It's a textbook example of the right-wing parlor game, "Stop the Historical Clock!"
In this instance, author Daniel J. Flynn's thesis is that the life of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who died a few weeks ago at the age of 92, embodies "the recent racist past of the Democratic Party."
Let's consider.
For starters, I'd question Flynn's conservative bona fides. After all, every movement conservative knows from birth there is no such thing as a "Democratic" Party. It's the "Democrat" Party.
But let's wade on, deeper, into the swamp. I'll interpose comments along the way.
Robert Byrd & His Racist Party
Posted 07/08/2010 ET
Robert Byrd’s death severs the Democratic Party’s most glaring link to its racist past. Rather than let the party’s embarrassing past fade from memory with Robert Byrd, party heavyweights have lamely obfuscated their former senate majority leader’s past as a “Kleagle” and an “Exalted Cyclops” in the Ku Klux Klan.
Who're the party heavyweights? And was Byrd as bad as some of the other actors Flynn invokes below?
“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?” eulogized Bill Clinton of America’s longest serving senator. “I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and the hollers of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have and he spent the rest of his life making it up.”
“He once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean?” eulogized Bill Clinton of America’s longest serving senator. “I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and the hollers of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have and he spent the rest of his life making it up.”
Bill Clinton is, of course, the Official Spokesadulterer of the Left. Whatever he says is true and beyond question. Just ask his impeachment managers. Or Klansman David Duke, who became a Republican in 1988 after getting no traction as a Louisiana Democrat and subsequently ran for everything GOP from the state legislature to the US presidency and never faced any of the sort of sanctions Flynn argues Byrd should have faced.
Or Strom Thurmond.
President Barack Obama more subtly addressed Byrd’s membership in the secretive racist organization. “We know there are things he said and things he did that he came to regret,” the President said.
President Barack Obama more subtly addressed Byrd’s membership in the secretive racist organization. “We know there are things he said and things he did that he came to regret,” the President said.
Byrd's local paper summed that up:
In his autobiography, Byrd wrote of his membership in the KKK: "It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation."
Indeed, Byrd could not fully escape his racist past. In his 1982 campaign, his opponent's supporters presented Byrd with a Klan robe at a rally.
As late as 2001, Byrd used the phrase "white niggers" in a nationally televised interview. He later apologized and said, "The phrase dates back to my boyhood and has no place in today's society."Being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry. No matter how egregious one’s sins against the stated principles of American liberalism, American liberals will welcome the sinner back as long as he atones through service to American liberalism. So convinced of the goodness of their own cause, liberals self-servingly view liberalism as an indemnity against past transgressions, as proven by this past year’s beatifications of one senator who left a woman to suffocate in her own air pocket at Chappaquiddick and of his longtime colleague who served as a recruiter for the KKK.
How many American liberals were there in West Virginia when Byrd began his legislative career in the 1940s? Or any time thereafter? Leaving for another day the circle of Hell Ted Kennedy may inhabit, how does one event in a 47-year Senate career trump a 51-year Senate career marked by consistent hostility to civil rights legislation until it became apparent to Byrd his raging ambitions were being blocked by it? And why did all the obits for Byrd describe him as a conservative Democrat if he was such a raging liberal? Oh, never mind, MSM bias.
And why wouldn’t a former Klansman such as Byrd feel comfortable in the Democratic Party?
Robert Byrd entered an America in which segregationist Democrat Woodrow Wilson served as President. More than six years after Byrd’s birth, the Democratic Party narrowly rejected a resolution at its 1924 convention condemning the Ku Klux Klan.
Woodrow Wilson served as president from 1913 to 1921 and died in 1924. He was the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland (1885-89; 1893-97). Note the modifier "narrowly." Where were Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover when it came to undoing Wilson's segregationist record?
Shortly before Byrd turned 20 in 1937, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt appointed former Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. By the time Byrd reached voting age, his Democratic Party had in its entire history sent exactly one African American to Congress. And in Byrd’s first term in the United States Senate, “no” votes on 1964’s Civil Rights Act—which Byrd filibustered—disproportionately came from Democrats.
If you compare Black's record on the Court with Byrd's in the Senate, it's Black, hands down. Black, unlike Byrd, admitted hi]s membership was pure political opportunism in a one-party state:
In 1921, Black defended E. R. Stephenson in the sensationalistic trial for the murder of Fr. James E. Coyle. He joined the Ku Klux Klan shortly after, thinking it necessary for his political career. Running for the Senate as the "people's" candidate, Black believed he needed the votes of Klan members. Black would near the end of his life admit that joining the Klan was a mistake, but said "I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes."[9
One could ask if FDR nominated any other former Klansmen to the Court but that would be piling on.
When racism was a state-sponsored problem in America, Byrd’s was the party of racists.
When government-perpetrated racism ceased to be a problem in America, Byrd’s party became the scourge of long-since-marginalized racists. In Rhodesia, in South Africa, in faraway places, Democrats fought against racists by remote. But at home, when it mattered, when they could have made a difference, Democrats considered Theodore Bilbo, Orval Faubus, and John Rankin to be party members in good standing.
Consider the record:
Racism has never prevented the American Left from embracing recovering racists such as Robert Byrd. To Karl Marx, America’s Southern neighbors were “lazy Mexicans” and rival theorist Ferdinand Lassalle was “nigger-like.” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger spoke to a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1926, championed a “negro programme” to reduce the African American birth rate, and deemed Jews, Italians, and Aborigines unfit lesser races. Jack Reed, the subject of Warren Beatty’s fawning biopic Reds and the only American buried beneath the Kremlin Wall, casually referred to black people as “niggers” and “coons” in his extant correspondence to Louise Bryant housed at Harvard University.
Karl Marx died in 1883. Ferdinand Lasalle died in 1864. In those days comparisons of Jews to Negroes were common. Neither Marx nor Lasalle seem to have been members of the Democratic Party.
Margaret Sanger was, like many of her time, all over the map, but she wasn't much impressed by her invitation to lecture to the Klan:
Regarding John Reed, Flynn seems intent on fixing a man who died in 1920 with the views he freely admits are romanticized effects in a movie (one should admit, in fairness, by a liberal actor/director. What Reed's views have to do with Senator Byrd's- other than slinging mud at a wall to see what sticks- is unclear.
These are massive, not marginal, figures in the history of the Left. And their history of racism doesn’t disqualify them from their status as radical heroes. The standards the Left imposes upon their enemies are not the standards imposed upon their icons.
Here Flynn hikes his legs to interpose non-office-holding liberals with office-holding Democrats. It's an easy- and cheap- conflation of chatterati with elected officials: satisfying, cheap and intellectually dishonest. Link it to Byrd, you wuss, or retract the entire piece.
Indulgences, when the penitent is a Democrat, are easy to come by. The unpardonable sin here is not racism but opposition to liberalism. Big-spending Robert Byrd gets a pass because he faithfully served the interests of the Democratic Party for more than a half century. Had he served opposing interests, his years among cross-burners, violent bigots, and hooded hooligans would have been used as a brickbat to destroy him. It’s not racism that liberal crusaders are concerned about, but how to use “racism” as a cudgel to batter political opponents. How else does one explain the reverential treatment of a Klansman and segregationist by the leading lights of the Democratic Party?
The recent racist history of the Democratic Party doesn’t make its current votaries bigots or haters. It just makes them odd schoolmarms to lecture the rest of us about racism. The awkward eulogistic excuses and apologias for the KKK-Exalted-Cyclops-turned-Democratic-Senate-Majority-Leader demonstrate this.
Neither does Flynn address the wink-wink, nudge-nudge deals Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan negotiated with Southern Democrats on integration, busing and other issues for their support. Don't call the oppo racist when you're busy making deals with the Devil under the table.
Woodrow Wilson served as president from 1913 to 1921 and died in 1924. He was the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland (1885-89; 1893-97). Note the modifier "narrowly." Where were Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover when it came to undoing Wilson's segregationist record?
Shortly before Byrd turned 20 in 1937, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt appointed former Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. By the time Byrd reached voting age, his Democratic Party had in its entire history sent exactly one African American to Congress. And in Byrd’s first term in the United States Senate, “no” votes on 1964’s Civil Rights Act—which Byrd filibustered—disproportionately came from Democrats.
If you compare Black's record on the Court with Byrd's in the Senate, it's Black, hands down. Black, unlike Byrd, admitted hi]s membership was pure political opportunism in a one-party state:
In 1921, Black defended E. R. Stephenson in the sensationalistic trial for the murder of Fr. James E. Coyle. He joined the Ku Klux Klan shortly after, thinking it necessary for his political career. Running for the Senate as the "people's" candidate, Black believed he needed the votes of Klan members. Black would near the end of his life admit that joining the Klan was a mistake, but said "I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes."[9
One could ask if FDR nominated any other former Klansmen to the Court but that would be piling on.
When racism was a state-sponsored problem in America, Byrd’s was the party of racists.
When government-perpetrated racism ceased to be a problem in America, Byrd’s party became the scourge of long-since-marginalized racists. In Rhodesia, in South Africa, in faraway places, Democrats fought against racists by remote. But at home, when it mattered, when they could have made a difference, Democrats considered Theodore Bilbo, Orval Faubus, and John Rankin to be party members in good standing.
Consider the record:
Bilbo was re-elected to a third Senate term in November 1946, but the newly-elected Republican majority in the United States Senate refused to seat Bilbo for the term because he was suspected of openly inciting violence against blacks who wanted to vote and a committee found that he had taken bribes. A filibuster by his supporters delayed the seating of the Senate for days. It was resolved when a supporter proposed that Bilbo's credentials remain on the table while he returned home to Mississippi to seek medical treatment for his oral cancer.[23]
Flynn might have profitably mined the Bilbo-Byrd connection. It's denied him his global point but would have been way more historically accurate.
John Rankin? Alls we can find is a 19th century abolitionist by that name.
Racism has never prevented the American Left from embracing recovering racists such as Robert Byrd. To Karl Marx, America’s Southern neighbors were “lazy Mexicans” and rival theorist Ferdinand Lassalle was “nigger-like.” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger spoke to a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1926, championed a “negro programme” to reduce the African American birth rate, and deemed Jews, Italians, and Aborigines unfit lesser races. Jack Reed, the subject of Warren Beatty’s fawning biopic Reds and the only American buried beneath the Kremlin Wall, casually referred to black people as “niggers” and “coons” in his extant correspondence to Louise Bryant housed at Harvard University.
Karl Marx died in 1883. Ferdinand Lasalle died in 1864. In those days comparisons of Jews to Negroes were common. Neither Marx nor Lasalle seem to have been members of the Democratic Party.
Margaret Sanger was, like many of her time, all over the map, but she wasn't much impressed by her invitation to lecture to the Klan:
In 1926 Sanger gave a lecture on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.[12] She described it as "one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing," and added that she had to use only "the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand."[12] Sanger's talk was well-received by the group and as a result "a dozen invitations to similar groups were proffered."[12]
Regarding John Reed, Flynn seems intent on fixing a man who died in 1920 with the views he freely admits are romanticized effects in a movie (one should admit, in fairness, by a liberal actor/director. What Reed's views have to do with Senator Byrd's- other than slinging mud at a wall to see what sticks- is unclear.
These are massive, not marginal, figures in the history of the Left. And their history of racism doesn’t disqualify them from their status as radical heroes. The standards the Left imposes upon their enemies are not the standards imposed upon their icons.
Here Flynn hikes his legs to interpose non-office-holding liberals with office-holding Democrats. It's an easy- and cheap- conflation of chatterati with elected officials: satisfying, cheap and intellectually dishonest. Link it to Byrd, you wuss, or retract the entire piece.
Indulgences, when the penitent is a Democrat, are easy to come by. The unpardonable sin here is not racism but opposition to liberalism. Big-spending Robert Byrd gets a pass because he faithfully served the interests of the Democratic Party for more than a half century. Had he served opposing interests, his years among cross-burners, violent bigots, and hooded hooligans would have been used as a brickbat to destroy him. It’s not racism that liberal crusaders are concerned about, but how to use “racism” as a cudgel to batter political opponents. How else does one explain the reverential treatment of a Klansman and segregationist by the leading lights of the Democratic Party?
The recent racist history of the Democratic Party doesn’t make its current votaries bigots or haters. It just makes them odd schoolmarms to lecture the rest of us about racism. The awkward eulogistic excuses and apologias for the KKK-Exalted-Cyclops-turned-Democratic-Senate-Majority-Leader demonstrate this.
Neither does Flynn address the wink-wink, nudge-nudge deals Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan negotiated with Southern Democrats on integration, busing and other issues for their support. Don't call the oppo racist when you're busy making deals with the Devil under the table.
| Mr. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum), and editor of www.flynnfiles.com. |
As a hispanic, I was raised to be a Conservative Republican. As I reached adulthood and had the painful experience of "growing a brain of my own" I have moved steadily to the left and am now a Progressive Democrat. One of the main factors that played into this change is the simple fact that I feel, unquestionably, a target for Republicans because I am hispanic. It seems odd that this pretentious fool would attempt to use a history in which both parties were hand in hand racist to justify their own racist actions today that is leading to the GOP alienating what would otherwise typically be a perfect fit. The GOP is blind and foolish if they think the hispanic population, which represents a gold mine in potential future votes, will ignore their blatant racism and all out attack on those of us that are proud to be American hispanics.
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