Monthly Archives: November 2010

I find it appallingly creepy when right-wingers hold up the Confederate secession as a good thing.
Right-wing pundit Walter Williams has written multiple columns explaining that slavery really was a pretty good arrangement for the slaves, and that the country would be better off if the South had seceded because it would have limited the rights of that eeevil federal government, thereby increasing freedom (for a discussion and a link, see here). Conservative Thomas Lucente, in a column a few years ago, expressed the same theory: Successful secession would have been a net gain for freedom.
It’s possible they’d argue that slavery would have died with or without a Civil War. That’s a widespread belief (though I’ve heard some historians disagree) but I don’t think that a USA (or CSA) in which slavery is still legal would be a good thing, even if it weren’t practiced any more; race relations are bad in our timeline, but in this fantasy counterfactual, with slavery hanging over the heads of black Americans, I suspect they’d be a lot worse. And that’s assuming it wouldn’t be practiced: It’s possible it might be at least a few people with the money to make it worthwhile, if only as a status symbol.
Even without slavery, it’s hard to see how the civil rights movement would have succeeded without the federal government backing it up (albeit reluctantly at times). And that took support for the movement from outside the South. Maybe a CSA president would have sided with civil rights the way Texan LBJ did, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Williams has argued that secession wasn’t about slavery anyway, which is baloney. Read South Carolina’s declaration of secession: It doesn’t talk about tariffs or trade, only slavery. The north elected an anti-slavery president; the north refuses to return fugitive slaves; the north refuses to silence abolitionists; the north criticizes slavery. That’s the burr that chafed South Carolina, nothing else; you can find similar statements in the declarations of other states and by the Confederate leaders as a whole.
It’s even debatable that secession would have produced more “freedom,” even as regards Lucente and Williams’ limited definition of it. The Confederacy crushed attempts to secede during the Civil War (West Virginia was the only success, but not the only attempt). A new book called Confederate Reckoning argues that the CSA came much closer to 20th-century federal power than Lincoln’s government did.
I honestly don’t know if pundits such as Lucente and Williams really believe that a limited federal government is worth the continued existence of slavery, or if they’re just pandering. They appear to be writing for a right-wing audience and there’s a large chunk of the right wing that hates acknowledging racism in this country. They don’t want to admit it exists now; they don’t want to admit it ever existed or that blacks ever had a raw deal in this country. Being reassured that white America has nothing to feel uncomfortable about (or for the hard-core racists, that slavery was a Good Thing) is, I suspect, a smart move for a conservative pundit looking to build their brand.
But they’re still wrong, factually and morally.

In his recent column, pundit Frank Rich argues that Sarah Palin has a better shot at the presidency in 2012 than other pundits and political opponents give her credit for. He makes some good points (she does seem to connect with the resentment of the anti-elitist Repubs) but then he says this: “The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him.”
This is a tad … ingenuous.
As The Daily Howler website has chronicled over the years (here’s one example), Bush’s success wasn’t because his charisma or his Simple Texas Farmer image or his Rugged Jet Jockey Image won over the public or because people identified with him as a simple regular-guy alternative to Al Gore, Arrogant Intellectual Elitist. A large part of it was because the press liked him better.
The press hated Gore. They cheerfully embraced or sometimes made up stories about how Gore claimed he created the Internet, that he was the model for Love Story‘s protagonist and that he discovered the Love Canal toxic waste site (what he said was that a)in Congress he took the lead in promoting the Internet; b)a local paper had quoted Segal as saying the Gores were models for the leads in Love Story [and Segal later confirmed that while the paper had exaggerated Gore’s influence on the book, Al Gore was indeed one of several real-world models for Oliver]; c)that Love Canal kicked off the investigation into toxic sites. All accurate statements) and kept quoting them long after they’d been debunked.
When Gore and Bush had their debates, multiple analysts asserted that sure, Gore technically won the debate—but since everyone thought Bush would do much worse than he did, he was the real winner (one Howler entry shows how public perception of the debate changed to favor Bush after several days of this).
Some pundits and reporters admitted that they didn’t like Gore: He was too smart, like a high-school brainiac, where Bush was like the cool jock who they all wanted to hang with (I am not making that up).
Rich’s fellow NYT pundit Maureen Dowd wrote a column this year grumbling that if Gore had only been more passionate about the environment, wow, maybe he’d have won! At the time, she grumbled that his environmental blather about global warming put her to sleep (a horrifying number of national pundits have a long history of discussing how boring they find government policy as if that proves it unworthy of interest).
Dowd also admitted in an interview that Bush made as many inaccurate statements as Gore supposedly made, and about more substantial policy matters, but it was more entertaining to mock Gore’s gaffs (see what I mean about finding policy boring?).
None of which proves that Palin couldn’t win; two years before the election, that’s anybody’s guess (pundits’ fondness for making predictions this far ahead is another thing that annoys me). But using Bush as evidence that such long shots just well, happen and not acknowledging the press role is just CYA bullshit.