Carl and Peter are right to focus on the combination of statism, lawlessness and raw injustice that characterized Jim Crow. The consciousness of Jim Crow influences how people hear contemporary debate. Lots of well meaning Tea Party folks talk about taking the country back, worry about losing freedom, and want to restore liberty. Fair enough, but a lot of equally well meaning people hear that rhetoric and they don’t hear politics-as-usual or even hyperbole. They hear hysterical racism. I’m not talking about a media cynic like Chris Matthews who tries to turn liberal self-congratulation into ratings or Jimmy Carter in one of his pharisaical moods. I’m just talking about people who, even if they only have a rough knowledge of Jim Crow, also know that people have suffered far more comprehensive restrictions on their freedom than the federal health insurance purchase mandate. And I’m not even talking primarily about African-Americans here. There is a certain way to talk about the past sounds exclusionary, like you think that America was all about freedom until Obama, or the liberals, or whatever. But some listeners can’t forget that America wasn’t always all about freedom for some people and talking about the past in a way that ignores those experiences comes across like cluelessness at best or nostalgia for the political marginalization of nonwhites at worst.
There are also ways to talk about the past and present inclusively. Marco Rubio does it (though he lays it on a little thick for my liking.) Obama’s Second Inaugural wrapped all of American history from the founders onward into the unfolding Progressive narrative. There is no reason why the story of “founderism” (though I don’t think founderism is sufficient) can’t also be a story of progress that we can all believe in. It can be a story that sees the civil rights movement and the pro-life movement through the lens of the founding’s natural rights ideology. There is also a smaller scale view way of talking about the past and that is the personal past. One of the friends of this blog is Ken Masugi. I remember reading a biography of Clarence Thomas and that (if I remember correctly) one of the reasons Thomas converted to political conservatism was that Ken helped Thomas make the connection between the politics of conservatism and the example of Thomas’s grandfather. It is amazing what can happen when people don’t talk past each other.
February 5th, 2013 | 9:01 pm
The use of “Take our country back!” wasn’t invented by the Tea Party. It’s in constant use by the party out of power. I agree that it’s problematic, and I don’t like the sentiment for my own reasons, but using it as a cudgel against folks supposedly on the same side, as Mr. Medved does, is pretty vile.
February 5th, 2013 | 9:25 pm
Brian, it was self-defeating when Howard Dean used it. No reason to follow his example. Heeeyaaaa!
February 5th, 2013 | 9:35 pm
Pete: Great post. I agree with every word of it, and the punctuation, too.
February 5th, 2013 | 9:37 pm
Do you think there are a significant number of conservatives who are attracted to the “take this country back” line for reason related to racism? I think most people know that isn’t all conservatives, but are you saying that it’s all just an illusion.
That it’s only a tiny number with racist views rather than something like 30-60%?
February 5th, 2013 | 9:45 pm
Pete, STOP, put down the glass of koolaide. You’ve drunk way too much.
And, no matter how much you kowtow to the PC Gods you will never, ever be accepted among their tribe.
February 5th, 2013 | 10:01 pm
Didn’t know that about Ken Masugi and Clarence Thomas…very cool.
February 5th, 2013 | 10:37 pm
Justice Thomas is our best contemporary resource for figuring out how to speak to one another on this issue. He saw the connection immediately between his grandfather and conservatism properly understood.
February 6th, 2013 | 1:39 am
[...] Carl and Peter are right to focus on the combination of statism, lawlessness and raw injustice that characterized Jim Crow. The consciousness of Jim Crow influences how people hear contemporary debate. Lots of well meaning Tea Party folks talk about taking the country back, worry about losing freedom, and want Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
February 6th, 2013 | 8:50 am
Pete: It waaay predates Howard Dean. Clinton used it in 1992. It’s always used by the party out of power, as I said. Acting like it’s all of a sudden completely out-of-bounds is like going along with the hysteria about “targeted seats” after the Giffords shooting. We can at least pretend to be serious, even if no one else is.
February 6th, 2013 | 8:29 pm
Brian, it wasn’t “completely out-of-bounds” for Howard Dean to use the “take our country back rhetoric, back then, and it isn’t out of bounds now. It was just self-defeating. It (in the context of 2004) made it sound like he thought the government was the stolen property of affluent liberals. That wasn’t what he and his supporters meant by it of course. The context is different today, but Republicans using the same rhetoric come across some of the same problems when it comes to using this rhetoric with people who might otherwise be persuadable. It is more effective as a means of psychic revenge than persuasion. Most people don’t feel like Obama has stolen their country.
Susan,
“Do you think there are a significant number of conservatives who are attracted to the “take this country back” line for reason related to racism? I think most people know that isn’t all conservatives, but are you saying that it’s all just an illusion.
That it’s only a tiny number with racist views rather than something like 30-60%?”
Let me put it this way: Do I think that conservatives would be using the take this country back rhetoric if we had President Chris Dodd with the same policies? Yes, I do. Do I think that these conservatives would be trying to “take this country back” from President Tim Scott? No, I don’t. I think this gives a sense of where I think the vast majority of conservatives are.
Now what about racialized rhetoric and images used by a minority of the opposition? Do I think that a President Scott would face a comparable set of racialized attacks. Yes, and maybe (probably?) more than Obama. Is that because I think that 30%-to-60% of liberals are racist? Nope. It is because I think jerks are present on all sides and the purpose of such attacks in the present day is more to personally wound than to make a claim of racial supremacy. Some (though not most) liberals might also feel a kind of cultural license to use bigoted messaging because they feel the normal rules of tolerance don’t apply to conservative Republican women and nonwhites. Look at Michelle Bachmann on the Jimmy Fallon show. Fallon apologized (though I’m not aware that the band apologize to Bachmann), but it is tough to imagine a liberal Democratic member of the House of Reps. being treated in the same way on network television or that the consequences would have stopped with just an apology. A President Tim Scott would face orders of magnitude greater hostility.
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