The Curse of Milhous Continues...
Ta-Nehisi Coates on William F. Buckley, Conservatives and Race:
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Buckley, Conservatives and Race: I think it's worth reading William Vogeli's piece, "Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement," which, to my mind, is the most thorough article I've read on the Right and African-Americans, from a conservative perspective. I think the grappling with the legacy of William F. Buckley is especially powerful. Vogeli is a Buckley guy, but he doesn't try to downplay the man's warts:
The single most disturbing thing about Buckley's reactions to the civil rights controversies was the asymmetry of his sympathies—genuine concern for Southern whites beset by integrationists, but more often than not, perfunctory concern for Southern blacks beset by bigots. This disparity culminated in a position on violence committed by whites against blacks and civil rights activists that was reliably equivocal. Like the liberals of the 1960s who didn't condone riots in Watts and Detroit but always understood them, Buckley regularly coupled the obligatory criticism of Southern whites' violent acts with a longer and more fervent denunciation of the provocations that elicited them. Thus, "the nation cannot get away with feigning surprise" when a mob of white students attacks a black woman admitted to the University of Alabama by federal court order in 1956. "For in defiance of constitutional practice, with a total disregard of custom and tradition, the Supreme Court, a year ago, illegalized a whole set of deeply-rooted folkways and mores; and now we are engaged in attempting to enforce our law." Thus, the Freedom Riders went into the South to "challenge with language of unconditional surrender" the whites' "deeply felt" beliefs, and were "met, inevitably, by a spastic response. By violence."
What's interesting is Buckley ultimately supported a holiday for MLK, and unlike some his more reprehensible peers, actually grappled with his blind-spot in regards to segregation. Also, Vogeli gets at the essential problem of conservatives and black voters--the dodginess of the "limited government" defense. To oppose Affirmative Action and hate crime legislation from the perspective of limited government is an honest position that probably could be explained to the African-American voter. But it can't be explained when the people who hold that position support other massive intrusions of government--like the drug war,and the expansion of prisons. Unfortunately, that leads to my critique of the article--I didn't see anything on what a conservative pitch to African-Americans would look like. I've said this before--if conservatives want the black vote, it's not enough to outline what your against, you have to say what you're for. I didn't get that from the piece. I still have no idea why any African-American should ultimately support a Republican....
I'm a liberal.... But as a black person--and I guess as a liberal--I've never thought it was a good thing that nine out of ten black people think that basically half the American electorate would like to see them back in chains. I'd much rather that nine out of ten blacks vote Democrat out of a serious committment to liberalism, not because they basically don't have a choice. That sense, that there really is only one electoral option, is not good for black folks, and it's not good for the country at large.
I want to cavill at Coates's characterization of Buckley. When Vogeli claims that Buckley found
The Claremont Institute - Civil Rights and the Conservative Movement: [For] National Review conservatism... [i]ntegration and black progress were welcomed when they were the result of private actions like the boycotts of segregated buses or lunch counters, which Buckley judged "wholly defensible" and "wholly commendable." He also praised... an investment venture started in 1965 to raise capital for racially integrated housing developments, calling it "a project divorced from government that is directed at doing something about a concrete situation," one that "depends for its success on the spontaneous support of individual people." The corollary was that conservatism opposed the civil rights agenda when it called for or depended on Big Government. "We frown on any effort of the Negroes to attain social equality by bending the instrument of the state to their purposes," Buckley wrote in 1960...
Vogeli's quotes come from one particular piece in the March 26, 1960 issue of National Review. I think it is important to read the piece Vogeli quotes in the context of another piece that Buckley had written three years earlier:
http://cumulus.hillsdale.edu/buckley/Standard/downloads/showoriginal/whythesouthmustprevaildotpdf_1703_buckleybuckleyarchivepublicationsbyyear1957articles/WhyTheSouthMustPrevail.pdf: [L]et us speak frankly.... [T]he White community merely intends to prevail.... The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.... The Negroes would, according to democratic processes, win the election: but that is the kind of situation the White community will not permit. The White community will not count the marginal negro vote. The man he didn't count it... will plead not guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him not guilty. A federal judge... would affirm the law and conform with the relevant political abstractions... [with] consequences... violent and anarchistic.
The central question... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally.... The sobering answer is Yes.... National Review believes that the South's premises are correct.... It is more important for any community... to affirm and live by civilized standards than to bow to the demands of a numerical majority.... [S]ometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price....
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage.... The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could.... Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom...
Now here is the broader context for Vogeli's quotes:
http://cumulus.hillsdale.edu/buckley/Standard/downloads/showoriginal/distinguamusdotpdf_3208_buckleybuckleyarchivepublicationsbyyear1960articles/Distinguamus.pdf: A sharp distinction must be made in evaluating the activity of the young Negroes-on-the-march in the south. The first is that private property remains private... a Negro does not have the right to enter a privately-owned restaurant whose proprietors choose... to bar access... to non-whites. The second is that the boycott the Negroes have instituted against business concerns which discriminate against Negroes..., is a wholly defensible--we go so far as to say wholly commendable--form of protest....
The white conservative has never said that in the South the forms will never change. He has fought against a disruption of the premises of Southern life by egalitarian statists who are given to deciding what the Constitution means after locking themselves into a quiet room and communing with Ideology. He has maintained that it is up to the state to decide whether its schools shall or shall not be segregated; and now he maintains that it is a right guaranteed to an American entrepreneur to refuse to do business with whomever he likes.... Those who wish the Negroes well must not in their fervor sweep American institutions under the carpet.... Brown v. Board of Education... was bad law and bad sociology.... [I]nflamed by it the ideologues will move to egg on the trespassers who are violating the right of the individual citizen... to set the rules in his own house....
[I]f the Negro decides not to patronize a local department store which refuses to sell him lunch, heaven knows that is his right... if... [these] economic pressures... [make store managers] give way, we have by objective test a form of segregation which... the community views as expendable...
We frown on any effort of the Negroes to attain social equality by bending the instrument of the state to their purposes. But we applaud the efforts to define their rights by the lawful and non-violent use of social and economic sanctions...
With respect to "if the Negro decides not to patronize a local department store which refuses to sell him lunch, heaven knows that is his right... if... [these] economic pressures... [make store managers] give way, we have by objective test a form of segregation which... the community views as expendable..." I note that the distinction between good peaceful, property-rights and legal-order respecting, economic pressure and bad government coercion and violence on the other is new to 1960. It was not present in 1957. In 1957, Buckley is endorsing the throwing-out of lawfully-cast votes by lawfully-registered voters, arguing against federal judiciary supervision of whether state courts are obeying the law, and--if I am not misreading--advocating that if federal judges insist that votes by counted then that African-American voters be lynched. I see no other way to read Buckley's reference to the "terrible price" of "violence."
Not only is the principled line that Vogeli claims Buckley follows not drawn in 1957, it is not consistently drawn in 1960. Consider: "the [the white southerner] has maintained that it is up to the [non-disenfranchised individual southern] state to decide whether its schools shall or shall not be segregated..." Buckley is not opposed to government policemen keeping African-American children from going to their neighborhood schools if the politicians elected by the non-disenfranchised voters of that individual state have labelled that particular school whites-only. That exercise of government power is just fine with Buckley in 1960. Vogeli clearly wishes that Buckley had drawn a principled "opposed to governmental coercion of free individuals" line. But Buckley did not.
And with respect to "the White conservative has never said that in the South the forms will never change..." I have here George Wallace:
ADAH: George Wallace's 1963 Inaugural Speech: Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever . . . Let us send this message back to Washington by our representatives who are with us today . . that from this day we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man . . . that we intend to take the offensive and carry our fight for freedom across the nation, wielding the balance of power we know we possess in the Southland . . . . that WE, not the insipid bloc of voters of some sections . . will determine in the next election who shall sit in the White House of these United States . . . That from this day, from this hour . . . from this minute . . . we give the word of a race of honor that we will tolerate their boot in our face no longer . . . . and let those certain judges put that in their opium pipes of power and smoke it for what it is worth...
Thus when Vogeli writes:
Like the liberals of the 1960s who didn't condone riots in Watts and Detroit but always understood them, Buckley regularly coupled the obligatory criticism of Southern whites' violent acts with a longer and more fervent denunciation of the provocations that elicited them...
My reaction is:
<keanu>Whoa!</keanu>
The "criticism of Southern whites' violent acts" seems to me more likely to have been something imposed on Buckley from the outside--something required if he wanted J.K. Galbraith to treat him as a debating partner and have anyone to go to dinner with in Manhattan--than to have been something Buckley drew from inside himself. For Buckley as for others, at bottom he seems to have seen violence as something as American as cherry pie.
