This heartwarming quote has been circulating like mad all over the Interwebs this weekend, and I thought it a good jumping-off point for a post today.
In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?
Now, I'm not sure this guy, and other Fetus for Jesus concern trolls like him, really has a really coherent political strategy here. I mean, more dead unborn Negro babies = fewer future ACORN volunteers = fewer future registered Democrats. So why discourage the coloreds from aborting even more babies?
Unless he's proposing we bring back slavery instead, that is.
On a related note, Doug J at Balloon Juice links to this insightful essay by Jon Rauch, which argues that the emergence of Sarah Palin as a national leader confirms that the GOP has transformed itself from the Party of Goldwater to the Party of Wallace:
First, with the important exception of race, not one of Wallace's central themes, from his bristling nationalism and his court-bashing to his anti-intellectualism and his aggressive provincialism, would seem out of place at any major Republican gathering today.Second, and again leaving race aside, any Republican politician who publicly renounced the Wallace playbook would be finished as a national leader.
Third, by becoming George Wallace's party, the GOP is abandoning rather than embracing conservatism, and it is thereby mortgaging both its integrity and its political future. Wallaceism was not sufficiently mainstream or coherent to sustain a national party in 1968, and the same is true today.
Conservatism is wary of extremism and rage and anti-intellectualism, of demagoguery and incoherent revolutionary rhetoric. Wallace was a right-wing populist, not a conservative. The rise of his brand of pseudo-conservatism in Republican circles should alarm anyone who cares about the genuine article.
I think this is generally spot-on, though I think we should recall that a fair amount of Barry Goldwater's appeal lay in his own peculiar "small-government" philosophy, which differed from that of Northern Republicans in its objections to federal enforcement of civil rights legislation, the passing of so-called "open housing" laws, and (later, as was the case with Wallace), court-mandated school desegregation---all latent appeals to white resentment. It's no accident, I think, that the only states that Goldwater won outside of his home state of Arizona were all former members of the Old Confederacy. George Wallace may have risen to prominence and power by blatantly appealing to the racist vote in the early '60s, but Goldwater's brand of conservatism simply provided a kinder, friendlier branding to the same noxious message: post-Goldwater conservatives weren't racists, and objected violently to discrimination based on race, color, or creed. They simply objected to empowering the government to actually do anything to correct the institutional biases that racism engendered and perpetuated. It was a rhetorical stance that differed from Wallace's only by degree, and it's one that to which Republicans still hew closely today. Wallace himself took the cue as well, and soft-pedaled the race-baiting in '68 and '72 in favor of railing against Eastern cultural elites who sought impose their egalitarian ideals on an unwilling populace.
Besides, how else is a party that has been as thoroughly dedicated to waging, and repeatedly losing, an ideological war against modernity---as the Republicans have since Franklin Roosevelt's time---to continue to exist as a relevant political organism in a post-industrial age, other than to eventually resort to a baser, less sophisticated politics of class-based, race-based, and culture-based populism? When you've lost one substantive policy debate after another over the past 75 years---over Social Security, over civil rights, over collective bargaining, over the United Nations, over Medicare, over environmental and worker safety laws---how can you continue to resort to policy-based arguments to advance your party's agenda? When several consecutive generations of Americans have repeatedly rejected your most dearly held policy prescriptions, what other political card in the deck do you have to play? When appeals to reason repeatedly fall on deaf ears, what else to fall back on but a politics based on anger, fear and resentment?
Hence the rise of Palin and a Teabagged GOP, a hopeless philosophical muddle of pseudo-Reaganite populism, Randian economics, social Darwinism, and Christianist-neocon foreign policy. The way I see it, the party of Goldwater is the party of Wallace is the party of Palin. There is no ideological dichotomy at play here: the current state of Republican politics in America is the inevitable by-product of a conservative movement that sees the American ideal preserved in amber in the form of Tocqueville's long-vanished agrarian paradise; which has worked laboriously to convince itself that such an original state of American exceptionalism can somehow be restored; and which as a result has now descended into a kind of collective psychosis at the unconscious realization that most Americans' perceptions of government, and of its role in people's everyday lives, has largely passed them by. Standing athwart history, yelling for a return to the 19th century for the last fifty years while denying the utter impossibility of the recurrence, will do that sort of thing to you.
Put it this way: You could just as well plead for the return of the Victrola, the surrey and the kerosene lamp as symbolic means to promote a simpler, more virtuous life. Which might be perfectly fine in theory, but you'll drive yourself crazy waiting for it to ever happen. And when it doesn't, you're going to start looking for people to blame. That's today's GOP in a nut: A dying institution looking for scapegoats to account for its myriad historical failures.
---Vitelius