David Brooks vs. His Colleagues

David Brooks, today, on the "Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side" slur:

... the agitprop version ... that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

I wonder which people he could have in mind?

Comments

When Ronald Reagan was elected, one of his first acts was to attempt to provide tax exemptions for segregated "private academies" set up in the South to avoid the effects of official integration. A furious backlash resulted and he dropped the plan.

When he visited an integrated classroom to take the heat off and a black child asked him why he tried to give tax exemptions to segregated schools, he lied and said that he didn't know there were any segregated schools. Lying to a black kid. Classy!

Ronald Reagan was a passionate supporter of the segregationists, if not of segregation itself. He felt that segregationists were the salt of the earth. On the other hand, he hated the civil rights movement, which he saw as communism, pure and simple. He fought to allow the South to maintain its system of racist oppression. Ronald Reagan was on the side of the racists.

Posted by Alan Vanneman | November 9, 2007 11:00 AM

Ross, would you mind taking time off from your busy schedule of posting about decades-old controversies and address the fact that the conservative movement has now wholeheartedly embraced torture as US policy.

Talk about stuff that matters, Ross! Magazines you write for and commentators you are de facto associated with by your self-identification as a conservative are now loud-and-proud torture advocators.

So let's hear more about, say, National Review's Deroy Murdock calling waterboarding something Americans should be proud of and a bit less of, say, Krugman on Reagan in '80.

Posted by Jim | November 9, 2007 11:05 AM

On second thought, nevermind, Ross. I suppose if you came out and condemned the National Review for its morally monstrous position on torture they wouldn't publish anymore of your movie reviews.

Are you going to stand up and call the right's embrace of torture what it is--decadent barbarism--or are you going to sit on the sidelines? I like to think that Yglesias would thrash the New Republic if they said the sorts of things the National Review is saying.

Posted by Jim | November 9, 2007 11:09 AM

If you read Kevin Drum's post, you see that he concluded that Reagan got a "(slightly) bum rap," but that he "deserved criticism."

Drum excuses Reagan's actions largely on the grounds that Dukakis also visited the fair as a candidate.

That seems to me to be insufficient. Dukakis didn't go there to talk about states' rights, which was a coded appeal to racism. Just ask Lee Atwater, as a Reagan official in 1981:

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me - because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'Nigger, nigger.'

Now, did Reagan pluck Philadelphia out of thin air? No. There was a fair there. But is it a "slur" to criticize his appearance there? No.

Going to Philadelphia and talking about states' rights instead of civil rights, as the first event as the party's candidate, is worthy of harsh criticism. There's just no way around that.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 9, 2007 11:30 AM

Ah, the great Right Wing History Rewrite Project kicks into another gear. FDR caused the Depression. Lincoln was a warmonger. Reagan nod to "state's rights" at Philadelphia meant nothing.

Jim, I think the plan is to get around to torture in 25 years, when you'll see things like, "You know, now that George W. Bush has died in a pretzel-bicycle accident, some irresponsible people on the left have decided to smear him as a president who approved of torture. Nothing could be further from the truth!"

Posted by Woody Bombay | November 9, 2007 12:13 PM

What Elvis said. To accuse Reagan of openly appealing to racism is a bridge too far. The GOP Southern Strategy was never predicated on telling Segregationists that the Republican Party would actively support racial segregation. The strategy was predicated on telling Segregationists that they were welcome in the Republican Party.

That's a fine distinction that's worth noting. It doesn't let Reagan off the hook for courting the racist vote. The speech at Philadelphia, MS wasn't a meaningless gesture. Not by a long shot.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | November 9, 2007 12:29 PM

While one might dispute the Philadelphia example in particular, it is not arguable that Reagan came to notoriety by decrying welfare queens (i.e. Black welfare earners) and open housing (i.e. outlawing discrimination in real estate). Goldwater used the same gambits as well, and in fact voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though he voted for the past two.

I'm not of the opinion that most conservatives are racist (though I do think that a good percentage of Southern conservatives still are), but modern conservatism got much of its start by appealing to racist, segregationist sentiment. That's why Goldwater won the South in 1964, and it's how the GOP was able to become a national party. Let's be honest about these things is all I'm asking.

Posted by Lev | November 9, 2007 1:27 PM

I tend to find this pretty weak tea compared to the fact that he lied about personally liberating a Nazi death camp... TWICE!!

Posted by Freddie | November 9, 2007 1:44 PM

And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states'-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.

What about this statement is not true? Nixon had run and won twice on a "southern strategy" that [if I want to be blindly and ridiculously charitable] was based not on racism but merely on resentment of Federal civil rights legislation.

Carter's win in 1976 was attributed in part to the fact that as a Georgian he could votes from fellow southerners (much like Clinton and Gore in 1992).

I remember 1980 and it seemed hugely obvious that Reagan was seeking a southern vote on precisely the same grounds as Nixon, described above. Why inaugurate your campaign -- which also was based on cutting taxes, cutting spending and increasing defense spending -- with a call for states rights in a small town that was notable for nothing except the murder of 3 civil rights workers 15 years earlier.

If the claims that Democrats engage inb the rhetoric of class warfare has even the smallest grain of truth, then the claim that Reagan was consciously appealing to racism counts as God's own revealed truth.

Posted by Gene | November 9, 2007 2:43 PM

David Brooks might want to read some history prior to calling something a “slur” or “agitprop.” Brooks has failed to rewrite the historical record of what Reagan said in Mississippi during the 1980 campaign, and his wishing that Reagan had “mentioned civil rights” that day seems to miss the essential point of the speech. Brooks, like many of Reagan’s supporters, senses a need to reinvent the Reagan record on race issues and civil rights. But Reagan had made effective use of racial appeals dating back to before he even became governor of California. His political career was launched with the rhetoric of white backlash. His emergence on the national political scene during the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater revealed his opposition to black voting rights and, more specifically, his denunciation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While running for governor of California in 1966 he made his opposition to civil rights a cornerstone of his candidacy, maintaining a sunny disposition while exploiting anxieties about race, integration, and civil rights. Meanwhile, his campaign commercials that year struck lurid notes about integration. His opponent in that race supported California’s Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963 which sought, in accordance with federal civil rights laws, to reduce barriers in housing based on race. Reagan, who had supported a white backlash initiative against the act -- Proposition 14 -- pledged to fight integration, which helped him make large inroads into the white electorate. As governor after 1967 he became known for his skepticism of civil rights. As president, he aimed to weaken the enforcement of civil rights and equal opportunity laws and even speculated that Martin Luther King Jr. would one day be exposed as a communist. This isn't "agitprop" -- as Brooks would have it -- it's the historical record.

Chris

Posted by Chris | November 9, 2007 5:08 PM

This blog would be so much better with out comments.

Posted by Steven | November 9, 2007 5:16 PM

This blog would be so much better with out comments.

Yeah. Then you could get your own worldview parroted back to you without any critical engagement at all.

Posted by Freddie | November 9, 2007 5:22 PM

Even if you completely remove the significance of the location, the talk of states' rights was still a coded appeal to racism.

Posted by Toadmonster | November 9, 2007 7:34 PM

It's no secret that there have been otherwise great Americans who had mixed or worse records on racial issues. The Philadelphia accusation in its strongest for, however, implies that Reagan condoned murder, so it's important to get the truth behind it.

Posted by James Kabala | November 9, 2007 9:06 PM

It's no secret that there have been otherwise great Americans who had mixed or worse records on racial issues. The Philadelphia accusation in its strongest for, however, implies that Reagan condoned murder, so it's important to get the truth behind it.

Posted by James Kabala | November 9, 2007 9:06 PM

"Its strongest form," of course.

Posted by James Kabala | November 9, 2007 9:08 PM

The Philadelphia accusation in its strongest for, however, implies that Reagan condoned murder

Whereas in fact he merely tolerated it.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | November 9, 2007 10:51 PM

Brooks has it right of course.

But what is so interesting to me is the anger on the left. Not at the evil of racism.

But that those damn racists voted the wrong way.

Posted by Thomas | November 10, 2007 1:11 AM

But that those damn racists voted the wrong way.

Huh. Racists, given the issues they care about, seem perfectly capable of identifying and voting for the 'right' party. Certain politicians of this 'right' party have also been perfectly capable at letting racists know their 'right' party will support them, and certain columnists belonging to this 'right' party have become perfectly capable of protesting too much at these obvious facts.

The real question is much simpler: Do you want your party to be the 'right' or the 'wrong' party for racists?

Posted by Bo | November 10, 2007 7:17 AM

Whereas in fact he merely tolerated it.

In 1964, Ronald Reagan was a resident of Southern California and had no more connection to (or influence over) events in Neshoba County, Mississippi than anyone else who might have read about them in the newspaper.

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 8:41 AM

When Ronald Reagan was elected, one of his first acts was to attempt to provide tax exemptions for segregated "private academies" set up in the South to avoid the effects of official integration. A furious backlash resulted and he dropped the plan.

In the interests of precision, it ought be noted that the restoration of tax exemptions to these schools occurred in January 1982, a year after he was inaugurated, and that the administration was engaged in quite a bit of activity during the previous year advancing its own priorites. This measure was not an initiative of the executive branch but a request of a congressman from Mississippi to which the administration acceded.

Given that eleemosynaries are not taxed in exceptional circumstances, one might ask Mr. Reagan's critics on this point to:

1. Elaborate a set of principles concerning which sort of voluntary associations should be subject to legal proscription or (alternatively) discouragement through financial penalties;

2. Specify the degree of consensus that ought to exist in the society at large before such measures are enacted;

3. Specify what organ of government should be empowered to enact them (recalling the measure in question was an administrative regulation of the Internal Revenue Service).

When he visited an integrated classroom to take the heat off and a black child asked him why he tried to give tax exemptions to segregated schools, he lied and said that he didn't know there were any segregated schools. Lying to a black kid. Classy!

Mr. Reagan was not a detail man, as is well known. Stipulating solely for purposes of argument that you have rendered this incident correctly, can you please elaborate on the ethical principle that lying to black youngsters is worse than lying to youngsters of some other color?

Ronald Reagan was a passionate supporter of the segregationists, if not of segregation itself. He felt that segregationists were the salt of the earth.

Would it tax you to provide a quotation from a reputable source (not Wikipedia) which would illustrate this sentiment?

That aside, Mr. Vanneman, I think if you consult contemporary public opinion research, you are going to discover that most people prior to 1955 supported a measure of segregation is some aspects of life (e.g. housing and schools). That was unfair and injurious to large numbers of people, but the habit of endorsing social policy that is unfair and injurious to large numbers of people remains to this day a feature of political life. Only the list of victims has changed. Human beings are not reducible to their views on selected social questions, then or now. Mr. Reagan was born in 1911. It would be unsurprising if he did not know people during the course of his life who were quite admirable for most intents and purposes, even if they thought 'the colored' should go to their own schools.

On the other hand, he hated the civil rights movement, which he saw as communism, pure and simple.

Again, citations please.

He fought to allow the South to maintain its system of racist oppression. Ronald Reagan was on the side of the racists.

Ronald Reagan's political activities prior to 1964 were in connection with his position in the Screen Actors Guild, and really had nothing in particular to do with any political or social conflicts down South. He was an opponent of 'open housing' laws during his years as Governor of California, but such measures act to remove discretion from ordinary people (i.e. people not routinely engaged in business proprietorship and hiring) about to whom they can rent or sell their real property. The standard for justifying the compulsion and intrusion involved in such measures is going to be fairly high in an American context.

One ought note that by the time Mr. Reagan was actually governing the Southern United States, Southern caste regulations had been dismantled and were not a live political issue. He was not 'fighting' to 'maintain' much of anything.

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 9:20 AM

The real question is much simpler: Do you want your party to be the 'right' or the 'wrong' party for racists?.

Adult citizens who advocate things I find indefensible and appalling have not been stripped of the franchise. In fact, they form a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. I suck it up and you can too.

That aside, can you specify which public policies advocated by the Republican Party in federal elections over the last fifty years qualify as 'racist'? (And can you define 'racist'?)

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 9:26 AM

Even if you completely remove the significance of the location, the talk of states' rights was still a coded appeal to racism.

And your remark is a fairly explicit statement that one cannot advocate local self-government for any honorable purpose.

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 9:29 AM

The GOP Southern Strategy was never predicated on telling Segregationists that the Republican Party would actively support racial segregation. The strategy was predicated on telling Segregationists that they were welcome in the Republican Party.

Sir, it is a reasonable guess that about a quarter of the adult population of the United States in 1964 favored retaining some part of the apparatus of Southern caste regulations. You have implicitly conceded here that neither party was going to give them what they preferred. Are you also suggesting that the GOP should further have advised such people to continue voting Democratic, to not vote at all, or to leave the country?

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 9:41 AM

it is not arguable that Reagan came to notoriety by decrying welfare queens (i.e. Black welfare earners)

Lev, in and around 1980, about half the AFDC recipients in the United States were not black. Mr. Reagan's remarks drew no distiction between subsets of the population on relief.

and open housing (i.e. outlawing discrimination in real estate). Goldwater used the same gambits as well, and in fact voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, even though he voted for the past two.

See above. All of you seem not to realize that 'Civil Rights' laws are coercive and that that remains a cost that has to be weighed against any benefits that may accrue in enacting such laws. That aside, not everyone thinks it advisable that social policy of that sort be vested in the central government or that it is at all honest to define 'interstate commerce' so as to include transactions occuring over a lunch counter. There were libertarian, federalist, and constitutionalist complaints against these laws by people who had no interest in maintaining segregation, Barry Goldwater and Robert Bork to name two. They may have been obtuse and divorced from the mundane texture of social life in this country, but that is a different vice than that under discussion (and not one limited to one or another political faction).

but modern conservatism got much of its start by appealing to racist, segregationist sentiment.

Lev, the polarity in contemporary political life originated in the disputes over political economy during the Depression, not disputes over race relations.

That's why Goldwater won the South in 1964, and it's how the GOP was able to become a national party. Let's be honest about these things is all I'm asking.

Let us be precise and understand our recent history. Barry Goldwater, who was a libertarian critic of civil rights laws, won five of thirteen Southern states in 1964 (in which a number of Republicans were elected to Congress). Any white Southerner who deserted the Democratic Party in 1964 expecting the Republican Party to restore the South's peculiar institutions was disappointed and had little reason to believe he would not be. The Republican Party simply had no history of enacting and implementing such institutional arrangements.

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 10:03 AM

That aside, can you specify which public policies advocated by the Republican Party in federal elections over the last fifty years qualify as 'racist'? (And can you define 'racist'?)

Art Deco, this attempt to scrub the history of American conservatism from racism and support of segregation is really pathetic. There simply is no question that the Civil Rights movement was fought at every turn by conservatives. That doesn't mean or imply active racism in the conservatism of today. But it is a fact, and however uncomfortable for you, manipulating or obscuring that fact is wrong. As far as Reagan goes, I don't think there's cause to say that he was a racist while President, or that his record on civil rights necessarily overrides any other part of his legacy. (As you may have guessed, I am not impressed by his legacy in general.) However, opposition to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the two most important pieces of civil rights legislation in our country's history, does in fact constitute a bad record on civil rights.

Posted by Freddie | November 10, 2007 12:35 PM

Elvis Elvisberg: That is a cheap shot. Yes, I think Reagan, and Dukakis for that matter, would have done well to mention the murders and the heroism of the killed men, but it's absurd to say that not mentioning a 16-year-old murder in a boilerplate campaign stump speech is somehow tolerating murder.

Posted by James Kabala | November 10, 2007 2:54 PM

Freddie, I am not sure how your remarks are an answer to the two questions (mine) to which you made reference.

The bulk of the Republican congressional caucus supported all of the salient legislation passed between 1957 and 1965. (I am not sure about the open housing law passed in 1968). Ronald Reagan did not, but he was not a working politician during those years. Mr. Reagan was a member of the Republican Party. He did not embody it.

Everett Dirksen and Gordon Allott favored 'civil rights' legislation; Barry Goldwater had no time for the practice of segregation (IIRC, he participated in the integration of the Arizona National Guard) but had a number of subsidiary objections to the legislation proposed (quite apart from coniderations of personal expediency); James Jackson Kilpatrick thought segregation laws were legitimate but that negro disfranchisement was not.

The Republican Party is an incorporated entity, so putting a boundary around it and identifying its stances requires little effort. This is less so the case with 'conservatism', where one is faced with a question of taxonomy. I think the appellation 'conservative' would have been applied at the time to all four named individuals. I do not think you can say that there was a uniform 'conservative' view of 'civil rights' legislation at the time.

Posted by Art Deco | November 10, 2007 4:14 PM

Good Lord, Krugman is positively destroying Brooks in this little kerfuffle over Saint Ronnie. Here's some more stuff for you guys to rationalize, distort and otherwise explain away:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistakes/

If this was a football game, Krugman would be taking a knee and the coaches would be waving smelling salts under Brooks' nose and asking him if he knew what day it was.

Posted by Woody Bombay | November 11, 2007 1:39 PM

I hate to rain on your parade Woody, but Krugman hardly does what you think he does. Brooks sets out to disprove the notion that Reagan launched his general election campaign with an explicit appeal to southern racists that he was on their side. Brooks marshals evidence that this is false by pointing to Reagan's decision to visit Vernon Jordan in the hospital, meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet, and give a policy speech at the Urban League. He did all of this, as Brooks mentions, in the week after his nomination at the Republican National Convention. This is a rather bizarre and counterproductive way of courting the racist vote at the beginning of a general election campagin. Meanwhile, his line at the fair in Philadelphia proclaiming his supposed fealty to the desires of southern racists was this:

"Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level."

I suppose you could take the states' right comment, strip it of any context, and then ignore everything else that Reagan did that week to arrive at the conclusion that Reagan kicked off his general election campaign by courting the racist vote. You would have to be a bit cynical and dishonest to reach this conclusion, but that's partisanship I guess.

Krugman ignores Brooks's arguments and responds by shifting the goalposts. He mentions other examples of Reagan supposedly embracing the "southern strategy" throughout his career to gain the racist vote. Some of the examples listed do, in fact, strike me as racially insensitive, but given Krugman's propensity to believe the worst about Reagan, as evidenced by his sneering non-response to Brooks, I'm not quite ready to condemn Reagan as the terrible person Krugman thinks he was. After all, I used to think that the Reagan-detractors had a point when they brought up the Philadelphia incident.

We do know, for example, that the young Reagan brought black patrons who had been turned away by the local inn in his hometown of Dixon, IL back to his house to stay. But maybe Reagan grew more antagonistic toward blacks as he got older and became involved in politics.

Or maybe, just maybe, liberals like Krugman despise the fact that Reagan was an incredibly successful and popular president and seek to diminish his legacy by suggesting that the southern strategy was the source of his success. As if the reason why Reagan won over 500 electoral votes in capturing 49 states in the 1984 election was because he successfully cultivated the inner-racist in most Americans.

Posted by torourke | November 11, 2007 11:00 PM

Very interesting... as always! Cheers from -Switzerland-.

Posted by Dog training | November 25, 2007 5:31 AM