Confederacy of Dunces - Say

Confederacy of Dunces - Say "states
s rights" to a Democrat, and he'll wonder where you put your white hood. John Ashcroft was harassed during his confirmation hearings for his interest in the Confederacy - as if the Confederacy was about nothing but slavery.

It's a bogus comparison. The National Review's Steven Hayward writes about how the left has hijacked "states' rights" from the good guys.

But "states' rights" was a sound principle of federalism that was debased by Democratic party rule in the south, for which it is not Republicans who owe an apology.

Indeed. "State's Rights" isn't shorthand for slavery, but for enumerated powers - AKA the Tenth Amendment.

Hayward continues:

Reagan had a long and well-known record of criticizing centralized government power, and this is how the media at the time interpreted his statement. "Most of those at the rally," the New York Times reported, "apparently regarded the statement as having been made in that context." And as a westerner Reagan had fully associated himself with the "Sagebrush Rebellion," for whom "states' rights" had no racial content, but rather meant wresting control of land from Washington. This was far from an outlandish or minority view. The same day Reagan made his "states' rights" remark in Mississippi, the National Governors Association issued what the Associated Press described as "a militant call for reduced federal involvement in state and local affairs." Arizona's liberal Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt wrote in a New York Times op-ed article that "It is time to take hard look at 'states' rights' — and responsibilities — and to sort out the respective functions of the federal government and the states." I missed where Jack White added Babbitt to his roster of racists (never mind Carter's calculated appeal to "ethnic purity" in 1976).

To liberals, however, employing the phrase "states' rights" in any context is to waive the bloody shirt of racism and segregation. Little time was wasted in accusing Reagan not simply of pandering to old-fashioned segregationist sentiment in the south, but of actively sympathizing with it. Patricia Harris, Carter's secretary of Health and Human Services, told a steelworkers' union conference in early August: "I will not attempt to explain why the KKK found the Republican candidate and the Republican platform compatible with the philosophy and guiding principles of that notorious organization." (A KKK chapter in Louisiana had scored some cheap publicity by endorsing Reagan in 1980, which endorsement Reagan immediately and forcefully rejected.) But, Harris added, when Reagan speaks before black audiences many blacks "will see the specter of a white sheet behind him." Andrew Young went even further, saying that Reagan's remarks seemed "like a code word to me that it's going to be all right to kill niggers when he's President." Coretta Scott King managed to top Young: "I am scared that if Ronald Reagan gets into office, we are going to see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party." Maryland Congressman Parren Mitchell, a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that " Reagan represents a distinct danger to black Americans." Reagan, it should be noted, received the endorsement of several black leaders in 1980, including the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Martin Luther King's successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, another prominent cleric from the civil rights movement.

Yet another phrase we have to steal back.

Posted by Mitch at December 19, 2002 07:55 PM