According to Anne Applebaum, a conservative columnist for Slate, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accepted the invitation to speak at Columbia as a way to promote his idea that he is more of a democrat than his opponents in the West.
It's pretty obvious that Ahmadinejad got this idea from the American right. Maybe one of Karl
Rove's proteges is working for him as a consultant. That's because the right is always trying to argue that they are more liberal than liberals. The best-known gambit along these lines is William Bennett quoting MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech" and claiming with almost a straight face against almost any government action that would benefit African-Americans.
But smaller fish like Christina Hoff Summers claims that they are the real feminists because they reject the feminism of the last forty years in the name of Victorian-era feminism. An even smaller fish, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, claims to be "the real liberal" as he promotes the pointless war in Iraq, opposes feminism, opposes gay rights, and follows the William Bennett line on race.
In a way, you can't blame the right-wing for taking this approach. Given the close association of conservatism with slavery, segregation, opposition to voting rights for women, McCarthyism, the Scopes Trial, and many of the other shameful episodes of American history, it's no surprise that the right-wing is extremely quiet about their heritage as American conservatives.
But, if Bennett, Summers, and Goldstein are the real liberals, then Ahmadinejad is a real democrat.
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9 comments:
Once again,
I think the greatest victory of the Democrat Party in the 20th century was convincing everyone that slavery and segregation were aspects of the Republican party. Not only was Lincoln a Republican, but the segregationists in the south (including George Wallace and Robert Byrd) were democrats and later dixie-crats. While the republicans are definitely flawed, the stain of racism is just as clearly on the democrat party. Sen. Robert Byrd, an active democrat senator, was an active Klansman. People need to quit making Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms into the only racists in politics as opposed to presenting the racism of the Democrat party (including racist drafts in vietnam, the racism of fdr, truman and johnson)
Brandon - That does not fit with The Narrative.
Caric must sit around in between classes and just day dream of goofball shite to make up and post.
I always find it ironic that JFK, the icon of the Left, and who is viewed as the epitome of the classical liberal, held many important views that are far more in line with the modern Republicans than the Dems. Pay any price, bear any burden, significant tax cuts, etc ... are hardly modern Dem ideals.
Pay any price for goods, labor and government services.
bear any burden as long as it's a symbolic burden. None of that real burden stuff please
significant tax cuts specifically targeted to forward the progressive social agenda.
Really JD. I don't see the disconnect.
Yet again....
An oppressor of women, executor of gays, West hating, religious fundamentalist, Holocaust Denying, Truther, (JD, feel free to add to the list) ACTUAL Dictator adopts the entire leftist agenda. We now have both OBL and Mahdi on record endorsing progressivism. Still, rather than take a deep breath and at least a tiny step back to check who he's rubbing ideological shoulders with, Caric looks for the Rove angle. I can only hope your line of thinking is self parody.
Brandon, if you've done any reading of comments on the site, then you will note that Democrats here don't run away from that legacy. Yesterday, I posted part of a Bob Herbert column in which Republican strategist Lee Atwater explicitly claimed to use racism to elect Republicans in the post-'68 era. Further, and as I noted Hannity will not tell you this, Byrd was a KKK member more than 50 years ago and has since apologized for it and repented. He has voted for all Civil Rights legislation since 1968. Check out his Wikipedia page. After all if you think a former drunk, failed businessman can be a good President ten years after turning his life around, then it is a bit uncharitable to think a person who has apologized repeatedly for joining the Klan in 1942 cannot be forgiven 65 years later.
More importantly, Professor you miss out on half of Goldstein's laughable commitment to liberty. He champions Guantanamo, he was for the government's illegal wiretapping and opposed FISA, he favors the right of the US government to lock up American citizens without trial (in fact, he was championing that disgusting idea yesterday), and he doesn't believe private organizations can invite foreign dictators to speak. He claims to be a "classical liberal", yet he's has an authoritarian streak a mile wide and will grant the government any power any time.
Starkly humorous to me is the dichotomy of his disdain for diversity and academia (despite wishing he had a career in the latter) contrasted with his adoption on his website of the the very speech codes he says he opposes. His site is a mirror of the worst of political correctness: if one lacks the proper viewpoint, one is shouted down and either called racist, homophobic, and Anti-Semitic or held up to ridicule by the Borg mind that is the PW crowd.
His acolytes, despite my apparent fondness for one of them, seep throughout the Internet, especially the risible Pablo....check out the treatment delivered to this ChrisS on one thread and the vile things said to serial dissenter sematicleo, etc.
He has created a phalanx of righteousness which stifles debate (debate he claims to promote) and would be the envy of any Code Pink demonstration.
The conservatives, who fought against civil rights for African-Americans and gays, who fight today over giving poor children health insurance, who fought against "Communist influence", who favored MacArthur over Truman and McCarthy to Eisenhower, have lost every battle of the last century and, like all losers, they would like to forget the lessons of the past.
At least, that's what I think.
I really need to stop reading PW. Balloon Juice is much more healthy (for me, it would drive ef and JD crazy).
tim.. who in the world are you? Democrats don't run from the legacy, they ignore it and yet try to paint republicans with that brush. Strom Thurmond also apologized and voted for civil rights legislation, the Democrat Party sure didn't forgive him for that. Personally, i don't care about Thurmond or Byrd's past. the point wasn't about forgiveness but instead my point was about it is misleading to try to portray the republican party as supporting segregation or racism
I'm just a guy. No one here is an authority, except the Professor.
All I can do is point you in the historical direction: the Herbert column from the other day, Ken Mehlman apologizing for using racial politics, i.e. the Southern strategy, the quote I used on another thread from Lee Atwater, and, the best argument for who opposes the interests of minorities, is where African-Americans vote and where the people who oppose their interests vote.
As I've mentioned several times, I reject the idea that everyone who opposes the political interests of a minority is a racist, but I will assume that racists will gravitate to the party which opposes minority interests. In other words, if you oppose Civil Rights Acts, oppose affirmative action, favor disenfranchisement of black voters, etc for political or philosophical reasons, then some of the people you attract are going to be racists.
In the end the Civil Rights legislation of '64 and the Voting Rights Act of '65 caused a grand realignment in American politics. Conservatives used to be split between the Democratic and Republicans depending on where they were from (Southern Dems were conservatives); Liberals used to be split between the Northeastern Republicans and Midwestern Conservatives. After the Democrats took credit for those two acts, conservatives, racists or not, moved to the Republican Party and liberals moved to the Democratic Party.
At the risk of hacking off, ef and JD (more so), here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "Realigning elections":
"For political scientists, 1964 was primarily an issue-based realignment. The classic study of the 1964 election, by Carmines and Stimson (1989), shows...while only 50% of African-Americans self-identified as Democrats in the 1960 National Election Study, 82% did in 1964, a change which persists to this day. Perhaps the clearest indicator of the importance of this election, was that Deep Southern states, such as Mississippi, voted Republican in 1964, something unimaginable as late as 1956. In contrast, much of the traditional Republican strongholds of the Northeast and Upper Midwest voted Democratic. Vermont and Maine, which stood alone voting against FDR in 1936, voted for LBJ in 1964."
Republicans should have trouble running away from modern accusations of racism, because they have actively used political strategies which racists would enjoy. I know plenty of Republican racists (I call them uncles and aunts and Dad), and the KEY is they would be so pissed to hear themselves called that. They think of racists as a combination of Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazard and the bad guys from Mississippi Burning. Truth is racists don't always wear hoods.
Sorry to be so long and I doubt I was persuasive. The best book on the subject I can offer is Robert Caro's Master of the Senate. It's a bio of LBJ, but has a fascinating history of racism in America.
Thanks for your time.
There are a couple of other things Tim could have mentioned:
Barry Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964;
Nixon's Law and Order campaign which was directed primarily against blacks;
Ronald Reagan's campaign kick-off about state's rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
I agree with Tim that opposing black interests is not "necessarily racists." However, the Republicans have long sought to use their opposition to black interests as a "wedge issue" to solidify their support among racist whites particularly in the South.
That is racist.
Face it, Ric. You are going to call anyone that disagrees with you a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, etc ... It is your M.O.
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