October 9, 2019
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
The Historical Folly
of ‘Nothing but Race’ and Our Modern Political Landscape
Friends,
A little over two years ago I had an essay, “The Historical
Folly of ‘Nothing but Race’,” published by the Abbeville Institute [September
20, 2017]. That brief essay raised
historical questions—and doubts—about the current Establishment (Neo)
conservative narrative which paints the Old South and the old (pre-1960s) Democratic
Party as racist and not truly reflective of or compatible with the beliefs and egalitarian
vision of the Founders of this country.
That Neocon template dominates heavily on Fox and throughout most “conservative
media,” from various radio talk shows (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean
Hannity, etc.) to think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to
journals of opinion like National Review.
Yet, historically, that narrative falls apart on close
inspection and examination. Rather, it is, in so many ways, an ex post facto, retroactive attempt by
those modern Neoconservative zealots to justify their own faulty reading of
history and this country’s founding and its founding documents. And it is done
with the precise goal of creating a “usable past” to justify their adherence to
a form of egalitarianism and centralized, managerial government that was never
envisaged by the founders. Indeed, it was precisely such a view, a conception
that most of this nation’s founders feared most and understood would be the
virtual undoing of the fragile republican experiment they had shaped.
Central to the contemporary Neoconservative vision is the
implicit acceptance of postulates premised by more extreme Leftist ideology
concerning race and racism. Thus, by accepting, almost always in a defensive
manner, the narrative advanced by the further Left on “race” and questions
revolving around it as the central issues affecting and determining American
history and defining American identity, the Neoconservatives are largely bound uncomfortably
by those contours.
Of course, they hotly deny this and carefully rubric their (counter)
arguments under the topic of “equality” and equality “for all,” which they
declare are the correct and proper measures and point of discussion. But
positing “equality” and “equal rights” as essential defining aspirations of the
American founding, something that must be guaranteed at all cost, something
that must be expanded steadily to include everyone within the union, they are
also compelled to embrace the contours and discussion terms erected by the further
Left. Despite disavowals, they end up accepting a view of history as constantly unfolding progress, as advancing steadily
with more “equal rights” for all, destroying the barriers, both natural and
inherited, of race, gender, nationality, and economic difference.
Thus, the specter of such prominent “(Neo) conservative”
opinion leaders and makers as Jonah Goldberg, David French, Guy Benson, the National Review, and many others, who
embrace same sex marriage and transgenderism as “conservative,” who defend the “administrative
state” (against that uncouth Donald Trump who might possibly attempt to undo a
part of it), and who advocate going around the world to impose “democracy” and “equality”
on every desert oasis they can locate on a Rand McNally map…and who would much
prefer attending a posh cocktail party with their swanky Leftwing friends in
New York’s Upper East Side, than deal with those unwashed “deplorables” out in
West Virginia or Mississippi. In reality, they have far more in common with their
Manhattan friends than with those they purport to represent when appearing on
Fox’s “Special Report” or writing in National
Review.
There is just no way our Establishment Neocon elites want any
connection, historically, genealogically or politically, with the old “segregationist”
Democratic Party which, they assert, opposed egalitarianism and the progressivist
view of history. Can’t let that stained tradition sully the modern conservative
movement or the current Republican Party—just listen to the verifiably ignorant
Dinesh D’Souza expostulate on the subject, and wonder how he ever passed a
fifth grade American history course! Or, perhaps it is not so much ignorance,
as willful distortion to serve a current ideological stance?
Abbeville has republished that essay, and I think it continues
to have some relevance.
[At the end of this essay, I also attach a link to another
essay, this one “How the Neocons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization,”
originally published by Abbeville on October 4, but now also available at
LewRockwell.com]
The Historical Folly
of “Nothing but Race”
[originally published on Sep 20, 2017]
At the base of most of the ongoing political
debates currently raging in the United Sates there are always, it seems, deeper
questions, more philosophical and more historical contexts that need to be
examined—what I would call “legacy issues.”
Oftentimes assumptions are made or are
disseminated by many self-proclaimed defenders of our traditions—by those
“conservative apologists”—that bear little relationship to historical reality,
and, in fact, fatally weaken or blur our understanding of it.
Many of these assumptions relate specifically
to the conscious creation by the present (neo) conservative movement of a
utilizable past that both justifies their present practice and fends off
criticism from the hard Left that somehow, because they claim to be
“conservative” and presumably defenders of the Constitution and inherited
traditions of the country, they partake in forms of “racism,” as well as sexism,
homophobia, and white supremacy.
Much of this is motivated by a politics of
fear that, I would suggest, comes from the fact that the modern conservative
movement, dominated now intellectually as it is by those whose philosophical
and fundamental origins are over on the Marxist and Trotskyite left, has never
freed itself from the Progressivist historical narrative about racism (=bad)
and egalitarianism (=good), and the inevitable “movement of history” (which
is always to the Left). It is as if it possesses a
guilty conscience and its spokesmen are constantly afraid of being “labeled”
racist or some other term of opprobrium.
Thus, even though these so-called
“conservatives” presume to offer opposition to the “further Left” narrative on
various economic and political issues, they are equally possessed by what my
friend Dr. Paul Gottfried terms, rightly, a “politics of guilt,” a social sin
which they must continually and defensively expiate. And thus, the rather
constant, at times frantic, self-justification and strenuous efforts by (neo)
conservatives to distinguish themselves from any form or type of perceived
“racism.” And, concurrently, their efforts to paint the modern-day Democratic
Party with the brush of the odious “historically racist” Democratic
Party, and to emphasize the fact that fifty years ago “it was
the—mostly Southern—segregationist Democrats who opposed the Voting Rights and
Civil Rights Bills.” Then follows a long litany of, again, mostly
Southern Democratic political leaders and statesmen—including Senators Harry
Byrd (and Robert Byrd), Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin—which is trotted out to
“prove” that the Democratic Party just a couple of generations ago was the “racist”
party, the party that coddled segregationists…and, yes, that “racist demagogue
George Wallace!” Thank goodness, they then add, “we don’t have that legacy!”
(Think here, most notably, of the efforts of Dinesh D’Souza, Jonah Goldberg, or
Sean Hannity.)
The underlying assumption here is that it has
been the Democrats who incarnate historically the evils of racism, sexism,
homophobia, and white supremacy—and in some ways, still do—while the
clean-as-the-driven-snow Republicans (and [neo] conservatives) have championed
equality, opposed racism, supported the Civil rights legislation of the 1950s
and 1960s…and, by the way, Martin Luther King Jr, was actually one of them, a
dyed-in-the-wool “conservative!”
This narrative in many respects is fraudulent,
does serious damage to the understanding of our history, and can be reduced to
a form of rather crass political legerdemain, anchored as it is in an
acceptance of the Progressivist historical vision. It enables Republican
political gurus such as Karl Rove to embrace the neo-Reconstructionist and
Marxist posturing of viciously anti-Southern historian Eric Foner, or Sean
Hannity to tie in West Virginia’s late US Senator Robert Byrd—who had many
years before been a member of the Ku Klux Klan—to Hillary Clinton, or connect
Arkansas’s Senator J. William Fulbright to Bill Clinton.
It fails to comprehend dramatic historical
change and the evolution of political parties. For much of this nation’s
history it was, indeed, the Democratic Party that was most representative of a
traditional, Jeffersonian “conservatism.” The Republican Party, founded in the
1850s, not only lacked that essential connection to and understanding of
America’s Founding, but in its War-time president, Abraham Lincoln, and
succeeding GOP presidents in the second half of the 19th century,
incarnated a vision of the American republic that, I would argue, was in many
respects contrary to the vision of the Founders. An examination of Lincoln’s
views—on statecraft and the powers of the presidency, on the relationship of
the various states to the Federal executive, on his faith in unchained
financial capitalism, and, indeed, on his view of the Constitution, itself,
offer ample confirmation of this.
Obviously, political parties and political
thinking don’t remain static. And, especially in the 1930s and beyond, the
Democratic Party underwent a transformation. We should not forget that when
Franklin Roosevelt ran for president in 1932, his platform was actually, in
many ways, more conservative than that of Republican President Herbert Hoover.
Only after he entered office did he radically change his praxis.
At first, traditional states’ rights
conservatives (e.g., leaders like the Virginia Byrds, and North Carolina’s
Josiah Bailey and Sam Ervin) and the more leftwing New Dealers co-existed
within “the Democracy,” if uneasily, up through the 1950s. As numerous
historians have detailed, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s certainly
figured in what would become “the Southern strategy” of inviting disaffected
white Southern voters—part of Nixon’s “silent majority”—into the Republican
Party.
Yet it would be a major mistake to see “race”
as the only causative factor in this process. Indeed, although
racial issues certainly existed, larger questions of social, economic and
cultural dislocation, the break-up of community, and, above all, the
legitimate, well-grounded fear of the loss of local and individual liberties as
the Federal government assumed more power and more direct authority over how
individuals and families ran their own lives, figured, if not so visibly, even
more significantly.
I recall a friend of my father, a
well-established farmer and one-time state legislator (the late Democratic
State Senator Julian Allsbrook of Halifax County) telling me back in 1968, “I
can deal with black folks voting—I will get their votes; but I cannot tolerate
in any way the Federal government assuming direct control over practically
every aspect of our social and political lives, and making us the new slaves!”
I think the good senator’s views reflected quite well those of his fellow Tar
Heels.
Making “race” and “racial issues” the only
points of discussion—the only determinants for action and
reaction—in our history, something that both the Left and the
pseudo-conservative Neocons do, leaves out too much that is essential to
understanding our complex past.
This first became apparent to me when as a
young Jefferson Fellow grad student at the University of Virginia I did research for my
MA on the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835 (and conventions
in other Southern states). Given the recent (1831) Nat Turner slave rebellion
in Virginia, I expected to find a concentration on slavery and the need to defend
at all cost “the peculiar institution.” But, rather, I discovered that, like
whites, free blacks with property freeholds had voted in North Carolina prior
to that year (and since the Revolution), and that during the lengthy convention
debates most of the state’s prominent conservatives –both
Democrats and Whigs—defended the suffrage of propertied free blacks. Such
notables as state Chief Justice William Gaston, Judge Joseph Daniel, and
Secretary of the Navy John Branch under President Jackson, all opposed the
change. For these leaders, the issue was not so much about race as it was about
class and whether a male elector had the property qualification—and thus the
stability, and social and economic status within the community—to exercise the
franchise.
There were, of course, a few voices who in
their interventions mentioned the Turner rebellion, but remarkably, those views
were not overpowering and did not reflect the “white fear” I had been taught by
some of my professors to find. In not one recorded peroration did I detect
anything approaching the kind of severe racial animus we are supposed to
discover in the minds and voices of our ante-bellum ancestors. Even though the
convention finally very narrowly voted to eliminate free black suffrage, it is revealing
that even at that date, fifteen years after the Missouri Compromise, it was, in
a sense, class, social position, and property that still dominated much of the
thinking of the dominant political leadership of North Carolina, not race.
Since then, in reading about secession and
about slavery as the “cause” of the War Between the States, about the “strange
career of Jim Crow,” about the history of the nation’s two major political
parties, and then the essentially ideological uses to which the fractured and
tendentious template of race—and slavery—has been put, it is apparent that such
an approach is fraught with problems. Historians such as Thomas DiLorenzo,
Clyde Wilson, Charles Adams, David Gordon, and others have highlighted how the
ideological use of such “devil terms” as “race” and “racism” has resulted in a
warped view of our past.
Underlying the current “conservative”
movement’s anxiety—the fear that Republicans and Neocons have—about being
labeled “racists,” then, is the acceptance of the debatable historical “fact”
that America is all about race and that nothing else really matters, that
severe economic factors, dramatic social and cultural changes, all flow from
that single determining issue.
No; give me any day the wisdom, intelligence,
devotion to the Constitution—and delightful Southern humor—of a true
conservative Democrat, “Senator Sam” Ervin, over the Progressivism and
globalist fanaticism of a Republican Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake,
or Neocon Bill Kristol.
That latter narrative I am not prepared,
philosophically or historically, to accept.
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the
Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver
Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a
Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the
late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the
North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French,
Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and
opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical,
archival, and genealogical organizations. His book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong Press),
was published in 2018.
********
How the
Necons are Helping Destroy Western Civilization
by Boyd D. Cathey October 7, 2019
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