Chapter 7
Racism Justified
As an adult, I
saw racism revealed over and over again. I found a common thread in political
views running through every racist that I encountered. All of them held
conservative views. Conservatism is
always a reaction to a challenge to an existing order becoming self-conscious and reflective when other ways
of life and thought appear on the
scene, against which it is compelled to
take up arms in an ideological struggle.
Situationally, conservatism is defined as the ideology
arising out of a distinct but recurring type of historical situation in which a
fundamental challenge is directed at established institutions and in which the
supporters of those institutions employ the conservative ideology in their
defense. Thus, conservatism is that system of ideas employed to justify any
established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any
fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.
Conservatism in this sense is possible in the United States today only if there
is a basic challenge to existing American institutions which impels their
defenders to articulate conservative values.
The Civil Rights movement was a direct challenge to the
existing institutions of the time, and
conservatism as an ideology is thus a reaction to a system
under challenge, a defense of the status – quo in a period of intense
ideological and social conflict.
The very notion of a race of people that was; at our beginnings as a country, only
considered to be 3/5’s of a human being,
now having equal footing with those that actually believed in this idea,
is a direct challenge to a long held
social concept. It denied the idea of white supremacy as legitimate.
It’s surprising how many people still cling to this idea, and will go to
extreme lengths to perpetuate it.
The idea that a person that could have been your slave at
one time, could today be your boss, or even President of the United States, is
more than some people can deal with on an emotional level. White supremacy as an institution is
renounced, discredited, and dismantled, and that is a major blow to an existing
order, and conservatism is always a reaction to a challenge to an existing
order. These are people that desperately need somebody to look down to in order
to validate their own self-worth. “Sure, life is tough. But at least I’m
White.” They can no longer rely on a policy that used to be institutionally
enforceable. When that is removed by law, hostility is the result; hostility for those that have been
emancipated by law and elevated to equal status, and hostility for the law
itself including those that proposed it and passed it.
Thus, hatred for African-Americans and for the Liberal’s
and liberal policies that endorse their equal status is fully embraced by the
conservative.
Letting go of the
past is difficult to do. An entire race of people becomes an easy scapegoat for
one’s own failures. Hate is passed on from one generation to the next. Parents
teach their children to hate.
The cure for hate is education, so every attempt to keep
schools segregated was an important factor. Every attempt to de-segregate
schools was resisted. Integrated schools are a way of leveling the playing
field and a sign of equality and equality is a challenge to the social fabric.
The more narrow the view point, the more ignorant the person becomes and the easier it is to promote fear and fear
promotes hate. Fear always promotes
hate.
The conservative mind embraces a narrow point of
view. It doesn’t like being challenged. It resists new information. A liberal mind by definition is open to
change, but change always threatens the existing order, so the liberal is not
to be trusted. He is feared, and hated because he challenges the existing
order.
Another glaring problem is that the conservative knows
there is no rational justification for his racism. He knows that it’s wrong,
intellectually, but he’s imprisoned by an ideology without a basis, and this
ideology appeals to his “Gut” and not his brain. As Charles Pierce wrote, “The Gut is the roiling repository of dark
and ancient fears. It knows what it knows because it knows how it feels”.
Richard Hofstadter points to this when he says, “Intellect is pitted against
feeling”, he writes, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm
emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that
intellect stands for cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the
diabolical”. The Conservatives entire
set of values is wrapped in a theory of rationality that was handed to him by
somebody else with a nice big bow. His way of life is now threatened by a truth
that contradicts his beliefs. To admit that it was flawed and without any
basis, is to admit that, foundationally, everything he believed in is flawed
and that means that he could be wrong about something. And that also means that there is no
justification for the pain and suffering that his ideology has inflicted on
others. An entire war was fought and over 600,000 lives were lost in order to
continue a way of life that was baseless. Rather than admit that his beliefs
were in error, he clings to the ideology of hate and directs that hate toward the object that is the very cause of the hate: The
Black Man. The Black Man is a constant reminder that his ideology is flawed, a reminder that his
hatred is baseless. Holding on to an ideology with no basis is irrational.
Rather than dump this irrational way of thinking, he
embraces irrationality as a way of life. He becomes a justificationist, and
looks for anything that will justify his flawed ideology. He looks for passages
in the Bible as a justification for slavery and therefore a justification for
his beliefs. He finds a refuge in the
Bible and religion, (conservatives a very religious bunch) and this becomes the
foundation that he “feels” he can stand
on. But he fails to recognize that that the Bible cannot be its own basis.
That’s circular reasoning. A criteria
cannot be its own criteria. If we claim a basis gives us truth, we then are
making the implicit claim that truth requires bases. But then it is plainly
obvious our own basis lacks a basis, as it cannot be its own basis. The Bible
might justify slavery, but what justifies the Bible? Well…it’s the inspired
word of God. According to whom? According to the Bible. That’s circular reasoning. That’s a logical fallacy. Clinging to a
logical fallacy, when you know it’s a logical fallacy is irrational. Conservatives insist on a foundationalist way of
thinking, and the basis, the foundation
of this idea all rests on something claiming itself as its own foundation.
So…what is the foundation for the foundation, or the basis for the basis? They
don’t like being pressed on this because that requires defending a stated position based on something, and that leads to
an infinite regress vs. their dogma. Trying to justify a basis leads to more
justification for yet another basis and that leads into a black hole of one
justification after another. There is no exit.
Conservatives oppose the “liberal agenda”. But what is that “agenda”? Liberalism
challenges the status-quo. Conservatism opposes any challenge to the
status-quo. And there you have it. But what is the justification for the
status-quo, especially one that keeps an entire race of people suppressed
because of an ideology without a basis?
African-Americans are fully aware of this attitude coming
from conservatives, which is why so few align themselves to this ideology.
Conservatives talk about trying to reach out to the African-American community,
but fail to understand that nobody wants to hang with people that hate
you. Blacks understand the source of
this hatred, and are not likely to embrace it. Until conservatism renounces
racism and purges racists from the Republican Party, they’ll never reach the
African-American in any significant numbers.
As pointed out by Professor Robert C. Smith, “African
American thought has always been mainly a system-challenging, dissident
thought. However, until the 1950s and
1960s this thought had not been linked to a powerful mass movement. And the
mere articulation of a dissident ideology does not produce conservatism until
the ideology is embraced by significant social groups. Once it appeared that
the black movement presented “ a clear and present danger” to the existing
order, a self-conscious conservative movement would necessarily emerge, and it
would also necessarily be for the most part a racist movement”. It was in the 1950’s that the Conservative
Movement had its beginnings as a backlash to the challenges presented by
African American thought.
In my previous book, Political Logic, I pointed to Russell
Kirk and his book The Conservative Mind.
“In his lecture on “The Origins of the Modern American
Conservative Movement” given to the
Heritage Foundation in 2003, Dr. Lee Edwards cited Russell
Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind as providing the central idea upon which American
conservatism is essentially based, calling it ordered liberty”.
Kirk described six basic “canons” or principles of conservatism:
1.A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules
society;
2.Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery
while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
3.Civilized society requires orders and classes;
4.Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
5.Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that
he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
6.Society must alter slowly.
Edwards states that “the work established convincingly
that there was a tradition of American
conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the
Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually
acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name.
Lest we minimize the writings of Kirk, we should point out
that one of his biggest supporters was “Mr.Conservative”, President Ronald Reagan. Reagan
said this of Kirk:
“As the prophet of
American conservatism, Russell Kirk has taught, nurtured, and inspired a
generation. From . .
. Piety Hill, he reached deep into the roots of American values, writing and
editing central
works of political philosophy. His intellectual contribution has been a
profound act of patriotism. I
look forward to the future with anticipation that his work will continue to exert a profound
influence in the defense of our values and our cherished civilization.”
—Ronald Reagan, 1981
For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the
Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President
Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal.
In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori
Prize for historical writing. Dr, Kirks conservative
credentials are established. He is a conservative. He is qualified to speak on the meaning of
conservatism.
This prompted me to examine a few of Kirks ideas which he
put forth as his 10 principles of
conservatism, in addition to his 6 “canons”. Kirk begins
with his first principle as being that “the
conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order”.
He states, “Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato taught this
doctrine, but even the educated nowadays find it difficult to understand” . The problem of
order has been a principal concern of conservatives ever since conservative became a term of politics.
Putting it mildly, Plato’s view was that we are ineradicably social, and that
the individual person was not, and could not, be self-sufficient. In fact,
Plato offered up humans like so many animals that could do nothing for
themselves unless they had constant and detailed direction from those who were
to be their leaders:
“... And even in the smallest manner ... [one] should
stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals ...
only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of
acting independently ... There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself,
till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really
and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same
hands.” (The Republic.)
In his chapter on southern conservatism, Kirk writes “that
while human slavery is bad ground for
conservatives to make a stand upon, yet the wild demands
and expectations of the abolitionists were quite as slippery a foundation for
political decency” Describing “Negroes” as “the menace of debased, ignorant and
abysmally poor folk” he argued they “must tend to produce in the minds of the
dominant people an anxiety to preserve every detail of the present structure,
and an ultra-vigilant suspicion of innovation”.
Ok…so this is the guy that influenced Ronald Reagan. His views were also more or less adapted by
William F. Buckley, National Review, and other conservatives after Brown v
Board of Education.
Professor Robert Smith of the University of San Francisco
writes; “Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s Buckley and National Review
opposed the civil rights movement. In 1957, Buckley wrote an editorial entitled
“Why the South Must Prevail”. He wrote; “National Review believes that the
South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic,
and then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is
more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by
civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of minority, in which case
it may give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority
cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the
prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence”.
This sentence stands out to me: “ It is more important for
any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized
standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority”. It appears
that Mr. Buckley had Kenya in mind with
this comment. “The question, as far as
the White community is concerned , is whether the claims of civilization
supersede those of universal suffrage.” Actually, the question becomes, how
civilized is a society that enforces racist White Supremacy? Is Mr. Buckley defining “civilized standards”
for all of us, including those living under the suppression of a racist
overlord? I seriously doubt that anybody living under Jim Crow thought they
were living under civilized standards. Being denied the most basic human rights
including the right to vote, to an education, to being on a street after
sundown, and facing the prospects of being
lynched if you defied the norms
of this kind of community hardly paints a picture of a civilized society to these
eyes.
This led me to Ronald Reagan. In 1980, Ronald Reagan began
his campaign, not with a speech on supply side economics. He began it with a
speech supporting “states rights” just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi at the
Neshoba County Fair, the very community where three civil rights workers were
murdered in 1964. This was a deliberate appeal to white racists that he was on
their side and was part of a Republican strategy going back to the 1960’s to
build a conservative majority on the basis of racism.
This is not a way to attract blacks to the conservative
movement. But that was never the
intention. The conservative isn’t looking to appeal to Blacks. They’re looking
to suppress them.
I found this an outrageous move on the part of Ronald
Reagan. Of all the locations in the United States to launch a campaign…he picks
this one? What did he think that would say to the African American community?
It’s pretty clear whose votes he was courting.
According to Smith; “The South is and always has been the
most conservative part of America,
conservative in an almost militant promotion of Lockean
principles and institutions, and the only part of the country that claimed some
kind of Burkean aristocratic conservatism. The South has also always been the
most racist part of the country. This is
probably the most direct connection between racism and conservatism in America;
despite all the denials of southern intellectuals and politicians, past and
present, the South’s militant conservatism was rooted fundamentally in its
hyperracism”.
“The schizophrenia that is part of “southern thought”, is
that while it embraced John Locke for whites, it denied Locke to blacks. But at
the same time, many of the South’s leading thinkers rejected Locke because
slavery could not be squared with his idea of inalienable natural rights. It
was one thing to deny Africans civil rights as northern whites did, but to deny
them liberty and their property in their labor was more difficult, leading to a
full-bore embrace of a bastardized Burkean Aristocracy”.
“Southern conservatism is an integral part of American
conservatism. And if one looks at it, you’ll find racism at its core. Its
militant laissez-faire capitalism, it’s emphasis on the soil, limited
government, states rights, concurrent majorities, tradition, and all the rest
are little more than reactions to modernity and to anti-racist movements.”
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