Republican revisionism and civil rights history

Jonathan Chait takes to New York Magazine to explain how a revisionist version of American civil rights history paints the Republicans as the party of racial equality:

The civil rights movement, once a controversial left-wing fringe, has grown deeply embedded into the fabric of our national story. This is a salutary development, but a problematic one for conservatives, who are the direct political descendants of (and, in the case of some of the older members of the movement, the exact same people as) the strident opponents of the civil rights movement. It has thus become necessary for conservatives to craft an alternative story, one that absolves their own ideology of any guilt. The right has dutifully set itself to its task, circulating its convoluted version of history, honing it to the point where it can be repeated by any defensive College Republican in his dorm room.

The Conservative Fantasy History of Civil Rights (via Making Light)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: civil rights • gop • History • politics • race

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Pedantic Douchebag

A lot of southern Democrats were pretty awful during this period as well, including LBJ.
- http://twitter.com/GideonTJones Gideon Jones
  
  The above comment is exactly the sort of fantasy history that the article is about.
  - http://libraries.unl.edu dross1260
    
    George Wallace. And I’m a dem.
    - GawainLavers
      
      And therein lies the difference between the two parties.
    - http://twitter.com/GideonTJones Gideon Jones
      
      Then you’re a Dem who needs to go back and read about those few decades of American history. It sounds like maybe your school used one of those lovely history textbooks the state of Texas forces on the rest of the the country.
      
      Maybe start by plugging the phrases “southern strategy”, Dixiecrat, “State’s Rights Democratic Party”, and “realignment election” into your preferred search engine.
      - Navin_Johnson
        
        Don’t you hate having to repeatedly remind people of basic American history? The Dixiecrat canard is trotted out over and over again. And here in the comments of an article that is exactly about that revisionist history, and attempt at crafting a fantasy narrative.
      - Pedantic Douchebag
        
        “I’ll have those n****rs voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” – President Lyndon B. Johnson
        
        Oh, and I consider myself a liberal Democrat, I’m just not one of those liberal Democrats drinking the “we’re always right” kool-aid. I grew up in Texas Democratic politics, and some of those fuckers were downright evil.
      - petertrepan
        
        Alabama is 26% black and 68% non-Hispanic white. In 2010, Republicans won a majority in Alabama’s legislature for the first time in 136 years. How did Alabama hold onto a Democratic majority until 2010 despite being famously conservative and having a history of racial conflict?
        
        With Dixiecrats, who really exist.
  - nemomen
    
    How so? The Republican’s Southern Strategy of ’68 explicitly exploited the lingering racist/anti-civil rights sentiment of conservative white Southern Democrats who resented the Democratic Party’s increasing support of civil liberties to bring them into the GOP. That’s why Dixiecrat segregationists/racists like Strom Thurmond switched parties. Where’s the “fantasy history” part?
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      “Where’s the “fantasy history” part?”
      
      In suggesting that those Democrats weren’t conservatives who would end up being in the GOP or wouldn’t be in the GOP now.
      - Boris Bartlog
        
        But that’s sort of a different point. I agree that it is weird for Republicans to pretend that the political landscape of (say) 1955-1965 has any bearing on what attitudes the two parties have towards race today. But the historical record is indeed weird and interesting (much like the history of abortion rights support, actually…). To the extent that their claims get people to read about the Southern Strategy and realize that the parties shift ideologies over time, it’s actually a good thing.
  - Michael Heinz
    
    The fantasy here is your ignorance of history. Which political party was founded for the sole purpose of keeping slavery? Which political party controlled the south until 1970? Which political party announced “Segregation now, segregation forever”?
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Southern Democrats
  
  Southern Strategy
  - Pedantic Douchebag
    
    Yes? And? Do you think that posting Wikipedia links about history that I actually lived through and observed is really adding anything to the conversation? Or are you making a joke?
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      Why make your deliberately dishonest post if you’re familiar with Southern Democrats, Civil Rights, the Southern Strategy and so on? A “kindergartner” should be able to answer that simple question….
      - Pedantic Douchebag
        
        Consider the possibility that there were good people and bad people on both sides, and that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
      - Navin_Johnson
        
        ”Both sides”
        
        Uh nah, *conservatives* were against civil rights, whether they were Republicans or Democrats, just as the article says. You’re trying to push that exact same narrative that Southern Democrats were a) not conservatives, and b) didn’t jump ship and become Republicans as the Democrats (outside the South) backed civil rights. It’s false and ahistorical.
        
        Next we’ll hear about how the progressives and liberals were the ones beating civil rights activists……
      - hymenopterid
        
        Irresistible Force, allow me to introduce you to Immovable Object.
        
        –munches popcorn–
    - http://profile.yahoo.com/5KDXOSBEPPO3YLPUEEF7FOIHGU talby0
      
      The dozen or so historians who researched and published the works cited in the wiki article beg to differ with you. Congrats on being old enough to remember things the way you want to though.
      - Pedantic Douchebag
        
        It’s great that we can disagree about the wrong things.
      - hymenopterid
        
        There is a bit of irony in citing Wikipedia as evidence of revisionism.
    - Charlie B
      
      You can’t penetrate the cognitive dissonance of “Democrats are always virtuous” any more than you can the Republican version.
      
      Like you, I lived through it.
- Petzl
  
  yup, southern Democrats, i.e. Conservatives, i.e. current-day Republicans.
einsteinatthemall

Cory, shame on you. You certainly must know that politicians (from either and all sides) participate in a constant process of re-writing history – hence, the modern catch word “SPIN”

Our immediate, collective reality is manipulated from all sides and all factions. Politicians and their crony power brokers are constantly warping the facts to bolster their own agendae. Notice how the Obama administration is now taking credit for furthering the cause of Gay marriage, when a few months ago Obama couldn’t be bothered to commit to an opinion. Faulting Republicans for re-writing history leaves out at least half the story.
- GawainLavers
  
  False equivalence is false.
  - Cowicide
    
    Yes, but the Republican party would be far worse off if it wasn’t for persistent false equivalences and we all certainly can’t have that…
    - Preston Sturges
      
      And of course the people who want to claim that the GOP led the Civil Rights movement are the same folks who would say that THERE IS NO RACISM in America except the reverse racism that discriminates against white people, which of course is a theme stolen from White Supremacists, who will always claim self defense against the anti-white conspiracy of liberals and their multicultural henchmen.
      - Ipo
        
        I have never met anyone claiming there was NO RACISM in America.
        
        It would be retarded to act like only Caucasians are capable of racism. And racist.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        We get comments here all the time stating that we live in a post-racial society and there’s no reason to ever mention the subject again.
- Thad Boyd
  
  I guess I missed the part where anybody said Democrats don’t rewrite history too?
  - xzzy
    
    Two wrongs don’t make a right!
    
    Politicians in general are repugnant beings, it just so happens this article is picking on a republican. I’m sure there’s plenty out there about democrats too.
  - Charlie B
    
    Just look up-thread a little.
- wysinwyg
  
  There is a protracted right-wing attempt to rewrite American history to deemphasize enlightenment values, to exaggerate the importance of Christianity in the founding of the US, and to “historically” justify right-wing economic ideas. There is no equivalent on the left.
  
  Find out who David Barton is. Once you have a good idea of who he is and what his MO is, please find me his liberal equivalent. And if you can’t then please stop with the false equivalence.
  
  Edit: You might also want to take a look at recent changes to the Texas Board of Education’s recent rewrites to history standards for public schools. Barton was a consultant in that effort. If you can find some example of a left-slanted school board making similar changes to remove positive conservative contributions from the history curriculum I’ll listen. Otherwise, again, please stop making this argument.
  - ChicagoD
    
    Wait, are we ignoring essentially all of the historical scholarship from the mid-1960s through the 1990s? If we are, then sure, I agree. Otherwise it looks to me like the Left took its shot, now the Right is taking its shot, and we will all have to be saved by Wikipedia and the wisdom of the masses.
    - wysinwyg
      
      I’m not sure I understand. Are you arguing that all historical research that isn’t explicitly slanted right-wing is implicitly slanted left-wing?
      
      Or are you arguing that liberals were actually rewriting history through the period indicated?
      
      If the latter, please provide citations.
      - ChicagoD
        
        I feel like all of the critical theorists I read in college are too numerous to cite. They were mostly left of “liberals” but then, most of the right wingers doing this are right of “conservatives” so that seems fair.
        
        In any case, the right is certainly doing it now and a pox on their house for doing so.
      - wysinwyg
        
        Hmm, well it’s obviously true that most academics are liberals, so you have a great point that it’s not necessarily easy to distinguish politically biased historical narratives from legitimate historical research (at least without some degree of expertise in the methodologies of historical research).
        
        But I think it would be a stretch to label literally all historical research from that period as the same type of propaganda that Barton is producing.
        
        The closest to a left-wing Barton I could think of is Howard Zinn. Which I think is a telling example, because Zinn, unlike Barton, was a real academic historian with a professional reputation to lose and I don’t think he played fast and loose with facts as Barton does, however controversial his interpretations of those facts may have been.
        
        But I think it makes sense to distinguish between legitimate historians and critical theorists. Neither field is immune from the other but I think they’re distinct enough to warrant different paint brushes.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      I get the feeling that being a “left” historian means simply being somewhat accurate and not strategically leaving inconvenient incidents out to try to drive a narrative of exceptionalism for ones own country/interests or one of deliberate negativity for others.
      - ChicagoD
        
        I get the feeling you are not familiar with the historians we are talking about.
        
        That being said, academic history is not a mere recounting of a timeline. It requires interpretation, and every interpreter has their own ideas. Some lean to the left, some to the right. What we are talking about is people on the fringes who are making history fit their theories, not vice versa.
  - Preston Sturges
    
    David Barton is a scam artist, and a propagandist, a religious charlatan on par with Jim Jones, except he’s not insane he’s in it for the money.
    
    It’s not just that the GOP is substituting political propaganda for history, people like him are also directly substituting political propaganda for religion.
    
    Barton essentially just claims “Well the Bible says (insert absurd political talking point).”
    
    It’s not just about destroying history and democracy, it’s also about destroying religion.
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

Oceania has always supported civil rights in Eastasia.
ChicagoD

Abe Lincoln! Abe Lincoln!
- Shinkuhadoken
  
  Indeed. Blacks typically voted Republican because Lincoln freed the slaves. Southerners typically voted Democrat because Lincoln beat the Confederation. And then the Civil Rights Movement happened and the polarity flipped. What’s there to revise, really?
  - ChicagoD
    
    This is a big favorite of the “business Republicans” I know. “But, we are the party of Lincoln, how can we be racists?” And yet, here we are.
    - Charlie B
      
      Not twelve miles from where I sit, white Democrats literally – not figuratively, but literally – SPIT on black children as the police held them back from those brave little girls who wanted a decent education.
      
      But that, I guess, does not fit your narrative -because it’s FACT. I was a child in the sixties; I lived next door to these people, and they were from both parties. NO party is clean, despite the propaganda…
      - ChicagoD
        
        You don’t read so good. Try again. I recognize that party of Lincoln now has a strong racist wing, and that the party of FDR was beholden to hardcore segregationists for decades.
      - Charlie B
        
        ChicagoD – I could have sworn my post was in response to one of Navin Johnson’s, and not yours. Perhaps I fumbled the keyboard/mouse, or perhaps Disqus strikes again – either way, I understand why you were confused by the non-sequitur. Sorry about that.
electricdoodle

A very interesting article, thank you. We in the UK have the same right-wing revisionist attitudes. The current Tory Government blames the recession solely on the previous Labour Government – and not because of a history of pandering to the whims of big business and bankers put in motion by Thatcher. That is merrily forgotten. Come the Revolution Comrades! ;)
- Tynam
  
  Although, in fairness, the previous Labour Government was staggeringly stupid, pandered to the whims of big business and threw any semblance of responsible public finance out the window. You have to go back a very long way to find a not-stupid government.
styrofoam

Wasn’t the Republican party formed with Slavery Abolition being the major plank of their platform? That’s what the little stop I took in Ripon, Wisconsin taught me.

I’m not sure of the trajectory from Anti-Slavery to small-government morality policing.
- ChicagoD
  
  Yes. Hence the Abe Lincoln comment. But you know, American political parties are in the business of winning elections, not holding “truths” over time. Each of the changes, from the party of Lincoln to the party of Taft, to the party of Dewey, to the party of Nixon to the present made sense in electoral politics.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    I predict that in about two decades, President Meghan McCain will be a progressive Republican. That’s not a joke. They’ll ultimately follow the money because that’s how government has always worked.
    - penguinchris
      
      Agreed. I made a similar point to a friend last week. The days of non-progressive politics are numbered, and I think it actually kind of starts with Romney!
      
      As we know, he’ll do or say anything to get votes. In this election, he doesn’t have to pretend to be progressive to get conservative votes. But I think four years from now both sides will have to push progressive policies in order to have any chance at winning (perhaps after Obama’s progressive second-term policies are successful and popular – one can dream anyway).
    - EnglebertFlaptyback
      
      It’s a sad-ass state of affairs when you write “President Meghan McCain” and I think, “Eh, couldn’t be any worse than the current crop of GOP candidates.”
- wysinwyg
  
  No. Lincoln would never have been elected on such a platform. The Republican platform did include stopping the spread of slavery to new US territories, however, and that was enough to cause a civil war.
  - Ipo
    
    It was not.
    That is revisionist history also.
    
    Slavery in new US territories was one of several reasons.
    It was the reason for Texas to secede, not for South Carolina to begin the war.
    The tariffs had been the original issue that brought up the movement pressing for secession.
    The Civil War was very much started over an unfair economy benefiting industrial New England that was leaching from the agricultural South by use of tariffs.
    Like customs duties on all machinery that could have been used to industrialize the South, while raw material went north below world market prices.
    The United States were not very united until after the war.
    
    That’s how in 1863, two years after Civil War began, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the ten Confederate States, which effectively left the last of nearly 900.000 slaves in Union controlled states and territories un-free until 1866.
    
    The Civil War was not fought to end slavery.
    But if the Union had not ended the inhumane condition of slavery that the CSA wanted to keep and expand over new territory, we wouldn’t know that the “good guys” won.
    - Charlie B
      
      Ipo, you’re not entirely wrong, but you should read some first-hand accounts of Bloody Kansas, and then read the newspapers of the day (particularly the Boston and Charleston newspapers) before you play down the issue of slavery so strongly. Look at the accounts of popular lectures, for example, in the Boston papers, and remember that the leading families of Boston had huge economic incentives to support slavery.
      
      The Quakers and Unitarians who sacrificed their lives to keep slavery out of Kansas, and the thousands of Border Ruffians who followed Senator Atchison into Kansas with the stated goal of murdering abolitionists, appear to have been the actual trigger for the war – not the economic sideshow.
- tomrigid
  
  For a long time the outcomes of American elections were warped by the legacy of the Civil War, which left one party alienated from its natural base across the rural South, but since the Civil Rights Act and the “southern strategy” this warp has been corrected.
- Preston Sturges
  
  No, the Abolitionists were way way to the Left of the Republican Party – they radicals who broke the law and often went to prison. They were people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, they were people who had to sneak in and out of town to avoid tar and feathers.
  - Charlie B
    
    Substitute “Right” for “Left” in your post and it reads the same.
travtastic

General note: this and other points of confusion in history can be fixed by ignoring party labels. No, it doesn’t make sense that the Republicans did these things, but it does make sense when you understand that they essentially used to be a left-wing party.
- ChicagoD
  
  That’s too simplistic. The parties took positions based on the issues of the day. The issues were not “left” or “right” as we use the term. I mean, the great tariff battles between the manufacturers in New England and the farmers in the South were . . . left versus right?
  - travtastic
    
    Shall I write a 50-page, bullet-pointed historical perspective on the subject? Or, can we just accept that every point in history contains reactionary jerks, and that they don’t always call themselves the same names?
    - Charlie B
      
      You’re making sense; thus you will get no traction in this argument.
  - Ipo
    
    Founded in 1854 they really were the left wing of the Whig Party (which self-destroyed that year fighting over issue of expanding slavery to the west) joined by the remnants of the very left-wing Free Soil Party (that seized to exist that year because of dwindling support).
    
    Nonetheless, you’re completely correct that the issues were not “left” or “right” as we use the terms now.
    
    From today’s perspective all those parties were far left.
    (With the exception of rights for women and people of races different than white.)
    Until after the Civil War no party, not even the “Free Slaves Party” and the GOP thought that Blacks could be citizens, or that it’d be good not to slaughter the natives.
    Which from today’s perspective makes all those parties ridiculously right-wing.
    
    At least that what it looks like from my vantage point.
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Exactly, the story is conservative vs. progressive.
  
  Dixiecrats were conservatives, they would be your Southern Republicans of today.
  
  Conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history, and these narratives are necessary to try to paper over that embarrassing fact.
  - ChicagoD
    
    Conservatives are always on the wrong side of history if you dole the labels out after the fight is settled. It is certainly not the case that history reflects a straight line of progressive success. See, e.g. the French Revolution through 1871 in France, and the Russian Revolution through 1953 (or later) in Russia.
    
    Just sayin’.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      Conservatism is a defense of the powerful/hierarchy against those trying to seek justice from below. Those former revolutionaries would eventually fall under that definition as well. Totalitarianism, or rule by an powerful elite, king, dictator, or collection of your “betters” was not really a problem, as much as defending existing hierarchies and privilege. Some say this is how modern conservatism was born. See the concept of “kicking away the ladder” and Edmund Burke’s quotes on revolution in both England and France. Progressivism is the big horror, not totalitarianism. Whatever protects privilege is good. Democracy is not important.
      - cetaceanplease
        
        I would think that most self-described conservatives would object to your definition. ’Conservative’ as applied to American politics today covers a large array of often diametrically opposed philosophies. You can’t equate contemporary conservatives. Trying to equate the modern conservative movement (such as it is) to groups in play 50 years ago or 500 years ago is absurd.
      - Charlie B
        
        I am conservative and I disagree with all that, but I guess you can redefine words as you please, just like Ann Coulter does. Turnabout is fair play?
      - Navin_Johnson
        
        Indeed, modern conservatives are even worse. They are complete radicals when it comes to defending privilege and hierarchy.
Preston Sturges

Keep in mind that the GOP burned Atlanta and gave the South Sherman’s March and that “Republican” means the party of strong central government.

The cracks started to appear in 1928 when Al Smith, the Catholic governor of New York was nominated by the Democrats. The KKK went INSANE in its opposition to Al Smith specifically because he was a Catholic, and that was when it became clear that race and religion trumped party loyalty in the South. That was the first major shift of racists out of the Democratic Party and to the GOP (party of Lincoln) for racist reasons.

This helped FDR build a coalition that included liberal Republicans, Catholics, and Jews in 1932, and there you saw the shift of progressives and Labor to FDR’s Democratic coalition and away from Wilsonian Democrats (what we’d call neoliberal or European Liberal(?)) and away from the rigid austerity of Hoover (equivalent to the Romney/Ryan agenda). The Republicans drifted right to become big fans of Fascism, and they became the “appeasers” of the Nazis, along with the British Conservatives.

Post WW2, the Bircher wing of the GOP continued as a reaction to Communism, and seemed to embrace many Fascist beliefs.
- Jonathan Badger
  
  Many people would argue that the flip happened even earlier — in 1877, when the Republicans agreed to remove the troops stationed in the South to protect the former slaves. Needless to say, as soon as the troops were gone, slavery was back in all but name.
  - Preston Sturges
    
    Compromise of 1877
    
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
dcorbett

I’m censoring myself!
bo1n6bo1n6

This shit gives me a headache. Neither side has been a good role model for sticking to morals…. Congress has seen more flip flops than Virginia beach.
- http://twitter.com/digitalArtform Joseph Francis
  
  The sides in question are Liberal vs Conservative, not Democrat vs Republican
  - Charlie B
    
    Liberal and conservative are not opposites or even mutually exclusive, unless you insist on redefining them that way to beg some question. The Republican Party likes your definition.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      I keep forgetting about all the lefties that were beating and hosing down civil rights activists.
  - Kevin Armstrong
    
    The title of the article posted on Boing Boing is ” Republican revisionism and civil rights history”. So while you maybe correct in saying that about the actual article, the author who posted and linked it on this site begs to differ with you.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

While it’s difficult, perhaps impossible, for rational people to truly understand how republicans see the world, I did run across this enlightening bit just now:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2008/10/the-sub-prime-kristol-meltdown

Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. “I oppose it”, Irving replied. “It subverts meritocracy.”
- chgoliz
  
  Excellent find!
  - chgoliz
    
    Oh, it turns out the core is true, but there were embellishments:
    
    “Regarding the post by Harry Hopkins:
    Like all games of telephone, this has some truth but has become exaggerated. Irving Kristol and I had breakfast at a conference we were attending. I asked him how his son got interested in politics, and was told that when William was 15, as I recall, Irving called Pat Moynihan to ask if he might give William an internship. We also talked about affirmative action, which he opposed on grounds of protecting meritocracy. So the core is correct, but not the embellishments about Penn and Harvard. I also don’t remember any discussion about the RNC.”
    
    (From further down the comments)
philllies

How many of you BongBongers would pull the trigger on Lincoln? How many would vote to let him continue his term?
- gwailo_joe
  
  Why would I wanna shoot the poor guy again? And OF COURSE it would have been better for the Nation had Lincoln not been assassinated: Reconstruction was bound to be a hard sell and a tough road, but Abe was a reasonable statesman. He could have (would have) made a better attempt at reconciliation then the furious faux-patriots that came South to bleed it dry and make it grovel…it made the South a sullen, simmering land of resentment (in some respects) that to this day has not completely abated.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  How many of you BongBongers would pull the trigger on Lincoln?
  
  I’m fascinated how you came to view us as a nest of potential assassins.
- Snig
  
  You think this our first rodeo? Only noobs kill Lincoln or Hitler.
  http://boingboing.net/2008/03/18/wikihistory-sf-story.html
  - Preston Sturges
    
    Am I married to Selma Hayak in the alternate reality? If so, let’s saddle up.
  - Preston Sturges
    
    Recently, Tom The Dancing Bug’s Super-Fun-Pak-Comix featured Tim Tripp, Time Traveler who discovered stopping the Third Reich takes more than shooting Hitler while wearing a nifty Flash Gordon get-up
    
    http://boingboing.net/2012/02/22/tom-the-dancing-bug-super-fun.html
- Ipo
  
  No true BoingBoinger would do such a thing.
  
  =]
buggzzee23

I grew up in Fontana, California which was a KKK hotbed in the late 60s/early 70s, so I knew a lot of KKK guys. Every single one of those bastards was a Democrat. There may have been a Republican or two in there but they didn’t admit it or they’d have got an ass-kicking. The KKK members I knew hated the Republicans almost as much as Black people.
- anharmyenone
  
  Pish posh, personal experiences are like primary sources or “original research” and are poo-poo’d. Unless the academic establishment has approved the telling of it, it didn’t happen! Liberals outnumber conservatives by 11-1 among social scientists and 13-1 among humanities professors, so they control history, don’t you know?
  - travtastic
    
    Have you ever grimaced with such force that your face just stayed that way?
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  Really?
  
  That’s fascinating. Please ask again at this month’s meeting, to let us know if your friends still vote democrat.
  - buggzzee23
    
    They weren’t my friends, just fellow members of my union at the time, USW Local 2869. You can’t choose your coworkers.
    - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
      
      Good to hear.
      
      Here in Kentucky, more KKK friendly than California I suspect, we even get them running for office.
      
      Always as republicans.
      
      In fact, they were just here yesterday:
      
      http://www.wlwt.com/news/31099626/detail.html
- Ipo
  
  KKK?
  But now they’re called the teabaggers.
  Know any?
Petzl

And they’re not just rewriting history of the ’60s. Jonah Goldberg of the National Review went back in history a tad farther and wrote a whole book equating Liberals with Nazis of the ’40s.

So, if you were keeping score: Liberals are leftists. Extreme leftists are Communists (bad). Oh, and extreme leftists are also Nazis (real bad). Extreme rightists are … well, there’s no name for them really. But they certainly can’t be Nazis or fascists. Just people with common sense, is all.

I think part of the problem is, Jonah got confused by the “Socialist” in “National Socialist Worker’s Party.”

Now, if he wanted to really do some useful research he should find out why Republicans so gleefully use “Democrat” (instead of “Democratic”) as a pejorative adjective.
- Preston Sturges
  
  Jonah is a Nazi apologist. And you know who else said that “liberals are the real Fascists?” Anders Breivik who killed all those teens at the summer camp because he was fighting “liberal Fascism” and “political correctness.” Because nothing says “tolerance” like killing a bunch of kids.
  
  I recently saw someone suggest “Breiviks Law – anyone who says Nazis were leftists will then spout Nazi propaganda.”
  
  “When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!”
  -Attributed to Huey Long
  
  “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled “Made in Germany”, it will not be marked with a swastika, it will not even be called fascism. It will of course be called “Americanism”.
  -Halford Luccock
- Preston Sturges
  
  You can find some similarities between Communism and Fascsism because they grew out of the same wild period of German history.
  
  Differences between Marx and Hitler, Fascism and Communism are fundemental:
  
  Fascism is explicitly racist and focused on racial purity. Communism is not racist, which allowed to spread to many coutries. Fascism attacks immigrants as the “enemy within.”
  
  Fascism condemns “class warfare” and create new classes that may reduce certain people to slaves. Communism is all about “class struggle”
  
  Fascism protects private property and factory owners. Communism promises that the workers will control the “means of production.”
  
  Fascism is a “spiritual” movement and condemns Communism’s “materialism” (pseudo scientific rules). Marx used “dialectic materialism.”
  
  Fascism is almost never atheist. It may embrace organized religion, but it will usually use “syncretism” – a mixture of beliefs. Fascist countries may have an official state religion. Communist societies are often officially atheist.
  
  Fascism will destroy society to return to the Utopian past.
  Socialism will destroy society to create the Utopian future.
  - CLamb
    
    It seems like you’re confusing National Socialism with Fascism. The Fascists made little effort to exclude ethnic minorities from the body politic. Even when pressed by the Germans to do something about the Italian Jewish population the Fascist government appeared to go along but its efforts were so inefficient that nothing much was accomplished. As far as economic systems Mussolini stated that Fascism is compatible either with government or private ownership of the means of production–which one is best depends on the circumstances of the times. He started out promoting socialism as a Fascist virtue and then switched to promoting private enterprise when the Fascists acquired power. Once the King removed him from office he switched back again to socialism.
    - Preston Sturges
      
      Nazism is a specific form of Fascism, and there is a nice essay on this topic by Umberto Eco (“Name Of The Rose”) who grew up under Mussolini. He makes a pretty credible case.
      
      http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
      
      Also he makes the point that Mussolini didn’t do much of a job of defining “Fascism” because Mussolini took very different positions over the years. Hitler had more influence on Mussolini than vice versa, and there are many many Fascist regimes that did not strictly follow the Italian model. And Eco make the point that Fascist is syncretist and absorbs aspects of other systems, Mussolini above all.
      
      Eco was concerned that if people said that Mussolini was the “real Fascist” then we are of course arguing about “no true Scotsman.” And if Hitler wasn’t a Fascist, then he was probably a leftist, and he probably didn’t really kill the Socialist Jews, and not liking the Nazis is just part of the international conspiracy against white people by the effete liberals yadda yadda yadda.
      
      Check the backgrounds of the notable people making the point about Mussolini being the last word in Fascism, and you won’t have to flip over many rocks to find the Holocaust deniers.
      
      Oh, and of course, they would argue that Fascism by definition a one time aberration unique to that time and place that we never have to worry about again.
CognitiveDissident

Admittedly, my American History knowledge is a bit weak, but I recently watched the click-flick “The Help” (surprisingly good) and I noticed that they included scenes from the Black Churches, which helped give the African-Americans strength to stand up to the racism of all those heathen white racists, those meanies burned crosses after all (in general, not sure if in this movie), how awful!
A day or so after watching it, it dawned on me, does the book include scenes of some of the Southern White Churches fighting all those heathen white racists? The Southern White Churches used the EXACT same book then as now and they have Black people in their congregations now, how could it POSSIBLY have been any different then?
If I was more religious, I would be pissed if someone burned a cross, what’s the difference between burning a holy object and burning a holy book? Neither should be done, even if you don’t agree with the religion! So, obviously, all of the Southern White Churches supported the Southern Black Churches during the civil rights movement, it was common sense.
- Ipo
  
  The KKK are ultra religious.
  Klansmen state that crossburning is not destroying the cross, but “lighting” it, as a symbol of the members’ faith.
  
  So, obviously, all of the Southern White Churches supported the Southern Black Churches during the civil rights movement, it was common sense.
  
  Are you really trying to say that no baptist white bible belters are racists?
  
  Omfg, did I bite?!
  - CognitiveDissident
    
    chomp.
    
    It is interesting to note (at least to me) why their were no scenes of the White Churches in that movie, in reality, didn’t they use the Bible to “prove” the White Man’s superiority and as a justification of the Jim Crow laws? I think that I have seen old photos of White counter-protestors holding signs justifying their position with religious quotes.
donovan acree

Partisan tripe, the lot of it. Reps hate Dems – Dems hate Reps (at least the voters do). In truth, both Reps and Dems are two media outlets of the same corrupt mob.
I am so very tired of seeing these partisan types rant on and on about how their party is sooo much better than the other. It’s all bull. The 2 party system is a system of control. Anyone voting based on party is a fool and is ruining it all for the sane people are there.
Navin_Johnson

In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the Republican Party strategy of winning elections in Southern states by exploiting anti-African American racism and fears of lawlessness among Southern white voters and appealing to fears of growing federal power in social and economic matters (generally lumped under the concept of states’ rights). Though the “Solid South” had been a longtime Democratic Party stronghold due to the Democratic Party’s defense of slavery prior to the American Civil War and segregation for a century thereafter, many white Southern Democrats stopped supporting the party following the civil rights plank of the Democratic campaign in 1948 (triggering the Dixiecrats), the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and desegregation.
wysinwyg

I’m gonna go take a nap.

I think that might be best for everyone involved.