Actually, you were the one who first brought up the superiority of northerners regarding race over us ignorant southern hicks, but I’ll let that go for now.

I think I said that Democrats alligned themselves with anti-segregationist rhetoric in the North. I see little distinction between Northern and Southern racism though just to be 100% clear. For too long the south was used as scapegoat by northerners to avoid confronting their own predjudices, see we can agree :)

Actually, I was around then–so I got to see the riots live and in color on my television screen. If I were able to vote then, would I have voted for the Voting Rights Act? Yes, I would have–it was a necessary piece of legislation and did correct injustices–I’ll grant that. As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while it possessed necessary elements to correct abuses,

OK, then you also have to recognize that “states rights” was a huge part of the justification for continuing legal Jim Crow and fears of “Federal encroachment” were part of arguing against those laws. And that’s why I find what Reagan did in launching his Presidential career so blatantly transparent and race baiting. I think alot of white southerners took something from that speech and I’m not so sure it was what I would call….a message of racial tolerance. Why I harp on this I actually will bring up later in a response to JD Perren’s comments because the issues are related.

As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while it possessed necessary elements to correct abuses, it also introduced elements which, as an African-American friend of mine pointed out once to me, was also very destructive to the African-American community.

Well the 60s Civil Rights Movement was a movement for the black middle class, which is why it was able to succeed and why the black middle class has done so spectacularly well over the last 40 years. And really Michelle and Barack are descendents from that story (as am I). But, there’s a reason why they waited until MLK was organizing the poor people’s march, a multi racial campaign, before he was killed.

Sure…Much of Johnson’s Great Society program–its entire purpose was to create an underclass dependent on the Democratic Party–what, did you honestly think that Lyndon Johnson pushed it because it was “The Right Thing To Do.”

I don’t think the options were “create permanent underclass” or “pure moreal altruism.” Indeed if you read any of the hearings/Johnson papers on Great Society Policy you know that:
1. The policies were equally more driven by sympathy for poor whites in Appalachian regions, perhaps you remember a Christmas special “Christmas in Appalachia”?
2. The policies were also driven by a need for stability in urban areas. This is key. Johnson and the Democrats said “maybe there’s a reason people in these cities are rioting.” Now that assumption is one that was impossible for conservatives to except. Even though they’d witnessed generations of whites engaging in violence to maintain a position of white superiority, when black urban residents did it it had to be understood as a threat to the entire nation and “our way of life” etc. etc. You were there. So the Great Society was constructed on the assumption that a lack of economic opportunity within urban areas and systematic municipal discrimination contributed to unrest and unhappiness and that those concerns should be addressed by the Federal government because big city mayors, like Daley and his ilk had failed to.

Now I’ll conceede the War on Poverty didn’t work, but the reasons are alot more complex than “it made people lazy and they didn’t want to work.” I just don’t trust stereotypes about African Americans that are directly borrowed from pro slavery rhetoric that warned of “idleness” were black people to be freed. Anyone who studies black urbanization knows that black folks worked the hardest, dirtiest jobs in cities at the lowest pay. They were the first fired and last hired. Most urban unions opposed integration and even then wouldnt recognize black seniority until the seventies when white workers moved en masse to the suburbs. I’ve never seen a single shred of statistical evidence identifying African Americans as non-workers. Everything I’ve seen says that black women always worked more than white women, because black families needed two low wage jobs to make ends meet.

Interesting how I can readily acknowledge that those social prejudices were wrong, but your Marxist philosophy can’t allow the right to voluntary trade for all adults

Luckily for all of us, I’m not a marxist ideologue. No seriously, I’m not. I don’t understand why your side always feels the need to create these strawmen. I don’t think a socialist revolution needs to happen, I don’t think the workers should own the means of production and I certainly don’t think the bourgouise is evil. I DO think that our country has descended into a culture where nothing more than profit and greed are markers for success and the pursuit of those things is 100% unregulated at the expense of ANYTHING, even if the cost is war, death, exploitation and VAST inequalities. And I just don’t think it has to be that bad. When you say people should have the right to trade freely, I agree, but you don’t really mean that do you? Does that extend to the weed dealer on the corner? To the guy who wants to sell a nuclear bomb to Iran? Who wants to sell kiddy porn to 8th graders. And that’s not to equate nuke dealers, pederats and weed dealers, but they are examples of trade between individuals that you’re 100% OK with regulating. And that’s what’s so disingenuous about the right. If they REALLY believed in free markets, why do they pump certain industries with federal subsidies while ignoring others? Of course fossil fuels seem like our only option, because our government has funded fossil fuel development at the behest of corporations, rather than alternative fuels.

And this extends to the debate about the war on poverty and the demonization of welfare when it comes to racial minorities. In the same sentence politicians will say “we can’t just give money to working families to make ends meet” and “we’re going to give tons of taxpayer money to these corporations because they donated to my campaign” and then they’ll call it “conservatism.”

DeathToMediaHacks on January 25, 2009 at 2:51 PM