Republican "Southern Strategy" Moves North

To my friends up north, including a lot of relatives in Wisconsin where my wife was born, and in Indiana and Ohio and out West too, in Arizona: If you want to know where Nixon’s cynical “Southern Strategy”—baptizing racists into the Republican Party in the 1970s—is leading you—today, in 2011—read Intelligence Report, an award-winning periodical published by the famous nemesis of the Klu Klux Klan, Morris Dees and The Southern Poverty Law Center.

When Barack Obama became a presidential candidate, an explosive resurgence of Klan successors cast a sudden burden of revolutionary proportions on the Secret Service, the FBI, and on state and local police departments. According to SPLC’s latest ”Hate Map,” more than one thousand fast growing groups of armed racist militias—221 named “Klu Klux Klan;” 170, “Neo-Nazi;” 136, “White Nationalist;” another 136, “Racist Skinhead;” and 42 “Neo-Confederate.” An additional 824 violently anti-government hate groups call themselves “Patriots” or “Sovereign Citizen” organizations; and, yes, with the same blind irony, 26 of them are called “Christian Identity.”

These armed insurgencies now threaten, not only in the south, as northerners might think, but in all but two of the States of the Union. For example, there are 8 hate groups in Wisconsin, 24 in Indiana, 32 in Ohio and 22 in Arizona. Their sordid criminal activities make “Watergate” look like a girl scout sleep over. Check out SPLC’s names and addressees in your own state and neighborhood.

In the course of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, racial epithets became commonplace at political rallies. The GOP, the Party of Lincoln, and its Presidential candidate denied responsibility, and I have every reason to believe them.

My fellow southerner, Carlos Dews, distinguished author and Chairman of the Department of English Literature at John Cabot University in Rome, explained in the December 2009 issue of Aspenia, an Italian journal, reprinted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, how racists in the United States have learned one lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. “But I know what they mean when they say they ‘want their country back.’ They want it back safely in the exclusive hands of people exactly like themselves.”

But we live in a country of excitingly different kinds of people from every corner of the earth; of every shape, size, sex, age, appearance, language, and color; of an endless variety of religious, social, political persuasions and affiliations; all kinds of tastes, talents, interests, and skills; some smart and thoughtful; others stupid and unthinking; some healthy and whole, others sick, lame and disabled; strong and weak; rich and poor.

Absolutists here and in other parts of the world think such a diverse country as ours is ungovernable absent a strong, coercive state that disdains both the truth and the rights of its people.

I’ll take this up next in my continuing series on

“The Poisonous Fruit of the Republican Party's 'Southern Strategy' as it Moves North,”

or, “I’m not prejudiced, but. . . .”

photo credit: flickr Bob Jagendorf

My Alma Mater's Women's Lacrosse Team

When I received an invitation from the Atlanta Chapter of the Washington and Lee University Alumni Association to attend a dinner party honoring the Women's Lacrosse Team, I replied:

I'll be delighted to attend with my son, Martin. . . .

I entered W&L seventy years ago. On the day after Pearl Harbor, about half of the student body enlisted, and we freshman and others soon followed. Our football team, once nationally ranked, was left without a single letterman.

We were so hard up that, before reporting for active military duty, I played guard (at 160 pounds) on our 1942 team. Coached by a Lexington lawyer, we had an unbroken record: not a single win.

Our last game, against Maryland, was the closest we came to a victory (26-28, or something like that), thanks to a last quarter strategy engineered by a W&L linebacker from Baltimore, Lud Micheau, Captain of the Lacrosse team.

We put in a nine man defensive line to exploit the Terps’ extremely limited repertoire of line plays, pouncing on the quarterback before he could do his tricks with the new, complex T-formation backfield and end play with which Maryland had dominated East Coast football that year.

I'm sure W&L Women's Lacrosse Team is every bit as resourceful, and I look forward to meeting them.

After attending the dinner party, I reported to a dear friend:

I had a long conversation about you, your mother and your father last week, a kind of acausal connection, I suspect, to prepare me for your birthday. The occasion was a first of its kind event: a Washington & Lee Alumni party in Atlanta with its Women's Lacrosse Team.

When I entered W&L seventy years ago, there were no African American students; the closest female companionship (other than our elderly, civilizing fraternity house mothers) was fifty miles away, and the Lacrosse team was a bunch of burly boys that had at each other with sticks. I knew that sport was very popular in Baltimore; so when I greeted W&L's Lacrosse ladies, I asked how many of them were from that city. Sure enough, there were several, including Emmy, a charming senior midfielder that the team coach seemed to regard highly (as she did everyone of her players).

Emmy and I exchanged a lot of Baltimore stories, including the love I developed for your mother as my 7th grade English teacher, then for your littérateur father and last, but far from least, for you, Clarinda, my tender hearted poet and muse.

The last time I visited Lexington was shortly after returning from WWII, but I have often pondered how the Southern traditions we inherited from our once president, Robert E. Lee, have weathered the radical social changes of the last seventy years. The answer is clear, "Very well, thank you."

In any event, we all seem to have survived beautifully!

W&L Women triumphed over Sewanee the next day, as Emmy promised, 21-13.

photo of junior attacker, Britten Mathews, Washington and Lee Women's Lacrosse Team

Archaic Hatreds Threaten The Conservative Movement

Miso-‘neism, hatred of anything new (fr. Greek, misos (hatred) + neos (new), is common among primitive people because they live so close to the edge that anything new seems to threaten disaster; but it’s such an anachronism in civilized societies that the word can only be found in our biggest dictionaries. Yet terrifying calamities besiege us every morning in big, bold headlines, wearing down our thin veneer of civilizing hope. Who can honestly say that our daily diet of dreadful news does not induce in us a conscious or unconscious fear-driven hatred of change? We’re all struggling to reassure ourselves behind a happy, fearless face; but even trifling inconveniences can induce hatred of new things: I disdain improved software because I hate the thought of having to learn new ways of operating it. Mi- ’sologism, hatred of reason, discussion, learning or knowledge (misos + logos) rears its ugly head!

These archaic hatreds feed all kinds of prejudice, fanaticism, vicious, if not violent, politics, and cash for pseudo-conservative candidates in recent mid-term elections; but just as hatred of change holds back primitive tribes, so too it keeps the Conservative Movement forever behind the curve. For example, according to George W. Bush, the highest debt financed spending since WWII, expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product, occurred during the Reagan (“It’s morning in America”) years—4.23% compared with Clinton’s 0.76%, next to Eisenhower’s lowest 0.56%. Now, in the continuing dark days of the Great Recession spawned by Reagan and Bush spend-but-don’t-tax financing, “Conservative” opportunists want to retain its enormous tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing essential public services for the jobless and foreclosed who suffered most from those same debt-financed tax breaks.

They also subvert other honest Conservative values. Stern, “turn back the clock,” “no compromise” reactionary polemics of self-anointed “Conservatives” are at war with the teaching of the all-time favorite advocate of Conservative values, Edmund Burke (1729-97, a Dublin born Whig Member of the British Parliament):

“You can never plan the future by the past.”

— Letter to National Assembly,1791

“Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant.”

— Letter to Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777

“Every human benefit, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise.

—On Conciliation with America, 1775

“Magnanimity in Politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”

—On Conciliation with America, 1775

“It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.”

— On late Publication of the Present State of the Nation (2d ed. 1769)

“By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

—On Conciliation with America, 1775

“A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

—Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. “

—On the Sublime and the Reasonable (1757) pt. 2, sect. 2

Burke’s wise words are perversely scorned by pseudo-conservatives in thrall to misoneist demons. In keeping with my landsman Burke’s magnanimity, I will not name names; but I know that generous-hearted Edmund is turning over in his two hundred sixteen year old grave like a whirling dervish at what is being said and done in the name of Conservatism.

Misoneist politics—after inflicting immense pain on voters—will eventually backfire on the Republican Party; but Republican hatred of change—has been, and will continue to plague our nation’s economy for years.

Yet, as Harold Meyerson points out, decline in innovation fails to explain something far more distinctive about Republican era economics. From 1947 through 1973, “the benefits from economic growth were widely shared, while in the years following, they increasingly went only to the top.”

Stay tuned for

THE CORRUPTION SPREADS—MIS-‘ANTHROPY (hatred of humankind)

photo credit: flickr RubyGoes

Shalom, Baby!

I was deeply moved during John Boehner’s installation as the Republican Speaker of the House when he and the former Democratic Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, embraced.

I was reminded of the “kiss of peace” at a pre-game mass of Cincinnati’s Moeller High School football team on which John Boehner played center and linebacker. I was there as a guest of the teams’ coach, Gerry Faust, for whom I was negotiating a book deal before he became head coach at Notre Dame. I played the same positions as Boehner on my high school team; so I feel a certain affinity with him.

In our floating D.C. parish of the 60s, we substituted for the English kiss of peace salutation, “Peace be with you,” its ancient Hebrew ancestor, Shalom, to which we added an African-American colloquialism, “Shalom, Baby!”

Today intolerance is spreading like wildfire against immigrants from south of our borders (“illegal”), from the near east (“terrorists”), and tolerant citizens everywhere are damned as “liberals.”

I’m reminded that in the 1840s, bigotry landed hard on Irish immigrants (my ancestors); and later, on newly arriving Italians (Nancy Pelosi’s). Nor did German immigrants (like John Boehner’s ancestors) escape hatred’s scourge: In WWI a Catholic school was forbidden to teach the German language; and in WWII bigotry’s grip closed a famous German-American restaurant in Baltimore.

There is no cultural, religious, ethnic, gender, or belief group in the United States that hasn’t felt the lash of demagogues peddling hatred.

In my New Year blog, I hoped that the new 112th Congress, “inspired by the 111th," would “do as well or better, and that new members, including Republicans and their Speaker, John Boehner, will help the nation weather its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”

The kiss of peace at Boehner’s installation reinforced my hope as did the near universal remorse over the Tucson Tragedy. The Republican Health Care stunt echoed some of last year’s muddy, deadlock trenches; but I was cheered watching senators and congress members from opposing parties sitting side by side to hear the President’s State of the Union address.

President Obama challenged both parties to work together to renew a forward looking, innovative edge to our nation’s economy. The Republican Party’s official response disclosed deep disagreement with some of the president’s proposals. The president believes, however, that our differences, vigorously argued in an open, collegial spirit, will yield new creative solutions to vanquish unemployment and other persistent, ugly remains of the 2008 recession.

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Keep the faith, baby!

photo credit, Flickr, CincMatt