James Jackson Kilpatrick, conservative columnist, segregationist crusader, and celebrated wordsmith, is dead. The Oklahoma-born journalist quickly rose to the top of the Richmond News-Leader but became a nationally-known figure for his call for massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education and later the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he denounced as an un-American threat to "the right to own, possess, and manage property." If "the citizen's right to discriminate" should "be destroyed, the whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed."In his waning years, Kilpatrick distanced himself from his segregationist past. He renounced racial discrimination and attributed his segregationism to youthful excess. Youthful excess or not, the man who once described himself as "only a little to the South of John C. Calhoun" played a vital role in facilitating the rise of a right-wing, free-market ideology--one that was born of opposition to even the mildest laws restricting racial segregation. Historian Nancy MacLean (who has written persuasively about the link between the free market economics and Jim Crow--some of the above Kilpatrick quotes come from her work) shows how Kilpatrick influenced William Buckley and the National Review (even helping provide the NR with membership lists from the racist White Citizens Councils to expand the magazine's subscriber pool) and laid the groundwork for the inroads that the Republican Party made in the Land of Dixie in the 1960s and beyond. ...
Whites are victims of discrimination. Opposition to "miscegenation"is a legitimate religious belief. AIDS victims brought it on themselves: Kilpatrickisms still shape the vision of America's cultural warriors--witness the "black racism" charges involving the minuscule New Black Panther Party or the brouhaha around Shirley Sherrod.
But Kilpatrickism--its faux color blindness and its uncompromising faith in the market--is his most poisonous legacy. Kilpatrick's paeans to color blindness and his suspicion of integration are echoed in current conservative jurisprudence. Read Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion in Parents Involved (the Supreme Court case that struck down voluntary school integration programs in Seattle and Louisville) if you want to see Kilpatrickism redux. And it infuses the antigovernment, pro-business rhetoric of the right.
Whether or not Kilpatrick rests in peace, it will be a long time before his ideas are buried and gone.
More:
Excerpt: Unjust Spoils by Robert Reich (The Nation)
Wall Street's banditry was the proximate cause of the Great Recession, not its underlying cause. Even if the Street is better controlled in the future (and I have my doubts), the structural reason for the Great Recession still haunts America. That reason is America's surging inequality. ...Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect. ...
The problem isn't that typical Americans have spent beyond their means. It's that their means haven't kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.
Note: Best of the Blogs via The Philadelphia Inquirer (Sunday, Aug. 22nd)