Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 10: The anti-democracy white supremacist zombie is still stalking around

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideas were never some crackpot spin on American history. They were and are an ideology to support white supremacist actions, from segregated water fountains to blocking African-American from voting.

But it's important to remember that the latter - denial of the full rights of citizenship to black citizens - was always the core of the old segregationist system.

The classic "highbrow" American conservative journal, National Review, was on the bandwagon for the old segregation system in the 1950s and 1960s. And it's on board for the new Trumpist version, too, as Ben Mathis-Lilley discusses in National Review Comes Out Against Democracy, Explicitly 04/09/2012.

He describes NR's version from the 1950s:

Theories about moving the ballot box out of the easy reach of the masses also belong firmly within the magazine’s intellectual tradition. Here’s what the National Review’s founder and guiding spirit, William F. Buckley, had to say in 1957 on the subject of how widespread the franchise ought to be:

If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, 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…Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn.

Sounds familiar! Unfortunately for the magazine’s current editor, Rich Lowry, who defended the Georgia law this week under the headline “Anyone Using the ‘Jim Crow’ Charge as a Political Weapon Should Hang His Head in Shame,” Buckley was specifically defending Jim Crow when he wrote it. His argument was that given “the median cultural superiority of White over Negro,” it was only appropriate to prevent Black people from joining a political majority that might favor things like integrated education—that, in the face of such a possibility, “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.” The magazine would make similar arguments for years about the white apartheid government in South Africa. [my emphasis]

Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay on the "paranoid style" distinguished between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" version of rightwing radicalism. He even suggested an intermediate "middlebrow" category, which apparently never caught on.

In 1950s/1960s terms, groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens Council would have counted as part of the "lowbrow" part of the spectrum, although the Citizens Council tended to attract more white-color supporters. National Review positioned itself as an intellectually respectable, "highbrow" outlet. I think it's helpful to think of the John Birch Society as providing a "middlebrow" channel.

In business terms, we could describe this as a segregationist/Jim Crow market segmentation strategy: offering an (ideological) "product" to different tastes among the customers. When General Motors follows such of strategy, all customers still wind up with a car. And in the case of the anti-democracy, segregationist spectrum, sectarian and factional differences still provided variations of the same "product": the Jim Crow system that depended on suppressing Constitutional rights, promoting of white supremacist racist attitudes, and the violence of lynch murder to protect the entire Jim Crow system.

One of the best-known examples of such a marketing differentiation was Buckley's much-discussed but largely fake "purging" of the John Birch Society from the conservative movement. (Cormac Kelly, William F. Buckley and the Birchers: A myth, a history lesson and a moral Salon 04/03/2021) With zombie ideas, it's not surprising that they keep shuffling back from the grave. (John Savage, The John Birch Society Is Back Politico 07/16/2017; Rick Perlstein and Edward Miller, The John Birch Society Never Left New Republic 03/08/2021)

As Perlstein and Miller explain, St. Reagan brought the various strands together in his political career:

Although it wouldn’t be fair to beat up only on Buckley. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, remembered today as the avatar of the Republicans’ lost respectability, who in 1971 described African United Nations delegates to a chortling Richard Nixon as “monkeys … uncomfortable wearing shoes.” He espoused conspiracy theories like the claim that Gerald Ford staged assassination attempts against himself to win sympathy votes in the 1976 presidential primaries, and that the Soviet Union had removed 20 million young people to the countryside to practice for reconstructing their society after launching an offensive nuclear war. The newsletter of Reagan’s political action committee advocated the quack cancer cure (and pet Bircher cause) laetrile, which “[m]ay be efficacious against cancer but which government in its wisdom wants to keep people from using.” (The reason was that it didn’t work, and frequently killed people.)

Then Reagan became president—and the only thing that changed was the people around him worked harder to keep his wackiness from the public.

They were frequently frustrated — for instance when Reagan claimed the nuclear freeze movement that drew a million protesters to Central Park in 1982 had been engineered in the Kremlin, or the time he told reporters that apartheid South Africa had “eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country.” There was also the moment when he quoted to a group of college students visiting the White House Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s “eloquent statement” of his plan to conquer America: that he would first take Eastern Europe, then “organize the hordes of Asia,” then “move into Latin America”; then “we will not have to take the last bastion of capitalism, the United States. It will fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.”

Except that Lenin never said it. But Robert Welch claimed he did, in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, the ur-text of his movement. [my emphasis]

As Mathis-Lilley points out, the anti-democracy sentiment is part of the package.