The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Doing a ‘Macaca’ on Haley Barbour

Posted on | December 20, 2010 | 26 Comments

If you’re not from the Deep South and don’t personally know people who lived through the civil rights era — or if you’re a liberal just trying to smear a conservative Republican from Mississippi — it seems perfectly fair to play the kind of dirty game that Matthew Yglesias is playing with Haley Barbour.

Yglesias seizes on a passage in a Weekly Standard profile of Barbour in which the governor of Mississippi explains why school desegration in his hometown of Yazoo City was accomplished without violence:

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. . . .”

Barbour states this as a fact, which sets Yglesias and other liberals to shouting “white supremacist!” And yet nothing that Yglesias or anyone else musters as evidence sheds any light on the facts in dispute: Was the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City composed principally of “town leaders” and members of “the business community”? And did these leaders play a role in ensuring that school desegregation took place without violence?

Whether or not Barbour’s characterization of circumstances in Yazoo City half a century ago is accurate, it ought to be possible to address that question without imputing to Barbour — as Yglesias evidently desires to do — any nostalgia for Jim Crow. Keep in mind that Haley Barbour was born in October 1947, so that he was only 16 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law and thus has lived his entire adult life in a post-civil rights America without incurring the sort of reputation with which Yglesias & Co. are now attempting to tar him.

Ben Smith of Politico scarcely does any better:

The roots of Southern Republicanism are in the segregationist split from the Democratic Party . . .

This is not true, and I don’t care how many times liberals invoke “The Southern Strategy,” that still doesn’t make it true. The Democratic Party remained a viable and even dominant political force in the South for three decades after the end of segregation.

Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976 and Southern Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. The Democratic Party maintained control of the Georgia state legislature until 2003 and it was not until this year — let me check my calendar, yeah, it’s 2010 — that Republicans gained a majority in the Alabama state legislature.

As much as it may flatter the vanity of liberals to think that the Democratic “Solid South” ended in 1964 — and that the success of the GOP in the Sunbelt is therefore somehow attributable to redneck bigotry — it simply is not true.

And I’m sick and tired of pious lectures from arrogant fools whose moral horizons can be summarized in two words: “Vote Democrat.”

UPDATE: Tom Maguire notes the absurdity of Matthew Yglesias teaching Mississippi history to Haley Barbour, a fifth-generation Mississippian.

But Yglesias went to Harvard. That means he know everything.

UPDATE II: Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ:

A lot of folks whose only notions of the south come from watching or reading To Kill a Mockingbird or popular history simply equate “southern” with “racism”.

Thanks for acknowledging that reality, Drew. I’ve often said that some people seem to believe that racism is like Coca-Cola, a product invented in the South and exported from there around the world.

Drew also notes Jimmy Carter’s early political career as a segregationist. Although, in fairness to Carter, it would have been impossible for him — or anyone else — to get elected to public office in Sumter County, Ga., as an advocate of integration in 1956.

I have on my shelves a 1960 book by William D. Workman Jr. entitled The Case for the South. Workman makes clear that it was foolish to speak of “moderates” in the Deep South of that era if, by “moderate,” you meant white people who were in favor of integration. The overwhelming majority of white Southerners were in favor of maintaining the status quo of Jim Crow, which was all they’d ever known.

When it became obvious that the federal government intended to impose desegregation at all hazards, one might say that those leaders who counseled peaceful cooperation for the good of the community were “moderates,” but this doesn’t mean they were actually in favor of desegregation. Neither does it mean that officials like Jimmy Carter — who campaigned and governed as a segregationists so long as that was the means to political success — were any more “racist” than anyone else.

It is worthwhile to observe that the man whom Carter succeeded as governor of Georgia, Lester Maddox, campaigned as an outspoken segregationist but, once in office, governed in a far more equitable manner than anyone expected. Indeed, you might even say that Maddox was a progressive reformer, who especially improved the previously deplorable conditions in Georgia’s prison system.

The problem in all this involves the moralitic tendency to make mere politics a proxy for virtue, with a one-dimensional focus on race, during one of the most controversial eras in American history.

UPDATE III: Dave Weigel:

Like I said, Barbour is not dumb. If he’s being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he’s not alone, and he’s fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate — this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all? He wasn’t in a Citizens Council. . . . [H]ow many of these reporters know what they’re talking about, anyway?

That last question is the most important. The idea that everything knowable about race relations in Yazoo City (or anywhere else) in 1960 can be learned from the distance of a thousand miles and a half-century is extraordinarily foolish. To borrow Orwell’s axiom, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”

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Category: Mississippi, Racism

Comments

  • blaster

    Yes, how soon they forget. A while back there was a big foofaraw over the fact that South Carolina had a Dixie flag flying over the capitol building (for the record I am not nostalgic for the Confederacy and anyone who feels the need to correct me on what the flag is actually called, cool your jets. Everybody knows what I mean) and there was much made of the fact that there were many Republican voters in the state and you know, they are all just racists blah blah blah. Not mentioned much then was that the Governor who signed the legislation that put the flag there was a sitting US Senator of the Democrat Party.

    So, please, tell me when the segregationists split from the Democrat party.

  • The Osprey

    Chuckles Johnson has already jumped on the Macaca Haley bandwagon

  • http://ak4mc.us/2c/2011/ McGehee

    The idiots will talk about Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, completely forgetting that ole Strom was only the second U.S. Senator in history to appoint a black to his Senate staff (the first to do so was a Senator from Mississippi in 1937 — so much for those race-enlightened Northerners, eh?)

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    Honestly, I’m far more disturbed at TWS’s story than I am the Yglesias/liberal chatter. I really don’t like seeing the Kristol wing of the party playing footsy with them, and that’s exactly what that article was.

  • http://pointofagun.blogspot.com/ Dave C

    Yglesias has his own racial issues buried behind the sheets in the closet.

    http://ace.mu.nu/archives/300078.php

  • http://waxingerratic.wordpress.com/ ECM
  • Robbyahm

    Hey Stacy,
    dont forget that in North Carolina the Republicans too got a majority in the state legislator for the first time since Reconstruction (i believe the time frame is right)
    also there is still 3 democratically-held legislaters in the deep south (Arkansa, Louisiana, Mississippi) that are still slow to respond to the rising tide of Republicanism, so that whole southern strategy may have worked in the national level (sort of) but in the local level its still hard to get rid of some of these democrats. Heres a map of what it currently looks like in the deep south http://www.ncsl.org/tabid/21253/default.aspx
    btw did you notice that before the midterm elections you look at a congressional map and many of the states in the deep south had betwee 2-4 democrats, now after the midterms they are down to one or two and they are black majority district IYKWIM ;)

  • http://twitter.com/victoria_29 victoria_29

    Thanks about time someone pointed out the reality of being a southerner. You speak with an soft drawl & that automatically makes you a racist to liberals.

  • Duuwhee

    Maybe someone should ask Zig Ziglar

  • The Wondering Jew

    All sadly very true.

  • Anonymous

    The sooner I never hear about Yglesias again, the better.

    That said, he is absolutely irrefutable proof that Harvard should be immediately cut off from all Federal, State and Local funding, it’s professors turned out into the street, it’s buildings razed to the ground and salt sown in the furrows.

    Harvard delenda est!

  • http://www.rightviewfromtheleftcoast.blogspot.com Mark Goluskin

    I was not even alive during all of this time. So my experience is very current. My wife and I visited South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana on a cross country trip almost two years ago. We found EVERYONE so nice and friendly. Even when we embarassingly admitted we were from California. We did not see the kind a racial segragation that was that way in the not to distant past. Has anyone thought that many people knew righteous change was coming and straddled the line on race relations? Hey, how about a Silent Majority that wanted to see a lot of change come, but not in what was percieved as radical? I do not know, and no one can claim to know what is truly in people’s hearts. But, people can and do change. So what if a very young Haley Barbour was not an agitator? Did he need to be? No. These worthless abiters of their percieved truth need to look in the mirror.

  • Pingback: No, Haley Barbour is Not a Racist | The Lonely Conservative

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    Not only that – Strom also employed more blacks on his staff than any other Senator from the South, even in the days when most Senators from the region were Democrats, and continuing up until his death. At one point only one of the others had as many as half the number Thurmond employed.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

    I cannot help but recall, whenever Yglesias, Ezra Klein, or Andrew Sullivan write something outrageously false about conservatives/Republicans/Southerners/Americans, that none of them would enjoy the audience and prominence they do today if not for the fawning over them by the Short Pants Brigade at NRO (“people we can have an honest discussion with”).

    Of course, those krazy Kidz were just suckers, falling for the siren songs of liberalism, the tunes they love to play to attract marks but never seem to sound the same when they acquire power.

    The other side isn’t honest. They are either deceivers, totalitarians, or complete dupes. There is no “honest discussion” with any of them, and hasn’t been since the last of their cornerstones of belief were pulverized by Reagan.

  • MrPaulRevere

    Haley Barbour’s real crime was saying anything at all positive about his region or it’s history. What a sad state of affairs.

  • Pingback: Haley Barbor’s real crime: “We paid more attention to the girls than to King” « Da Techguy's Blog

  • Anonymous

    After the original Klan disbanded in 1871, there was another major revival in the 1920s….. centered in the Midwest, especially in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, because African Americans from the South moved North, and Yankees are always tolerant as long as they’re at a distance. As for desegregation, anyone else remember the violence in Boston, especially South Boston, in 1970?

    Hypocrites.

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  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QXUCYFXN2WJDNXDVU5THXGCJX4 leander press

    Bill Clinton’s mentor-J.William Fulbright- was once a hero of liberals for
    denouncing Joe McCarthy, opposing the Vietnam War and being soft on the Soviet Bloc. Yet Fulbright was a segregationist who filibustered the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights bills. He served until 1974, but I can’t find any evidence that he ever voted for a civil rights bill.

  • http://twitter.com/MarkAdomanis Mark Adomanis

    yes, because the real measure of race-relations in america is, and has always been, whether or not rich and powerful white people are willing to hire blacks as subordinates.

    so the fact that strom thurmond was a vile old racist whose entire political persona was constructed upon fear and hatred of blacks is completely negated because…he once hired a black person to work in his office. makes total sesnse to me!

  • Pingback: Mr Barbour, I’m sorry but you got about a good of a chance as a white Governor from Mississippi | The American MAXIM

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  • Bob

    While none, not even one, of his colleagues was willing to offer jobs to black people or have them around, Thurmond did so repeatedly.

    But he’s the “vile old racist.”

    Makes total “sesnse” to me!

  • Anonymous

    The MSM has already done more research and reporting on Barbour’s background than it did on Obama’s before the ’08 election.

  • http://twitter.com/MarkAdomanis Mark Adomanis

    This is the intellectual equivalent of saying “I don’t hate Mexicans… I pay them to clean my lawn!”

    Strom Thurmond repeatedly campaigned on a specific policy platform of preventing black Americans from enjoying full civil rights, going to far as to carry out one of the longest filibusters in the history of the senate to prevent passage of a civil rights bill. That shameful and appalling record of racism is not negated, and is barely even mitigated, by the fact that, after he had been in the senate for almost two full decades, and after the civil rights act had been passed and blacks were finally allowed to vote, he hired a black man to work in his office

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