By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I admit that nostalgia may be clouding my mind, but it still seems to me that the television talk shows of old — William F. Buckley’s Firing Line and David Susskind’s program, for example — offered viewers a far more serious discussion of the issues than do the shows of today, which tend to feature representatives of the Democratic and the Republican Parties doing nothing more than exchanging talking points to push their respective agendas. Fox News commentator Bob Beckel admitted to participating in morning conference calls between Democratic Party leaders and Democrats likely to be on the talk shows that day to get their talking points. It seems safe to assume that the Republicans do something similar.
That is not the way it was on Firing Line. When Buckley discussed a topic with someone like John Kenneth Galbraith or William Sloane Coffin, Buckley’s goal was to grapple with his adversary’s point of view at its best, for the purpose of winning the argument without gimmicks or sophistry. (Buckley’s famous name-calling confrontation with Gore Vidal during the Democratic Party convention in 1968 is remembered because it was so out of character.) The discussions did not rely upon cheap shots designed to shape public opinion.
Salon.com editor-at-large and MSNBC commentator Joan Walsh recently provided an example of the kind of sophistry that is coarsening public discussion these days. Walsh has to know better: She is a veteran journalist who has written for The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, Vogue, and the Nation. She understands full well that she was engaging in political one-up-man-ship, with no regard for the truth, when she accused the Republican Party of “50 years of race-baiting” in her Salon.com column on October 1.
Look: Everyone knows that there are some racists on the right, just as there are some Stalinists on the left. The question is whether racism is what motivates the voting patterns and political positions that Walsh finds so deplorable. I submit that it is fair game to call the Republican positions that anger Walsh ignorant, shortsighted, mistaken — even harmful to American blacks — but not to attribute them to racism. We are taught from our early years that it is unfair to attribute motives to those we disagree with, without solid evidence to back up our position. We can’t read minds. Walsh writes as if she thinks she can.
Consider how she attributes opposition to Obamacare and the shutdown of the government to “50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.” She points to Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to “lure old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party” and to the “Northern Strategy,” which “targeted so-called ‘white ethnics’ — many of them from the Catholic ‘Sidewalks of New York’.” All of this was hinged, she argues, on an unspoken appeal to white racism and a resentment toward blacks.
She attributes Ronald Reagan’s success to his ability to devise a “de-racialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with ‘welfare,’ and ‘welfare’ synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American.” Modern Republicans, she assures us, deploy the same ruse: “You say ‘Defund Obamacare,’ and everyone knows why.” It is the same tactic, she continues, that Roger Ailes, “one of Richard Nixon’s media henchmen,” used when he produced “the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis.”
Walsh’s assumption is that when Republicans talk of bloated budgets that cannot be sustained, of a tax burden for government programs that cripples businesses and destroys their ability to create jobs, of government programs that destroy incentive by making people content to be wards of the state, of the reverse racism that denies working-class whites admission to colleges in favor of the children of black professional couples — they don’t mean it; that they would not be saying these things if the government benefits were directed mainly toward blue-collar whites, rather than minorities. She acts as if Roger Ailes would not have used the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis if Horton were a swaggering, tattooed, meth-head biker, rather than a black. Which is silly. That ad would have worked even better if Horton looked like Charles Manson on steroids. (By the way, Horton was first used as a campaign theme by Al Gore, in his primary run against Dukakis. Was he racist, too?)
Walsh proceeds as if Republicans who quote Milton Friedman about the job-creating power of the free market don’t mean it; that if they quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan about the benefits of a period of “benign neglect” for black Americans, rather than increased welfare programs, they are saying it to hurt blacks rather than to help them. She acts as if no one could have read Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground, about the counterproductive effects of government spending on the poor, and believed it; that they must be using Murray’s findings as an excuse to deny black Americans a chance to get ahead in life.
She writes as if white Republicans, who agree with black columnists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell about the destructive impact of welfare programs and the “criminal as victim” view of crime on black communities, do so to escape their responsibility to help poor blacks; that they are lying; that the conservative intellectuals who wrote for William F. Buckley’s National Review, for Modern Age, and for Intercollegiate Review were all part of a con job to give people on the right the shop talk they would need to disguise their racism when they talked to friends or colleagues or entered politics.
Walsh knows all that in spite of what conservatives and Republicans say; knows that when white Americans express their support for black political leaders such as Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, and Herman Cain it is because these blacks are Uncle Toms who can be used to keep blacks down, and not, as conservatives say, because they are role models that can be used to help blacks succeed.
The question is how Walsh knows this. It is a question that she would have to answer if she were engaged in a sincere discussion in the marketplace of ideas, such as used to take place on Firing Line. It is one that she would not answer, if she knows she is maneuvering to win votes through any means available, including dishonest sloganeering, on the political stump.
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