Items of Interest: Fourth Week of Lent

When Fighting Racism Meant Fighting Economic Exploitation
an interview with Erik Gellman (Jacobin). «Though often forgotten today, the National Negro Congress forged a black-led, labor-based coalition in New Deal America that fought white supremacy and the economic exploitation that undergirded it.»

A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments
by Aaron Huertas (Medium). Bad faith arguments are common in politics. And while they’ve always been part of political culture, they’re much more rampant on social media. It’s easy to fall prey to bad faith arguments and waste time engaging someone on points that obscure rather than shed light on how we’re all affected by policy and politics. So with that in mind, here’s a field guide for spotting and responding to bad faith arguments and staying focused on the real-world issues that matter.»

The Secret History of Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas
by Carlos Kevin Blanton (Texas Monthly). «It's a dynamic that almost anyone who teaches or writes about Texas’s past grapples with. Many of my students at Texas A&M have firm impressions about Texas history. They see it as the story of how barbed and brutal justice tamed a wild land, bringing civilized modernity to the wilderness and spurring moral and spiritual regeneration. These notions are a part of our identity. We read these enduring narratives in the histories of Walter Prescott Webb and T. R. Fehrenbach. We revisit them in our literature and films. We recite these beliefs about the good and necessary violence in Texas like prayers. All states have bloody pasts. But no state bathes itself in it quite like Texas.»

The Christianization of U.S. Foreign Policy
by Kathryn Joyce (The New Republic) Should be titled "The Evangelical Theocrats Take Over U.S. Foreign Policy". «Even amid an administration stacked with evangelical staffers and advisors, Pompeo stands out. As former CIA director he described the “war on terror” as a holy war and said the U.S. “worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.” He now readily tells audiences about how he keeps a Bible open on his State Department desk to remind him of God’s truth. One of the driving motivators of Pompeo’s State Department increasingly seems to be what Gardiner calls “well-documented beliefs in the prophetic necessity of the establishment of a ‘Greater Israel’ in order to usher in the End Times”—hardly a stabilizing central principle in an era of nuclear risk. Meanwhile, holding “separate interviews with religious broadcasters,” Gardiner pointed out, means “reaching the white evangelicals who are the single most unwavering part of the voting base of an embattled president.”»

Gluttony
by Henry Karlson (Little Bit of Nothing). «The citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah were prideful in their wealth and power: they used it in excess on themselves, on their inordinate pleasures, to demonstrate their earthly glory; but in their prosperity, they ate away at the resources of the earth, leading to the poor and needy to experience extreme suffering and death. It is in this respect, in the injustice which can be seen tied with gluttony we can begin to understand why gluttony is one of the deadly sins: its nature lies is not in overeating, though that often is a form in which it takes, but in the inordinate taking in of the abundance of the earth at the expense of others, with eating, a necessary function of life, being at the center of the disorder.»

Items of Interest: Third Week of Lent

Where is Jesus in a culture of winning?
by Meghan J. Clark (US Catholic). «When our culture separates so-called winners from losers, the Christian commitment to human dignity is essential. Human dignity is universal and inviolable; it does not need to be earned. For Day, “the gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”»

Where Do Women Belong? A Critique of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed
by Kristin Kobes Du Mez (KristinDuMez.com). «Yes, we need to critique the shortcomings of modern liberalism. But we also need a better model of authority, one shorn of nostalgia, patriarchy, and dangerous inattention to abuses of power. Without that, our future may be even bleaker than that which Deneen depicts.»

The World Would Be a Better Place Without the Rich
by Sam Pizzigati (Jacobin). «The awesomely affluent have no net redeeming social value.Their presence coarsens our culture, erodes our economic future, and diminishes our democracy. Any society that winks at the monstrously large fortunes that make some people decidedly more equal than others is asking for trouble. But the trouble the rich engender often goes obscured. Most of us will spend our entire existences without ever coming into contact with anyone of enormous means. In the daily rush of our complicated lives, we seldom stop to ponder how those lives could change without a superrich pressing down upon us. So, let’s ponder.»

The Kamala Conundrum
by Michael Harriot (The Root) «Kamala Harris’ flaws might be significant, but the criticism comes from an examination of her policy and her past. Many of the people who love Harris have seen her on television ripping apart her conservative counterparts and fighting for the values they believe in. She is a newer, aggressive progressive who is willing to fight. Taken at her word, Harris is exactly what America needs. But her deeds make it hard. Those who are reluctant to offer their support after examining her record also have a point. Her past is not prologue, because it is not even her past. Even if she has grown or changed, we have seen the wolf unzip his sheepskin cloak and devour the lambs too many times.»

In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup
by Greg Palast (Truthout). «This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as “white.”)»

The Decisions We Don't Realize We're Making: On Chugga Chugga Choo-Choos and White Nationalism
by Ferrett Steinmetz (Ferrett). «The fascinating thing about all of this is that we are awash in firm opinions we didn’t actually realize we had, because nobody challenges them seriously. We’re continually ping-ponged back and forth by ideas that we didn’t generate, and weirdly, we didn’t even realize we’d internalized – they’re just there, so deeply ingrained that we don’t even bother to argue with those ideas, and recoil from anyone who presents an opposing opinion.»

Purim, Sharpeville, and First Things

Sharpeville Massacre, South Africa, 21 March 1960

March 21st marked Purim this year, the day when Jews the world over celebrate their deliverance from the hand of Haman, who "rose up against them and sought to destroy, to slay, and to exterminate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, on the same day, on the thirteenth of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their possessions;" but the Lord "didst nullify his counsel and frustrate his intention, and caused his design to return upon his own head, and they hanged him and his sons on the gallows."

It was also the 59th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa, which was the atrocity that pushed the Apartheid regime's cruel brutality onto the world stage, beginning a process that would lead to the liberation of millions three decades later, but only after an immeasurable amount of violence, torture, and oppression had been dealt out by that country's white supremacist government. In South Africa, it is called Human Rights Day.

Thus, on the confluence of two important liberation-centered holidays, it is somewhat perplexing that First Things, a publication that claims to be "the leading intellectual journal of its kind in the United States," decided to go down the Blood & Soil road in a manifesto styled "Against the Dead Consensus." As my friend Jeremiah Bailey observed, "First Things' metamorphosis into Breitbart-for-Catholics-that-went-to-College is finally complete."

Indeed, one might have seen this motion toward the alt-right in the offing back in February, 2018 when First Things published "Non Possumus" – a full-blown defense of the Vatican's 19th Century kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy, to be raised and educated in the Catholic faith on the pretext that he had been secretly baptized by his nanny as an infant – followed by editor Rusty Reno's non-apology defending his publication of the subject in order have a more expansive dialogue about "things of the Lord" that "ennoble us" but "but often only after an agonizing process of conformity to his purposes, which are not our own."

And a deeper look will also show First Things' further propensity for publishing (at least) racially tone-deaf articles like this and this.

First Things, a project belonging initially to Richard John Neuhaus and his colleagues, was founded to "confront the ideology of secularism." It has been around since 1989, and, along with the Acton Institute, has been a stalwart of the libertarianish-conservative culture-war Catholicism so ably represented by Robert Novak, George Weigel, Thomas Woods, Robert Sirico, and Neuhaus himself, among others.

Times have changed though, as the authors of this piece observe, and "There is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016. Any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right." Their answer to this conundrum? That's the troubling thing.  They propose, in essence, a cultivated Catholic identity politics; a kinder, gentler, and certainly more urbane, white nationalist authoritarianism than currently rolls out of the White House.

Or as Lillian Vogl so aptly put it, "Dammit, Donald Trump makes the patriarchy and nationalism so ugly, crude, and obvious! How can we reframe to make it look refined and principled again?"

Others have done a fine job of responding to the First Things document. Lillian's fine point-by-point response is included below. All I have is lamentation that, with a rich tradition of justice and liberation to draw from, these 13 men and one woman have chosen the path of a religious-integralist America-First ethnonationalism, a path that leads somewhere that, I assure you, we don't want to go.


Wisdom from another of my friends:

This is serious. 

Taking a stand for "the worker" (meaning, the worker of our nation / ethnicity only), in the interests of overt nationalism, combined with opposition to globalism / foreigners is exactly the core ideology of national socialism. 

It is intended to suborn the resentment of the working classes and direct it against the "other." 

It is not Christian, but it is a menace that has seduced Christians before, due to their obsession with "the west." 

Read this and see what's happening. If it looks innocuous or even pleasing, well, that's how this stuff always starts.

Of course, not everyone is unhappy about this. Zebulon Baccelli, of the American Solidarity Party's National Committee, had this to say:

About time! Everyone who feels this way should come to the American Solidarity Party and help us form a new political identity for Americans.

I can't argue with him. If this article reflects your political views, the integralist alt-right-lite element that makes up the ASP is just the crowd you should run with.

A Response by Lillian Vogl to "Against the Dead Consensus"

We oppose the soulless society of individual affluence.

[Cool, I do too. So we’re dismantling unbridled capitalism together, right?]

Our society must not prioritize the needs of the childless, the healthy, and the intellectually competitive. Our policy must accommodate the messy demands of authentic human attachments: family, faith, and the political community.

[Okay, not focusing on the problems of capitalism then... Human attachments are good. What does “accommodate messy demands” mean, though? What if the “demands” are freedom to abuse others in the name of familial, religious, or community “principles”? And who is usually left “accommodating” the needs of the children, elderly, disabled, and other “unproductive” people, with no pay?]

We welcome allies who oppose dehumanizing attempts at “liberation” such as pornography, “designer babies,” wombs for rent, and the severing of the link between sex and gender. 

[Which of these things is not like the other? 🎶]

We stand with the American citizen.

In recent years, some have argued for immigration by saying that working-class Americans are less hard-working, less fertile, in some sense less worthy than potential immigrants. We oppose attempts to displace American citizens.

[Hmm, where have I heard the mantra “X will not displace us” before???]

Advancing the common good requires standing with, rather than abandoning, our countrymen. They are our fellow citizens, not interchangeable economic units. And as Americans we owe each other a distinct allegiance and must put each other first. 

[So we’re going with blatant nationalism in item number 2. Got it. I don’t blame anyone who stops reading here. I have a strong stomach and will keep going for the sake of opposition research.]

We reject attempts to compromise on human dignity.

In 2013, the Republican National Committee released an “autopsy report” that proposed compromising on social issues in order to appeal to young voters. In fact, millennials are the most pro-life generation in America, while economic libertarianism isn’t nearly as popular as its Beltway proponents imagine. We affirm the nonnegotiable dignity of every unborn life and oppose the transhumanist project of radical self-identification.

[So “human dignity” = the right to be born. But after that, you are who the dominant forces in society say you should be. How dare anyone “self identify” their place in the Order?!?]

We resist a tyrannical liberalism.

[“Tyrannical liberalism” is as oxymoronic as “dark brightness.” George Orwell gives you a Nancy Pelosi clap for this subheader.]

We seek to revive the virtues of liberality and neighborliness that many people describe as “liberalism.” But we oppose any attempt to conflate American interests with liberal ideology. When an ideological liberalism seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad. 

[Didn’t even try to explain what this could possibly mean, just asserted the specter of tyranny. No more claps for you. Oh wait, your fragile white male self thinks THAT is what “Nazi” means: Someone not giving you what you think you’re specially entitled to.]

We want a country that works for workers.

The Republican Party has for too long held investors and “job creators” above workers and citizens, dismissing vast swaths of Americans as takers unworthy of its time. Trump’s victory, driven in part by his appeal to working-class voters, shows the potential of a political movement that heeds the cries of the working class as much as the demands of capital. Americans take more pride in their identity as workers than their identity as consumers. Economic and welfare policy should prioritize work over consumption. 

[On second thought, you get another Nancy Pelosi clap for this. This paragraph is absolutely correct. Would it kill you, though, to add one sentence saying “therefore, we should repeal the 2017 Trump/Ryan tax cuts that gave 20-40% tax cuts to business owners and exempted all but the top 1/10th of 1% of families from the generational wealth transfer tax”?]

We believe home matters.

[Is this about keeping women in their place? That seems to be where the headline is going. But wait! There’s more...]

For those who enjoy the upsides, a borderless world brings intoxicating new liberties. They can go anywhere, work anywhere. They can call themselves “citizens” of the world. But the jet-setters’ vision clashes with the human need for a common life. And it has bred resentments that are only beginning to surface. We embrace the new nationalism insofar as it stands against the utopian ideal of a borderless world that, in practice, leads to universal tyranny.

[What actually is this about? Are you seriously suggesting not allowing people freedom of movement? We’re embracing “new nationalism” and the opposite is “universal tyranny”? George Orwell’s corpse is seriously swelling to many times its original size with...something.]

Whatever else might be said about it, the Trump phenomenon has opened up space in which to pose these questions anew. We will guard that space jealously. And we respectfully decline to join with those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate. 

[We thought Reagan was our friend, but his policies let women and minorities get ideas about their equality. No more! Trump has given us permission to not be “politically correct” anymore, so we can intimidate women and minorities again with impunity. We’re just asking questions! How dare anyone read sexism or racism into this list!?! That’s not “honest debate” because you can’t prove we have discriminatory intent in our hearts. No more libertarianism being categorized as an ally of the right. We’re ready to go full-on authoritarian, while calling the opposition to authoritarianism “tyranny” without batting an eye.]

Items of Interest: Second Week of Lent

Fragile, Handle With Care: On White Classicists
by Mathura Umachandran (Eidolon). «Classicists are very well placed (I wrote “uniquely” at first, but I don’t want to displace exceptionalism only to re-inscribe it elsewhere) to critique the political realities of racial injustice. That is, classicists are at a fruitful vantage point to expose how the foundational privileges of whiteness have been used to justify imperial systems of control, racial hierarchies and oppressive aesthetic regimes. And yet, the assumption of the cultural superiority of the Greco Roman past as the fountainhead of white Europe is an attitude that is so much a commonplace in our discipline that it hardly goes remarked upon.»

Moral church, amoral society
by Robin Lovin (The Christian Century). «The situation of the Confessing Church, however, is not quite our situation. Bonhoeffer was trying to sustain his church in a place where the state and the political party sought to determine all of the legitimate social options. The 20th century has offered numerous examples of that sort of state, and in many of them, “taking up space” has required real courage and brought real persecution on those who attempted it. It is less clear what it means to take up space that is morally empty.»

Beyond the Wages of Whiteness: Du Bois on the Irrationality of Antiblack Racism
by Ella Myers (Social Science Research Council). «Ella Myers provides an account of W. E. B. Du Bois’s nuanced analysis of the sense of entitlement among whites in the United States. Drawing from Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction and other writings, Myers draws attention to both the concept of a compensatory “wage” that elevates the social status of lower class whites in ways that bind them to white capital, but also to the irrational aspects of antiblack racism. Myers’s essay complements the earlier “Reading Racial Conflict” essay by J. Phillip Thompson on Black Reconstruction, and also makes a direct connection to debates on the role of the white working class in Trump’s electoral victory.»

75 Percent of Republicans Say White Americans Are Discriminated Against
by Peter Wade (Rolling Stone) This surge of white identity politics, not some abstract 'both sides' polarization, is at the root of the current conflict.

White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots
by Adam Serwer (The Atlantic). «King’s recent question, posed in a New York Times interview, may be appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” But it is apt. “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses, and the difficulty of eradicating it. The president’s rhetoric about “shithole countries” and “invasion” by immigrants invites dismissal as crude talk, but behind it lie ideas whose power should not be underestimated.»

Privilege Masked as Orthodoxy: What the Slander of Cardinal Ticona Reveals
by Jerry Ryan (Commonweal). «But what we are witnessing in many traditionalist groups of the kind that have targeted Ticona is on a different level altogether. Here Catholic identity is being defined as adherence to a rigid and unforgiving moral code and to a formalistic liturgical rite. This is combined with a total disregard and even disdain for social justice and the teachings of Vatican II. The image of a triumphant and glorious church is part of our creed and the object of our hope, but it is not our present reality, and to pretend otherwise is a dangerous form of self-deception. The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world; we are not yet a cortege of white-robed innocents following the Lamb wherever He goes. We are members of a pilgrim church, a community of broken people seeking mercy—and a communion of saints only to the degree that this mercy is received. Beneath all the triumphalism of the traditionalists can be heard the blasphemous prayer of the Pharisee: “I give you thanks, O Lord, that I am not like the rest of men.»

James Cone on Black Jesus

[EHB – In America today, Jesus, who identifies entirely with the oppressed, is black. He is not the emissary of white supremacy, he is not the false white Christ of the slaveholder, the Klansman, the alt-right marcher, or of the President and his followers, but is the One who is himself one of the oppressed and despised, preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the brokenhearted, preaching deliverance to the captives and the recovering of sight to the blind, setting at liberty them that are bruised, proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord.]

* * * * * * *

«Where is “the opening” that Christ provides? Where does he lead his people? Where indeed, if not in the ghetto. He meets the blacks where they are and becomes one of them. We see him there with his black face and big black hands lounging on a streetcorner. “Oh, but surely Christ is above race.” But society is not raceless, any more than when God became a despised Jew. White liberal preference for a raceless Christ serves only to make official and orthodox the centuries-old portrayal of Christ as white. The “raceless” American Christ has a light skin, wavy brown hair, and sometimes—wonder of wonders— blue eyes. For whites to find him with big lips and kinky hair is as offensive as it was for the Pharisees to find him partying with tax-collectors. But whether whites want to hear it or not, Christ is black, baby, with all of the features which are so detestable to white society.

«To suggest that Christ has taken on a black skin is not theological emotionalism. If the Church is a continuation of the Incarnation, and if the Church and Christ are where the oppressed are, then Christ and his Church must identify totally with the oppressed to the extent that they too suffer for the same reasons persons are enslaved. In America, blacks are oppressed because of their blackness. It would seem, then, that emancipation could only be realized by Christ and his Church becoming black. Thinking of Christ as nonblack in the twentieth century is as theologically impossible as thinking of him as non-Jewish in the first century. God’s Word in Christ not only fulfills his purposes for man through his elected people, but also inaugurates a new age in which all oppressed people become his people. In America, that people is a black people. In order to remain faithful to his Word in Christ, his present manifestation must be the very essence of blackness.

«It is the job of the Church to become black with him and accept the shame which white society places on blacks. But the Church knows that what is shame to the world is holiness to God. Black is holy, that is, it is symbol of God’s presence in history on behalf of the oppressed man. Where there is black, there is oppression; but blacks can be assured that where there is blackness, there is Christ who has taken on blackness that what is evil in men’s eyes might become good. Therefore Christ is black because he is oppressed, and oppressed because he is black. And if the Church is to join Christ by following his opening, it too must go where suffering is and become black also.

«This is what the New Testament means by the service of reconciliation. It is not smoothing things over by ignoring the deep-seated racism in white society. It is freeing the racist of racism by making him confront blacks as men. Reconciliation has nothing to do with the “let’s talk about it” attitude, or “it takes time” attitude. It merely says, “Look man, the revolution is on. Whose side are you on?”»

* * * * * * *

«It is in the light of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus in relation to his Jewishness that Black Theology asserts that "Jesus is black." If we assume that the Risen Lord is truly present with us as defined by his past history and witnessed by Scripture and tradition, what then does his presence mean in the social context of white racism? If Jesus' presence is real and not docetic, is it not true that Christ must be black in order to remain faithful to the divine promise to bear the suffering of the poor? Of course, I realize that "blackness" as a christological title may not be appropriate in the distant future or even in every human context in our present. This was no less true of the New Testament titles, such as "Son of God" and "Son of David," and of various descriptions of Jesus throughout the Christian tradition. But the validity of any christological title in any period of history is not decided by its universality but by this: whether in the particularity of its time it points to God's universal will to liberate particular oppressed people from inhumanity. This is exactly what blackness does in the contemporary social existence of America. If we Americans, blacks and whites, are to understand who Jesus is for us today, we must view his presence as continuous with his past and future coming which is best seen through his present blackness.

«Christ's blackness is both literal and symbolic. His blackness is literal in the sense that he truly becomes One with the oppressed blacks, taking their suffering as his suffering and revealing that he is found in the history of our struggle, the story of our pain, and the rhythm of our bodies. Jesus is found in the sociological context that gave birth to Aretha Franklin singing "Spirit in the Dark" and Roberta Flack proclaiming that "I told Jesus that it will be all right if he changed my name." Christ's blackness is the American expression of the truth of his about the Last Judgment: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me" (Matt. 25:45). The least in America are literally and symbolically present in black people. To say that Christ is black means that black people are God's poor people whom Christ has come to liberate. And thus no gospel of Jesus Christ is possible in America without coming to terms with the history and culture of that people who struggled to bear witness to his name in extreme circumstances. To say that Christ is black means that God, in his infinite wisdom and mercy, not only takes color seriously, he also takes it upon himself and discloses his will to make us whole—new creatures born in the spirit of divine blackness and redeemed through the blood of the Black Christ. Christ is black, therefore, not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor, the despised, and the black are, disclosing that he is with them, enduring their humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberated servants.»

Any time you are inclined to take the National Review seriously...

Any time you are inclined to take the National Review seriously as a participant in the discussion of important issues in American civic life, call to mind this 1957 editorial by William F. Buckley, Jr., and consider that the magazine hasn't fundamentally changed; it just, àla Lee Atwater*, disguises its racism more effectively. 

* * * * * * * 

Why the South Must Prevail 

William F. Buckley, Jr. 

National Review

24 August, 1957 

The most important event of the past three weeks was the remarkable and unexpected vote by the Senate to guarantee to defendants in a criminal contempt action the privilege of a jury trial. That vote does not necessarily affirm a citizen’s intrinsic rights: trial by jury in contempt actions, civil or criminal, is not an American birthright, and it cannot, therefore, be maintained that the Senate’s vote upheld, pure and simple, the Common Law.

What the Senate did was to leave undisturbed the mechanism that spans the abstractions by which a society is guided and the actual, sublunary requirements of the individual community. In that sense, the vote was a conservative victory. For the effect of it is—and let us speak about it bluntly—to permit a jury to modify or waive the law in such circumstances as, in the judgment of the jury, require so grave an interposition between the law and its violator.

What kind of circumstances do we speak about? Again, let us speak frankly. The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. Political scientists assert that minorities do not vote as a unit. Women do not vote as a bloc, they contend; nor do Jews, or Catholics, or laborers, or nudists—nor do Negroes; nor will the enfranchised Negroes of the South.

If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro from voting—why should it, if the Negro vote, like the women’s, merely swells the volume, but does not affect the ratio, of the vote? In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail—that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.

What are such issues? Is school integration one? The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as a unit want integrated schools. Others disagree, contending that most Negroes approve the social separation of the races. What if the NAACP jis correct, and the matter comes to a vote in a community in which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would. according to democratic processes, win the election: but that is the kind of situation the White community will not permit. The White community will not count the marginal Negro vote. The man who didn’t count it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation, might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which would affirm the law and conform with the relevant political abstractions, but whose consequences might be violent and anarchistic.


The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes, and intends to assert its own.

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 dmands 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 numerical 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 majority 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 recommendation 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.

* * * * * * * 

And yes, I do realize that Buckley walked back much of this later in his life, as one of the below articles discusses. But he set the tone for the magazine with this, and its legacy remains woven throughout the pages of each issue.

More on Buckley, National Review, and racism:

• William F. Buckley, Rest in Praise – Steve Rendell (FAIR.org)
• How William F. Buckley, Jr., Changed His Mind on Civil Rights – Alvin Felzenberg (Politico)
• William F. Buckley and National Review's vile race stance: Everything you need to know about conservatives and civil rights – Kevin M. Schultz (Salon)
• Do Conservatives Know Much About Conservative History? – Jeet Heer (New Republic)
• Conservatives’ self-delusion on race – Joshua Tait (Washington Post)

* Lee Atwater's infamous quote on the Southern Strategy of appealing to the racist vote without looking like a racist yourself was this: «You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”»

Items of Interest: Ash Wednesday Week

What do we do when the art we love was created by a monster?
by Constance Grady (Vox). «I don’t know what to do with good art by predatory artists. So I asked some literary critics.»

Abolish the Billionaire Class
by Luke Savage (Jacobin). «Vast concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few is both how and why there is so much poverty and insecurity among working and middle-class Americans, despite there being so much wealth overall. Thanks to their cumulative labor — in factories, schools, hospitals, care homes, restaurants, and throughout the economy — an immense amount of wealth is produced in a society like the United States, but much of it is expropriated by billionaires in the form of rents and capital income. No one earns a billion dollars, but hierarchical economic structures and a skewed political system ensure some nevertheless acquire it because of the property they own. A billion dollars, let alone the over $100 billion amassed by Jeff Bezos, is not a reward proportionate to someone’s social contribution. It’s institutionalized theft, plain and simple.»

A Chicano renaissance? A new Mexican-American generation embraces the term
by Dennis Romero (NBC) The signposts of a Chicano renaissance are everywhere. On streets and college campuses, in fashion and in art, there's renewed energy around a term associated with 1960s civil rights and farm worker activism. (from July 2018)

The Passion Of The Christ was the blunt-force weapon evangelicals were looking for
by Randall Colburn (AVClub). «It’s true, especially in hindsight, that The Passion wasn’t a recruitment tool so much as it was a weapon of reaffirmation, one that tapped into wells of emotion that many Christians weren’t finding at church. For a number of Christians, the film had a radicalizing quality, with its bludgeoning dose of cruelty, shame, and guilt serving to galvanize. For those outside of the church, however? Not so much.»