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Why We Should Not Encourage the GOP to Change Its Stance on Neo-Confederates
BUZZFLASH
READER COMMENTARY
by Linda Ann Wheeler Hilton
When Bill Back was confronted with the evidence of his having published a neo-confederate essay in a California GOP newsletter, Back said he apologized for his insensitivity and said he didn't think anyone would be so offended. He never said he disagreed with the statements made -- particularly that the United [sic] States of America would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War, War between the States, or War of Northern Aggression, depending on your perspective.
Many pundits, both official and unofficial, have called upon the Republican Party of 2003 to return to its roots, to when it was "the party of Lincoln" and the party that kept the Union together, freed the slaves, and worked for equality. But I think it's a sincere waste of time to expect the current GOP to embrace such a policy.
We've seen the analysis of language, of how the GOP codes words to look like one thing but mean something very different. "States' rights" is the key phrase: it looks like it means the states should be sovereign to make their own laws. But what we've seen in the case of the current administration is that there are no rights left to the states that don't agree with the administration. When it comes to the rights of the citizens of a sovereign state to declare that they see nothing criminal in the medical use of marijuana or in the rights of physicians to ease the suffering of terminal patients, the states do not have rights. When it comes to the qualifications of teachers and schools, all the GOP rhetoric of local control goes out the window when there are corporate profits to be made by imposing federal control.
States' rights is a GOP euphemism for segregation. The GOP, far from being the party of Lincoln, is the party of segregation. The sooner we simply look that ugly fact in the face, the sooner we will be able to do something constructive about it. Pretending that we will be able to jawbone "moderate" Republicans into taking control of "their" party and turning it back toward respect for civil rights, civil liberties, and indeed true rights of the citizens of a given state is just about like pretending democracy has come to Afghanistan.
What we should be doing is pointing out to those "moderate" Republicans, both those who occupy elected offices and those who voted to put them there, that they are in effect supporting their own worst enemies.
Their party has been co-opted by the likes of Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond, of Bill Back and Cass Ballenger, of Jesse Helms and George Wallace, of Ross Barnett and Charles Pickering, of David Duke and Lester Maddox. The party changed; it's not the party of Lincoln any more. It is the party of segregation, of Jim Crow, of the back of the bus, of the lynch mob. Some of those men may have been capital-R Republicans and some of them capital-D Democrats, but the labels mean little. What they stood for and what they wanted to impose on this nation is what counts: they wanted segregation now and segregation forever.
They speak loudly of "law and order," but not when it comes to corporate criminals or the drug crimes of poor, maladjusted rich white kids like Noelle Bush. "Law and order" is their euphemism for imprisoning black men so they can't vote and can't get decent jobs. "Law and order" only applies to black men, because the segregationist white folks who preach "law and order" need black women to do their laundry and housecleaning, raise their kids, cook their food, and do all the other menial tasks slave women used to do while "nice" white women sat around and looked, well, nice.
Black women can also be appropriated by white men, but never the other way around. We could ask Mamie Till Mobley about what happens when black men so much as look at white women, but Mrs. Mobley passed away a few days ago. When her teen-aged son Emmett was foully murdered in Mississippi in 1955, she didn't keep quiet. She didn't accept the rhetoric of the white folks. Her son had been murdered because some white man didn't like a black kid "sassin'" his wife. Emmett Till's murderers got away with murder, because the system in Mississippi, the system of White Citizens Councils and segregation, made sure the rest of the world knew black people aren't really people.
And when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1964 and 1965 civil rights acts, he pushed the post-Reconstruction southern Democrats into changing their name, but not their philosophy. If integration was forced on them by federal law, well, they would simply close the public parks and the public libraries rather than let black kids share with white. White folks could send their kids to private parks and private libraries; same thing as segregation, now and forever.
Segregation isn't just keeping the races separate and unequal. Unequal, yes, but not entirely separate. Keeping black men in jail, out of work, and/or just plain dead means black women are more dependent upon white men, either for jobs, sexual favors, or welfare. And we all know about welfare queens, thanks to Ronald Reagan.
I used to be a Republican, but not this kind of Republican. I believed in working for one's pay, in obeying the law, in not taking unnecessary hand-outs. Those were, to me, the cornerstones of the "conservative" Republican agenda. But these are no longer the planks in the GOP platform. Workers are disdained, taxed until they can't cough up another dime, laid off and then kicked when they're down. The only people who "earn" a living wage are the corporate crooks who pillage left and right [pun intended] and then pillage even after the corporations are bankrupt. There are far too few arrests for corporate malfeasance, or even just simple out and out greed, and even when there are indictments, there is no punishment. Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers aren't struggling to put food on the table; they're struggling to keep out of the glare of the press (as if the press were even interested in them any more). And it's not lazy welfare cheats who are suckling fat at the government teat: it's people like Gary Winnick, late of Global Crossing greed, who collected millions of tax dollars in farm subsidies, or Dennis Kozlowski who tapped his frozen Tyco assets to pay the crew of his racing yacht.
The Republicans of 2003 will haul out the working folks when it suits them, when it illuminates the compassionate side of their conservatism. So we got lots of interviews with the Enron employees who had been stripped of their fat 401(k) accounts when Lay and Skilling and Fastow were looting the company. What we never heard was just how much of their earnings those people had actually put into their 401(k)s and how much of the six-figure vaporizations were only smoke (and mirrors) to begin with.
Changing the rhetoric of the GOP won't change the GOP. It's the party of the rich, the party of the greedy, the party of those who think they are inherently better than the rest of us. They are white and they are straight and they are christian and they are rich, and they love to scream "class warfare!" whenever anyone suggests that there are differences in the way the rich and the poor treat each other.
But if "states' rights" and "law and order" and "southern pride" and "Confederate heritage" all mean something other than what they look like they mean, "class warfare" does, too. It's just another of those white sheets the segregationist GOP doesn't want us to find in their collective closet.
"Class warfare" isn't envy of the productive rich by the idle and wasteful poor. "Class warfare" is the oppression of the working, productive poor by the idle and wasteful rich. But the GOP of 2003 doesn't want us to know that. And if we keep trying to get them to "fix" their rhetoric, we'll be the most frightful enablers in history.
The GOP is the party of the plantation owners, the party of the rich who got that way without working for it, the party of the authoritarian, the totalitarian, the bully, the white supremacist, the genocidal nazi. Let's not give them instructions on how to lie to cover-up their true selves; let's instead encourage them to tell the truth. Then maybe the moderates, the Olympia Snows and the Lincoln Chafees and yes, even the John McCains, will see that they themselves are no longer Republicans. The segregationists hijacked what once was the Republican Party and turned it into something else.
Only if the truth is known, only if we, like Mamie Till, aren't afraid to make our anger and our grief and our mutilated loved ones' bodies public, only if we drag the segregationists kicking and screaming into the spotlight in their craven, white-sheeted ugliness, only then can we change the world. And it's in desperate need of changing.
Linda
Ann Wheeler Hilton
American Vertebrate Party candidate for President, 2004
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