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Trent Lott’s Missed Opportunities by Steven Yates
I’ll begin with a confession. Mississippi’s Trent Lott was never one of my favorite politicians – not that I have many of those, anyway. He’s no rocket scientist, but he is a Republican and a Southerner, and occasionally, resentment about matters pertaining to his state being dictated from outside emerges. So none of the current events really surprise me that much. What Lott said, referring to the 1948 States’ Rights Party, was, "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either." One possible response is that in today’s era of political correctness, saying something like that was just plain dumb – even if it was at a birthday gathering honoring the now 100-year-old, wheelchair-bound Strom. Lott said it on national television, no less. He should have known how it would be taken, and that it would probably derail his career. Needless to say, it’s been another high-tech lynching of an uppity Southerner. Interestingly, most of the lynching has come not from Democrats but from his fellow Republicans – very likely due to the shrill neocon element that now dominates the Republican Party. A tacit cultural Marxism now prevails in our political discourse, however, and the neocons have reveled in it. Cultural Marxism divides the world into oppressors and victims. It also divides the political establishment, at least by implication, into those who help the victims (the good guys, i.e., Democrats) and those who defend the oppressors (the bad guys, i.e., Republicans). The former can do no wrong; the latter are suspect no matter what they do. This explains how Robert Byrd, a Democrat, could utter the n-word three times, not to mention other aspects of his – shall we say – shady past, and you don’t hear a peep, while Lott, a Republican (from the South, no less!), says something comparatively tame, and might as well take early retirement. This explains, too, why Republicans excel at just three things: making promises they don’t keep, expanding the central government, and throwing their own to the wolves. On the collectivist-individualist spectrum, the Democrats know where they stand. Most Republicans (except for super-elites like the Bushies) are clueless. This is why the country continued drifting leftward during the 1990s even though Republicans controlled Congress. And why the drift deeper into statism continues with Republicans controlling Congress and the White House. And why the neocons are now worse than the affirmative action hires when it comes to standing in line behind whatever is politically correct (or sometimes just convenient). Lott, in the process of weaseling and uttering mealy-mouthed apologies, has passed on what might have been a good opportunity to educate anyone willing to listen on just what "states’ rights" was about – beginning with where the concept originated. No, it wasn’t invented out of thin air by Confederates. Contrary to collectivists and affirmative action hires, "states’ rights" was not about race. It was written into the late, lamented Bill of Rights – specifically, the Tenth Amendment, which reads: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." A dead letter, of course – but surely of historical interest for anyone who wants to understand the Framers’ unique contribution to Western political thought: federalism as originally conceived. The federal government was the creation of the states; its purpose was to serve the states. The locus of political control was to be the states. Federalism was thus to be a decentralized system of government – not the centralized behemoth the US government gradually became when Americans started ignoring Thomas Jefferson’s warning about vigilance being the price of liberty. Today, of course, the term federal government is a misnomer. The term should be central government – because centralist-minded politicians stopped heeding the Tenth Amendment long ago. Arguably it was thrown out when Lincoln forcibly prevented a group of states from seceding and forming a new republic. A federalist system is, by definition, a voluntary association. In a voluntary association, one or more of those associating can pull out. A right of secession is therefore implied in our founding principles, as a check on centralizing tendencies the Framers rightly feared. Trent Lott, of course, has said nothing even close to this. He wouldn’t. Odds are, he couldn’t articulate it. An explanation of federalism as our Framers originally conceived it is way too "intellectual" for the average Republican today. Nor could the boobs now populating newsrooms and television studios grasp it. Lott has not even enumerated the "problems" that might well have been encompassed by his remark. It is true that the "Dixiecrats" led by Strom Thurmond were segregationists, but in 1948, over 95 percent of whites believed in segregation and over 90 percent of blacks believed in segregation. You could say (as Tibor Machan recently did) that because forced segregation was morally wrong, the Dixiecrat movement was objectionable in principle and Lott disqualifies himself for Senate leadership by even associating himself with it. But in 1948, how much segregation really was forced? The laws were on the books, but few people, black or white, rejected them. Lott, had it not been simply beyond him, could have illustrated "all those problems" easily, just by comparing the world of 1948 to the world of today. He might have mentioned, for example, that people back then felt safe leaving their houses and cars unlocked at night – even in big cities. He might have observed how big city schools didn’t have metal detectors on their entrances, or bans on gang insignia out of desperate efforts to reduce the threat of deadly violence. He might have gone on to say that in 1948 teachers in government schools didn’t expend more classroom effort maintaining order than teaching, or attend national conferences devoted to discipline. Lott might have noted how mind-altering drugs (whether legal like Ritalin or illegal like LSD and speed) were unknown in 1948. He might have quietly commented that teen pregnancies were rare even in "at risk" groups. When out-of-wedlock births did occur, there was a definite stigma attached. Blacks may have lived in segregated conditions, but their families stayed together. Today it is common knowledge that something like 70 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock. The percentage of white babies born out of wedlock has been increasing since the 1960s. It now exceeds the percentage of black babies born out of wedlock back in 1948. I don’t blame the civil rights movement for this. Causality in society is never that simple. There were a lot of other factors involved – among them the undermining of Christian morality through the sex education introduced in the 1950s following the Kinsey Report. I believe the covert warfare that philosophical materialists had been waging against Christianity for several decades already, which began to bear fruit very slowly in the 1950s and then exploded in our faces beginning in the 1960s has hurt the country far more than the civil rights movement. Raising such matters shows how the simplistic reduction of all such discussions to race, segregation, slavery, etc., gets us nowhere. By the way, many colleges and universities now have race-specific dorms. They have race-specific academic programs. Walk into a campus cafeteria. Whites sit with whites, blacks sit with blacks, Hispanics with Hispanics, Asians with Asians, and so on. This is applauded by the university affirmative action hires. Identity-politics is "in." Will the real segregationists please stand up? Sometimes I think people harp about race, segregation, and slavery because their heads are too empty to grasp anything important – such as whether we are going to look at such issues as states’ rights in the light of the country’s founding document and its philosophical antecedents. The latter would suggest that problems involving racial and ethnic diversity be addressed at the local level – not in bureaucracies hundreds of miles away. Moreover, important if mostly unread books such as Thomas Sowell’s Preferential Policies: An International Perspective document in great detail how policies giving preferences to some groups at the expense of others inflame tensions between the groups getting government freebies and the "untouchables" refused them. The real shame is that no one in the original civil rights movement had the insight and patience to work out a strategy for ending coercive segregation and promoting the interests of minorities in ways that (1) preserved individual liberty by not compromising basic property rights and freedom of association, and (2) protected the best interests of the minorities themselves, which have surely not been served by the destruction of the black family. Segregation would have fallen on its own. Instead, we ended up with an arrangement in which politicians, federal judges, and bureaucrats dominate education, business, and even significant aspects of what is left of family life – and amidst it all the neo-segregationist mindset of identity-politics remains! Everyone who works for a living – black, white, red or yellow; employer, employee and independent contractor – subsidizes this insane system with coercive taxation. Again, I don’t expect Trent Lott or any other Republican to say this. What Lott actually said, now that I think of it, was a good bit safer. He will continue groveling, doing what South Carolina columnist Bob Whitaker calls the Southern Crawl, required of all "respectable conservatives." His fellow Republicans will continue trying to out-sensitive the worst of the sensitivity police. I guess there’s just too much rocket science here for today’s political establishment, and like I said at the outset, Lott is no rocket scientist. Nor are the vast majority of his colleagues. December 18, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
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Steven
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