pat Buchanan, then a Nixon speechwriter, threatened that the administration would consider bringing anti-trust charges against the networks if they continued to "freeze out opposing points of view and opposing information."

The right's campaign against liberal media bias continued unabated for the next twenty years, but it wasn't until Bill Clinton's election in 1992 that it went into high gear, spearheaded by well-funded think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute, the Media Research Center, and Accuracy in Media. By then, the media themselves were giving the charges wide coverage. Over the first four years of the Clinton presidency, major newspapers mentioned media bias four times as often as they had during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Even more striking, 95 percent of those referred to liberal bias rather than conservative bias.

(pp. 179-180):

As that makes clear, the right's attacks on media bias aren't simply a criticism of the way the mainstream media cover political stories: they're also aimed at undercutting the difference betwen reporting and commentary, and with it the notions of trust, neutrality, and even truth that have stood as the ideals of responsible journalism over the past century. The fact is, the right's disquisitions on the impossibility of true objectivity are a pure distraction here. It may or may not be possible to arrive at "objectivity" in the austere philosophical sense of the term -- "the view from nowhere in particular," as the philosopher Thomas Nagel describes it. But that concept is only incidentally related to what "objectivity" means in journalism, where it stands in for a collection of attitudes, ethical principles, stylistic guidelines, and professional practices that are always bumping awkwardly into one another as the canons of the profession evolve. In his history of the development of the concept of journalistic objectivity, David Mindich identifies its components as "detachment," "nonpartisanship," "balance," attention to facts, and the inverted pyramid form of writing, though no doubt others would carve it up differently. That assortment is varied enough to make it clear that "journalistic objectivity" doesn't really say a lot more than "good journalism" does. It certainly doesn't imply the absence of perspective or what used to be called "coloring." But it does imply a commitment to getting at the truth of the matter -- and top there being a truth of the matter to get at. And when journalists come up short, there are standards you can hold them to.

(pp. 181-182):

The most striking example of that tendency is the way the right has politicized the kind of scientific findings that used to be outside the pale of partisan controversy. Writers like Chris Mooney, John Judis, and Michael Specter have amply documented what Mooney calls "the Republican war on science," as the administration systematically ignores, suppresses, or distorts scientific findings that it finds inconvenient and stacks its scientific agencies and advisory committees with appointees who are willing to toe the Republican line on everything from the effects of excessive sugar intake to the causes of global warming. What's striking is that a lot of conservatives consider themselves bound by principle to accept the administration's views on those questions even when they run counter to the overwhelming scientific consensus. It's one thing to reject the scientific evidence of revolution out of a personal faith in biblical inerrancy. It's another to deny the existence of global warming simply because you're a loyal conservative, or to see bias when the press fails to "balance" its reporting on the issue. Thirty-five years ago, not even Spiro Agnew would have thought to look for evidence of liberal bias on the New York Times's science pages.

Afterword, added to paperback edition after 2006 elections (p. 210):

The meltdown was actually a long time coming. In retrospect, the history of the Bush administration's policies could be written as a string of linguistic miscues and slogan recalls. Six months after the 9/11 attacks, Bush's insistence that his administration was focused on getting Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" had morphed into official indifference: "I don't know where he is. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him." And then, after the initial military success in Iraq, the administration produced its single most ill-advised bit of rodomontade when Bush appeared in May 2003 beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.

"Cakewalk," "Freedom is untidy," "Bring 'em on," "When they stand up, we'll stand down": the more pithily memorable the phrases were, the more they came back to haunt the administration when their disconnect from reality grew too obvious to ignore. Take them together with the administration's other failed slogans and catchphrases -- "the ownership society," "Clear Skies," "personal accounts," and the rest -- and you have an object lesson in the limits of "messaging" and framing as instruments for shaping public opinion. Words can cloud reality for a while, but they can't wholly obscure it -- sooner or later, people cotton to what Auden called "the shadow cast by language upon truth."

(pp. 213-214):

Then too, the conservative label is more contested and weakened than at any time in recent years. In the wake of the 2006 election, everyone on the right was quick to blame the Republicans' setbacks on their failure to hew to the core principles of true conservatism, but each constituency offered a different idea of what those core principles are and how they were betrayed. For some, the Republicans' downfall was their failure to do more to preserve moral values; for some it was their refusal to hold the line on spending; for some it was a focus on money and power rather than a concern about character; and for some it was a failed Iraq adventure that's signaled what William F. Buckley described as the absence of an "effective conservative ideology." It's a reminder that labels cut both ways: what can be a useful tool for smoothing over differences in good times can be an embarrassment when it comes to apportioning blame. And however those disputes fall out, it's clear that in the future, people who call themselves conservatives will have to do a lot more explaining and qualifying than they have in recent elections. (John McCain's decision to label himself a "commonsense conservative" says more about the weakening of that label than George Bush's use of "compassionate conservative" eight years ago. As Michael Kinsley has observed, "common sense is considered, by conservatives, to be a specifically conservative virtue. Unlike, say, compassion.")

posted 2008-06-23

Martin Luther King [To]Day

Last night I caught a couple of snippets of a Martin Luther King speech, trotted out on the 40th anniversary of his murder. Today the Wichita Eagle had an op-ed on King, written by right-wing nut case Cal Thomas, which was respectful and almost coherent. Checked TPM -- the Clinton-Obama primary squabble is making me crazy (more on that later) -- and there are various reports on McCain speaking (and getting heckled) in Memphis honoring King. McCain even admitted his error in voting against the MLK holiday. Looks like King, like Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson, is gaining posthumous entry to the halls of conservative saints.

Coincidentally, I'm reading Geoffrey Nunberg's Talking Right, and I picked up today in a chapter called "New Bottles, Old Whines" where I read this (pp. 156-157):

Conservatives like to invoke Martin Luther King's famous call for a color-blind America: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." But the quotation, like conservatives' memory, is selective [ . . . ] As many conservatives tell the story, that's no longer a big problem; if the government would only stop taking race into account, nobody would notice it anymore.

Nunberg introduces this by explaining (p. 156):

The right's embrace of the language of color-blindness, "reverse discrimination," and the like provides ideological cover for white resentments about racial preferences that might otherwise leave people vulnerable to charges of racism and sexism.

Nunberg goes on (pp. 157-158):

Conservatives' appropriation of the language of the early civil rights movement allows them to present themselves as the true inheritors of tradition represented by John and Bobby Kennedy and especially Martin Luther King, whom the right has recast as a conservative icon. As William Bennett puts it, "If you said in 1968 that you should judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, that you should be color-blind, you were a liberal. If you say it now, you are a conservative." But conservatives also credit King with other ur-conservative virtues. According [to] the Heritage Foundation's Carolyn Garris, King's "core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative," adding that "King's primary aim was not to change laws, but to change people." On King's birthday in 2006, the Wall Street Journal celebrated King's "commitment to non-violent social change," in the course of deploring the liberals who "do violence to the English language and King legacy by engaging in inflammatory rhetoric." Whatever the historical realities, many on the right have turned King into a mythic embodiment of the "good" liberalism of the early civil rights movement, before it "degenerated into a collection of political extremists, homosexual militants, Muslim activists, and anti-American Marxists," as the right-wing media watchdog group Accuracy in Media puts it.

Thomas Frank, in What's the Matter With Kansas?, has many more examples of the right adopting the rhetoric of the civil rights movement for its own ends. This might be something of a paradox, given that the right opposed the civil rights movement at each and every stage, yet now they argue that it was a good and necessary thing, a triumph of good old fashioned Americanism. Cal Thomas writes:

It is easy to bask in his glow four decades after his death. It took incredible bravery at the time to walk with him in support of his cause. And it wasn't only his cause. It was an American cause. He challenged this country to live up to its ideals and what he knew was its better nature, if it could escape from behind the barricade of prejudice and ignorance.

Thomas goes on to say: "King deserves more than a national holiday. In what he said about race and brotherhood, he deserves to be followed." On the other hand, the way Thomas follows King is to attack Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a bigot. The big difference between Wright and King is that King died 40 years ago, so his speeches refer to an America that is now safely interred in the past, where self-serving conservatives can clean it up and present it as a triumph of Americanism, as opposed to a still unfinished struggle against America's deep habits and most disreputable impulses.

Michael Eric Dyson: The Prophetic Anger of MLK. Read this for a view of King 40 years ago that still has some immediate relevance today -- the word "prophetic" is not too strong:

After the grand victories of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King turned his attention to poverty, economic injustice and class inequality. King argued that those "legislative and judicial victories did very little to improve" Northern ghettos or to "penetrate the lower depths of Negro deprivation." In a frank assessment of the civil rights movement, King said the changes that came about from 1955 to 1965 "were at best surface changes" that were "limited mainly to the Negro middle class." In seeking to end black poverty, King told his staff in 1966 that blacks "care now making demands that will cost the nation something. . . . You're really tampering and getting on dangerous ground because you are messing with folk then."

King's conclusion? "There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." He didn't say this in the mainstream but to his black colleagues.

Similarly, although King spoke famously against the Vietnam War before a largely white audience at Riverside Church in New York in 1967, exactly a year before he died, he reserved some of his strongest antiwar language for his sermons before black congregations. In his own pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, two months before his death, King raged against America's "bitter, colossal contest for supremacy." He argued that God "didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world today," preaching that "we are criminals in that war" and that we "have committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world."

Amen.

posted 2008-04-04