Reality’s Liberal Bias: The Jonah Goldberg Edition:

[paft.livejournal.com]

Jonah Goldberg:

The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned.

Why is Livejournal refusing to embed This video? It's very frustrating.

So Goldberg not only wants to disenfranchise thousands of Americans because he doesn’t like the direction of their politics – he thinks they should be “literally” beaten until they change their minds.

Pesky reality keeps impinging on recent outrageous attempts by conservatives to rewrite it. Just last week, the National Review, fresh off of firing long-time writer John Derbyshire for getting just a bit too obvious about his racism, posted a long, woozy piece by Kevin D.Williamson about how, really, it’s the Democratic party that’s a bunch of racists:

Kevin D. Williamson, The National Review, “The Party of Civil Rights”:

This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans…


Williamson’s writing style is so long winded, oblique, and snore inducing it comes across as deliberate obfuscation. His arguments have to scuttle sideways across the page, edging around embarrassing facts like the GOP’s Southern Strategy, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the voting rights act, and Ronald Reagan’s infamous “States Rights” Speech in Neshoba.

And then, this week:

From Think Progress:

Republicans in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania have elected Steve Smith, a lifelong white supremacist with close ties to neo-Nazi groups and groups like Aryan Nations, to the county’s GOP Committee.


So, I hope everyone has got this straight. It’s really the conservatives who are pro-racial equality, in spite of those embarrassing essays William F. Buckley wrote back in the ‘60s, And the GOP’s embrace of the Southern Strategy. And those pesky white supremacists who wrote for the National Review until very recently. And that Neo-Nazi who, in the tradition of David Duke, is now representing the Republican Party in Pennsylvania.

And it’s really, the liberals who are Nazis says the guy who thinks thousands of Americans should not only be disenfranchised, but “literally” beaten until they come around to his own, right wing point of view about socialism.

Sometimes, reality does your arguing for you.

Comments

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

So it’s really the democrats who are pro-racial equality, in spite of those embarrassing incidents like democratic Governor Orval Faubus calling National Guard troops to keep black students out of the white schools.

[paft.livejournal.com]

And, uh, how long ago was that again?

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Way to be stuck in the past, bub.

The truly awesome part about this is how the democrats became less racist, showing they can learn from their mistakes and the republicans have done the complete opposite and now seem to embrace all the racist, misogynist, and homophobic mistakes of the past.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

Time: It's linear.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Poll 100 black Americans, and get back to me with the results.

[whoasksfinds.livejournal.com]

i'd recommend just ignoring paft's posts in the future.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Or the Republicans engaging in deliberate election fraud knowing this sanctified the rule of hang thy neighbor as the principle of law in the South and not giving a damn, to say nothing of the Robert Taft and Henry Ford Hitler-rimjobbers who would rather have seen the world turn totalitarian than spend one American dollar or life against Hitler.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

having read the entire set of comments, I find this all ridiculous. I agree with peristaltor, racism is not dependent on party membership.

But the Democratic Party had a sea change in the 1960s and became the party that pushed through Civil Rights, while the GOP became the party that stood with segregationist states to fight those Civil Rights.

The history is pretty clear on this.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Jonathan Chait wrote a piece in New York Magazine about that National Review article: The Conservative Fantasy History of Civil Rights (http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/05/conservative-fantasy-history-of-civil-rights.html):

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. Kevin Williamson’s cover story in National Review is the latest version of what is rapidly congealing into conservatism’s revisionist dogma.

The mainstream, and correct, history of the politics of civil rights is as follows. Southern white supremacy operated out of the Democratic Party beginning in the nineteenth century, but the party began attracting northern liberals, including African-Americans, into an ideologically cumbersome coalition. Over time the liberals prevailed, forcing the Democratic Party to support civil rights, and driving conservative (and especially southern) whites out, where they realigned with the Republican Party. Williamson crafts a tale in which the Republican Party is and always has been the greatest friend the civil rights cause ever had. The Republican takeover of the white South had absolutely nothing to do with civil rights, the revisionist case proclaims, except insofar as white Southerners supported Republicans because they were more pro-civil rights.

One factoid undergirding this bizarre interpretation is that the partisan realignment obviously took a long time to complete — Southerners still frequently voted Democratic into the seventies and eighties. This proves, according to Williamson, that a backlash against civil rights could not have driven southern whites out of the Democratic Party. “They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow,” he insists.

[Sound familiar to you? Several here make that case all the time.]

His story completely ignores the explicit revolt by conservative Southerners against the northern liberal civil rights wing, beginning with Strom Thurmond, who formed a third-party campaign in 1948 in protest against Harry Truman’s support for civil rights. Thurmond received 49 percent of the vote in Louisiana, 72 percent in South Carolina, 80 percent in Alabama, and 87 percent in Mississippi. He later, of course, switched to the Republican Party.

Thurmond’s candidacy is instructive. Democratic voting was deeply acculturated among southern whites as a result of the Civil War. When southern whites began to shake loose of it, they began at the presidential level, in protest against the civil rights leanings of the national wing. It took decades for the transformation to filter down, first to Congressional-level representation (Thurmond, who Williamson mentions only in his capacity as a loyal Democrat, finally switched to the GOP in 1964), and ultimately to local-level government. The most fervently white supremacist portions of the South were also the slowest to shed their Confederate-rooted one-party traditions. None of this slowness actually proves Williamson’s contention that the decline of the Democratic Party in the South was unrelated to race.

[notmrgarrison.livejournal.com]

the strident opponents of the civil rights movement

I guess tere was no such thing as Southern Democrats. (and Robert Byrd was never in the KKK)

[telemann.livejournal.com]

...

To the extent that Republicans replaced Democrats in the South, Williamson sees their support for civil rights as the cause. (“Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans.”) As his one data point, Williamson cites the victory of George Bush in Texas over a Democrat who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He correctly cites Bush’s previous record of moderation on civil rights but neglects to mention that Bush also opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Williamson does feel obliged to mention Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but defends it as a “principled” opposition to the “extension of federal power.” At the same time, he savages southern Democrats for their opposition to the 14th and 15th Amendments, Reconstruction, anti-lynching laws, and so on. It does not seem to occur to him that many of these opponents also presented their case in exactly the same pro-states' rights, anti-federal power terms that Goldwater employed. Williamson is willing to concede that opponents of civil rights laws have philosophical principles behind them, but only if they are Republican.

It is true that most Republicans in 1964 held vastly more liberal positions on civil rights than Goldwater. This strikes Williamson as proof of the idiosyncratic and isolated quality of Goldwater’s civil rights stance. What it actually shows is that conservatives had not yet gained control of the Republican Party.

But conservative Republicans — those represented politically by Goldwater, and intellectually by William F. Buckley and National Review — did oppose the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote frankly about his endorsement of white supremacy: “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.” More often conservatives argued on grounds of states’ rights, or freedom of property, or that civil rights leaders were annoying hypocrites, or that they had undermined respect for the law.

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

(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 amazes me how many younger adults seriously do not realize this fact/truth. they are disconnected....but maybe it's for their best interest? maybe it's better to be unaware of all the ugly?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

I KNEW this was going to make the rounds.

Steve Smith was a write-in candidate who ran on a ballot where there were no official candidates.

Three people voted in that election.

Three people.

Two people were elected. So Steve Smith lucked out and got at best 2 votes.

That's right, Republicans are pro-Nazi now because in a city of a few thousand... in a ward of a few hundred, a guy took the initiative to show up and won an election unopposed to a position that has almost no prestige or power in the party.

Think Progress is a bunch of disingenuous pseudo-intellectual effete politicos who like to push stories around the world before the truth even gets its shoes on. They should feel great shame in their efforts. But you can't shame the shameless.

[paft.livejournal.com]

b: That's right, Republicans are pro-Nazi now because in a city of a few thousand... in a ward of a few hundred, a guy took the initiative to show up and won an election unopposed to a position that has almost no prestige or power in the party.

More like some Nazis find the Republican Party appealing. And conservatives have no business attempting to rewrite recent history.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

This discussion is getting silly. Yes, Republicans and Democrats alike can be racists. Duh. Race as a marker of The Other transcends simple political politics and (to varying degrees) tickles the amygdala in all of us. All of us.

The question Paft puts forward, however, is more about how the Republicans are (through mouthpieces like that Over-paid Stooge Goldberg and those that quote him without irony like Williamson) trying to rewrite the history of who is racist and why.

For a history of why I consider Goldberg to be a revisionist stooge, consider:



(I believe only underlankers here holds that the policies of the US right are far closer to those of the US left, and only (IIRC) because he regards "fascism" as a much narrower subset of the historical political population than, as one example, myself. I also hope, UL, that I have adequately qualified and not misrepresented your position.)

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Piers Morgan was pretty ruthless in his recent interview with Goldberg, and suggested that he is quite deft at continuing a lot of "conservative" cliches himself (referring to the new book Goldberg is pimping now).

[theplanfailed.livejournal.com]

Bonus points for the use of the word "Pernicious". I've seen that in one book, ever, in my entire life. :)
Yes, I am impressed simply by that. I don't care about the politics.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Just wait until you stumble upon "calipygious!"

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Reading anything Jonah Goldberg writes makes you dumber.

[geezer-also.livejournal.com]

Good to know, I seem to get dumber without reading him, the mind boggles at the potential...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The irony is that neither party in terms of civil rights being enforced really has a leg to stand on in declaring either to be champions of it. The Democrats, after all, in practical terms were the one-party movement consisting of the preponderance of the Confederacy's leaders and the violent thugs in the Union that did things like the New York Riot. The Republicans had Grant, who really tried to ensure the law would apply to everyone regardless of skin color, but preferred to sell rule of law as opposed to rule of lynch mob down the river. Any sincere, honest view of the GOP as the party of the Civil Rights got garrotted to death and the corpse hung from a tree as a warning after 1877. Civil rights as such was only a priority of the categories of Americans denied it, the ones doing the denying didn't see anything wrong with that denial.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Haha, he wants to raise the voting age. Yeah, because being old enough to serve and die for your country doesn't quite make you qualified to choose your representatives.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Mitt Romney: America is apparently all white if you were to believe these screen-grabs from a recently ran campaign ad (courtesy of mahnmut):

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

You're right. Not enough tokens.

Republicans can not win. If they include minorities in a campaign ad... it's tokenism. If they don't. They're racist.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Racism in the Republican Party is not a recent phenomenon. Stephen Douglas described three shades of Republicans during his debates with Lincoln. Only the most "radical" Republicans favored emancipation and equal civil and social rights. The other types of Republicans either favored emancipation with civil rights, but no social rights, or they favored emancipation with neither civil nor social rights.

As for Jonah Goldberg, I forgive what he says because he is a young ignoramus who has learned little or nothing from his experience with the Bush Administration.

[rimpala.livejournal.com]

Oh republicans and their vicious cycle of alienating others and blaming it on others.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

They are soooo persecuted!

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

You know...

Any human being most of the way through puberty is a biological adult. We do not treat them as such--artificially extending the social definition of childhood--in order to "give them more time to mature". The main reason for this is their brains--specifically the part of the brain dealing with rational problem solving--essentially grows a huge number of connections at the beginning of puberty which essentially "resets" the ability to learn new solutions to problems given their now (biological) adult status.

They tend to make decisions as teenagers adults don't like because--in most cases--they're living in an artificial, age-graded, child-like world in order to protect them from adult influences. So, these teens tend to learn solutions to the problems they face in this artificial, age-graded, child-like world and make decisions based on these solutions to the situations in this artificial, age-graded, child-like world.

Then, magically, at 18 they are adults in both the biological sense and the legal sense... Now trying to create new solutions to the problems they are exposed to in the adult world...

Which means--while I don't agree with the use of beatings--this guy may have a point when it comes to the wisdom of young voters whose primary source of experience is either artificial (someone told them that was the right answer) or based on several years of experience in a artificial, age-graded, child-like world where success was rewarded with a grade or a gold star and failures were underwritten by their family, etc.

So, whether or not socialism is a successful political or economic solution to a given context isn't really the point of what he said, it's whether or not young people--as a demographic--have enough of an understanding of the real adult-world context to make rational decisions.

[paft.livejournal.com]

So should 18-year-olds be inducted into the army and sent into combat?

This is not about Goldberg and other conservatives being concerned about 18-year-olds not being wise enough to vote. It's about the fact that the youth vote seems to b going to the Democrats.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

So Goldberg not only wants to disenfranchise thousands of Americans because he doesn’t like the direction of their politics – he thinks they should be “literally” beaten until they change their minds.

I don't know if it's in the video or not, but your selected quote does not support this claim you are making. But the way you [mis]interpret his statement is always enlightening as to your thought process.

[paft.livejournal.com]

g: I don't know if it's in the video or not,

It is.

g: How does Goldberg saying: "The fact that young people think socialism is better than capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m concerned"

NOT support my contention that he thinks young people who disagree with him politically should be literally beaten?