Confederate nation
EMERY, NOEMIE
Confederate Nation By Noemie Emery And the word came down from above: Educators in the state of Texas were commanded to defy and circumvent orders enforcing a colorblind doctrine endorsed by...
...ghettoized programs, where students and members of the faculty can sit around and argue about whether a white person can think a black thought...
...Their idea of freedom is that of the group from majority influence...
...Liberals see a loose web of tribal affinities...
...DuBois wrote, "The human contact of human beings must be increased...to bring into closer contact and mutual knowledge the black and white people...
...The states taken—one each out of 50—by McGov-ern and Mondale were liberal, and from the northern sector...
...That different races can combine in one people...
...Fairness is bias...
...In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family was denounced so savagely by black and white liberals that all discussion of the issues it raised was curtailed...
...George Wallace, multicultural hero...
...King said, "Whether we believe it or not, and whether the racist understands it or not, our music, our poets, our material prosperity . . . are amalgams of black and white...
...In 1954, Sen...
...Republicans are slowly moving toward a post-racial politics while Democrats move in a different direction...
...Fairness is part of the dream," Dianne Feinstein told Californi-ans in 1990, pledging, in the interests of an "open" government, to "appoint women . . . and people of color" in proportion to their population in the state...
...As Richard Hofstadter writes of Calhoun and his theories, "The concurrent majority itself was a device without relevance to the protection of dissent, but designed specifically to protect a vested interest of considerable power...
...If we amalgamate into one unit, the freedom of our development is gone...
...At the 1972 Democratic convention, a South Carolina delegation survived a challenge that it had not met its quota on women...
...In his mammoth history of the American people, Samuel Eliot Morison describes the slow death of all kinds of discussion as the South slid to war...
...They stress differences, exaggerate differences, try to codify differences in law...
...Civil-rights leaders today reach back to their prepossessions, attaching old words to a different agenda...
...If so, how is it enforced...
...Different standards emerged for black and white students...
...Territorial districting cannot recognize dispersed interests," Guinier tells us...
...The abolition agitation, instead of making converts, engendered a closing of minds...
...Integration against racial ties...
...A black-power unit, seeking separate studies...
...That will be the day not of the white man and not of the black man...
...Countries and causes that classify people by background or color always end badly...
...The common emotion is fear...
...Now, as we enter the next century, Republicans should move us all beyond race, past the detour of Confederate theories, and back to the Unionist core...
...As Morison says, Calhoun "gave proslavery doctrine the sanction of his name and character, and so cunningly combined it with American prepossessions that slavery appeared no longer the antithesis of, but an essential ingredient of, democracy...
...The case is advanced, by those who promote them, that these first sets of race-based classifications were based on intentions malignant in nature, while the intentions of the last group are "benign...
...The Republican party, to which some southern racists fled in the 1960s away from the federal imposition of civil-rights laws, has become the party of choice for the integrationist faction, unhappy with race-conscious remedies...
...In 1915, W.E.B...
...Democrats defended the planters who subsisted on slavery (the final expression of race-based preferment...
...ticulturalism, separate classes on campus, districts designed to compass a single skin color...
...The multi-racial category could affect federal funding for affirmative action programs and shift congressional maps...
...John C. Calhoun, theoretician of the antebellum South, would have understood...
...Conservatives see one Union, composed of free people...
...It is in discussions of voting-rights matters that this reaches critical mass...
...Southern dissenters were denounced as unnatural beings...
...Black Republicans came very close to state office in Connecticut and Mississippi...
...Did these orders issue from the mouths of Dixiecrat segregationists fighting civil-rights groups and the federal government...
...They were integrationists and American patriots...
...She did not take this message to Maine or to Texas, where Republican women faced liberal men...
...The party of Lincoln should return to its roots, pick up the flag of the Unionist party, and engage the new Confederates in civil war...
...It is a matter of whether people belong to themselves, and can find their own values...
...The separation of American citizens into arbitrary (and incomplete and incomprehensive) ethnic groupings sends a message that is terrible in its effects...
...Liberalism became unreceptive, if not hostile, to new, contradictory, and sometimes frightening information," creating "an almost censorious set of prohibitions" against even the mention of things they found troubling...
...Calhoun said majority rule had "the major advantage of simplicity...
...James Eastland issued this protest to the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education: "Segregation promotes racial harmony...
...Civil-rights activists aping the machinations of the segregationists, and the Old South before them...
...Facts are distorted, terms misapplied, associations made with no basis in logic...
...In 1994, it pressed the use of the term "African-American" to mark off one singular kind...
...In 1995, there was precious little "close contact" on movement-drenched campuses, where minority students asked for and got separate dorms, classes, clubs, proms, and yearbooks, and (to quote Henry Louis Gates, Jr...
...The reference texts are easy to come by...
...Guinier and Calhoun (and George Wallace) sound like each other...
...Calhoun visualized a Congress of strictly defined group representation," Coit tells us, "the rise of a sort of minority control...
...But these different ideas had better be uniform, or be axed by the movement establishment...
...In time, they mean nothing at all...
...Laws were passed against criticism outside the South of southern institutions...
...Nor, of course, to Calhoun's...
...Is there a "right" to election to office...
...This could shock only someone who has not yet noticed how close the New Left has come to the Old South in both tactics and spirit, as the Left and the Right have changed sides...
...Strange things began to occur...
...This misses the point and the heart of the matter: The classification of people into racial and/or ethnic classes, and the different treatment of them on this basis, is always malignant, no matter what the intention of that act is claimed to be...
...But it stranded them in a Congress where their clout was diminished: Leaching them out left bleached districts around them, that tipped to Republican rule...
...But if one has a vote, how can it "mean little...
...A candidate who wins with even 50.5...
...Civil-rights lobbies and their tool, the Democratic party, want federal power—expanded, invasive, vast federal power—to enforce their complex agenda...
...We are in company we should not want to keep...
...Kennedy said, "Over the long run, we are going to have a mix...
...George Wallace, liberal before his time...
...fixedly alien to America and all it means...
...For that they have no time at all...
...Ranking people by color is "part of the dream...
...Coit, "believed 'it was not democracy when 51% of the people have a moral right to coerce 49%.'" Guinier says, "This system cruelly overcompen-sates the majority...
...They have vested interests in their position as spokesmen...
...today's leaders should sound like Lincoln...
...They believed in the melting pot, not the mosaic...
...Blacks elected by whites are not legitimate voices...
...Moral qualms concerning abortion are considered unthinkable in today's civil-rights movement...
...Words, in their mouths, come to lose their old meanings...
...George Wallace, meet George McGovern, meet multiculturalism...
...gets 100% of the power, while someone with 49.5% gets nothing...
...In some areas, black voters remain unable to elect officials who can or will diligently defend their interest," Guinier writes...
...Former NAACP head Benjamin Chavis called Clarence Thomas an "extra-terrestrial being" because he disliked his decisions from the bench...
...As the argument went in Plessy v. Ferguson, it is the "unconstitutionality of the assortment" that is wrong...
...Atwater began his career with Strom Thurmond, whose arc is instructive: A segregationist Democrat— Dixiecrat—segregationist Republican—he would in late life defend Clarence Thomas, a black conservative married to a white activist woman, against the now-racist Left...
...The Birmingham fire department, taken to court for not hiring blacks, was taken to court by whites some years later, when a black who scored 86th on a test for lieutenant was promoted over a white who scored 6th...
...It is a matter of whether personal identity is one's own possession, or something determined by others...
...These ideas give raise to the call for rigged voting districts, to "maximize" black voting power...
...It permits each race to follow its own pursuits and its own civilization . . . desired and supported by the vast majority of both races...
...They then say the Senate has too many men...
...In 1972, McGovern's convention defined as essential "the right to be different, to maintain a cultural or ethnic lifestyle or heritage, without being forced into a compelled homogeneity...
...Race creates character, passed on by blood...
...Feminists rail against "locker-room government," then attack female moderates, backing men in Senate races who are more fanatic on the movement line...
...Minneapolis and Seattle (75 percent white) now have black mayors...
...In the Confederacy, you could be the chattel of your own blood relations...
...In 1926, the Ku Klux Klan compared the "remarkable race character" of the colonial settlers to that of the recent immigrant, "inalterably fixed in his instincts, character, thought and interests by centuries of racial selection and development...
...Indeed, the office that issued the orders (which have since been abandoned) was the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education...
...The right of people to differ within groups does not get their attention...
...In the 1860s, Republicans moved the country past slavery...
...Results were measured in numbers, which became an obsession...
...For, as Roger Wilkins explains, "There is some political and intellectual behavior that you indulge in that keeps you from being a black person," while Derrick Bell tells us, "Diversity is not served by someone who looks black and thinks white...
...A possible menace to unit cohesion, freedom of thought is fought down...
...Guinier favors "legislative supermajorities for passing laws, and . . . a minority veto...
...As Hof-stadter says, "Southern leaders reacted with the most intense and exaggerated anxiety to every fluctuation in the balance of sectional power...
...In their book Chain Reaction, Thomas and Mary Edsall reported, "As liberalism came under siege in the late 1960s, many on the Left developed a dangerous intellectual intolerance...spurred on by fear of information damaging to liberal goals...
...the true brotherhood of America [is] in respecting separateness and uniting in effort...
...The right to vote meant little if the political rules...diluted the impact of black votes," ran a story in the New York Times, speaking of "district boundaries that spread minorities over areas where they stood little chance of getting elected," as if the right to vote and getting elected were one and the same...
...Diversity is uniformity of thought...
...But for the purposes of grievance deployed by the new Confederate lobbies, they qualify as a duly aggrieved racial minority...
...Calhoun, says Mrs...
...Liberals, on the other hand, stand for the things that divide...
...Public criticism of slavery was suppressed in the South by the force of public opinion, even where laws were lacking...
...An immigrant nation, a refugee nation, a nation of mongrels descended from outcasts, America stands for three things...
...Not quite...
...We are now at a point where hard-working "A" students from backgrounds like Lincoln's (and Jackson's) are barred from the places they earn, because of skin color...
...Calhoun called the slave system "a positive good, . . . the most solid and durable foundation on which to rest free and stable political institutions...
...Districts like the ones created in the 1980s were first seen in Mississippi in the 1870s, as whites sought to hold power, herding blacks off into one oddly shaped district, while they held the rest of the state...
...The impulse to censor is one and the same...
...Then, of course, it was not called Black Power, it was called keeping blacks in their place...
...It had simply moved northward, to the liberal Ivy League strongholds, where its largely white and insulated legions formed a clique not unlike the southern planters— privileged, elite, and out of touch...
...But an Illinois delegation, duly elected, was ejected for being diversity-impaired...
...Nor are whites elected by blacks...
...Calhoun created the "concurrent majority," where each bloc had added votes on concerns of its own borders, federal laws it disliked...
...Professor Clement Eaton . . . placed him first among those politicians who 'created stereotypes in the minds of the southern people, that produced intolerance.' . . . It was minority privileges, rather than rights, that he really proposed to protect...
...Sometimes, this . . . is the product of election rules that prevent black voters from electing any candidates," sometimes of standards that "simply count black faces" without knowing whose faces they are...
...The individual voter, the distinct human being, whose allegiance belongs to the culture in general, does not speak to her interest...
...The government is not the Racial Police...
...But they want all this power to break down the Union: the federal engine of Jackson and Lincoln, in pursuit of the goals of Calhoun...
...In the old South, moral qualms about slavery were considered unthinkable...
...We cannot reach Lincoln's country by way of Calhoun...
...As promised, these districts brought non-whites to office, swelling the congressional Black Caucus to a modern high of 41...
...The supporters of the modern concept of multicul-turalism could not put it better...
...In Nazi Germany, the "wrong" classification could land you in Auschwitz...
...Hispanics are not a race, are not more distinctive than other white ethnics, and have never been subject to legal segregation or slavery...
...It is a matter of whether race is the one thing that defines people completely, or merely one of many things that help to describe them...
...Women who would like to identify as women are not recognized per se...
...They run blacks as "blacks" and women as "women" for office, implying therein that these people are "different"—a claim that the Right now denies...
...In its current Census, there are four, or five, or six groups of races: American Indian or Alaskan native...
...Parties change, the players change, the skin tone may change, but the war remains constant: national pride against local allegiance...
...Whites" (who technically include American Indians) are then divided into Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites...
...The rationale for all this is that (1) voting rights means voting for one of one's own color...
...It is the law of God...
...Jackson became what historian Richard Hofstadter called "the hero of the lower and middling elements of American society, who believed in expanding opportunity through equal rights...
...Does the vote of a black person lack "impact" if it is not cast as part of a bloc...
...Calhoun, says his biographer Margaret Coit, "saw the country . . . as a union of discordant minorities, each with a right to freedom and self-determination," composed of "states, not individuals . . . an experiment in diversity . . . based on the rights of the people to choose their own way of life...
...In November 1969, Democrats took a step that still haunts them, when a "reform" commission under George McGovern voted to impose numerical quotas on the delegations sent to their national conventions by the states...
...King said, "There can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment...
...Race is a key factor in drawing boundaries for congressional districts and in funding more than 200 federal programs...
...In the newly Confederate American order, it can only cheat you out of a college place or federal contract you had earned on the merits...
...The same fate befell Walter Mondale, another CSA leader, who in 1984 carried affirmative action to its ultimate power, attempting to place in the line of succession a vastly underqualified three-term member of the House whose only reason for being on the ticket was that she could be referred to as "she...
...Thurmond's journey parallels the Republican party's in the past 30 years...
...In the post-Civil War South, you could lead a separate and most unequal life...
...Mails from the North and England were examined and 'purified...
...Women are a "caste and a class," a political entity...
...Civil-rights lobbies also create stereotypes that produce intolerance, describing all critics as fascists and racists...
...On the other hand, those that hold different standards for races and genders ought to be fought and destroyed...
...there can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not recognize the necessity of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and justice...
...Only when blacks elect blacks are "voting rights" granted, and sometimes, not even then: These must have a "cultural and psychological view of group solidarity" that makes them "authentically black...
...She wants to bolster the power of groups, against individuals, and the general interest...
...the liberals see states of mind...
...He saw states with rights above and beyond the Union...
...Each wished to empower blocs, and to add to their number...
...So too is "preference...
...that this nation is not an aggregation of small, defined, ethnic fragments, but one Union, composed of free men...
...Whose side do we want to be on...
...Their idea of difference is that of one group from another...
...Quotas (which supposedly do not exist) lead to "inclusion," creating "diversity," and different cultural viewpoints...
...Gary Franks and J. C. Watts won races for Congress on conservative platforms in districts less than 10 percent non-white...
...In the planter class was Michael Dukakis, Ashley Wilkes out of Brookline, who was roundly defeated when his views on power, the Pledge, and the treatment of felons were exposed by Lee Atwater, a Gingrich precursor and prototype white southern male...
...This is not what its founders envisioned...
...In Apartheid South Africa, it could condemn you to virtual slavery...
...Calhoun's great enemy was Andrew Jackson, a nationalist and a democrat who built his base on farmers and artisans...
...But the current civil-rights movement threatens the rights of men daily, in the name of a divisive and race-coded culture...
...That the right to form, hold, and express one's opinions is the greatest civil right of them all...
...So, of course, did Calhoun...
...To comprehend the southern planter," Morison tells us, "we must remember that his social system was on the defensive against the rest of the civilized world...
...Asian or Pacific Islander...
...where bright black students underachieve on purpose to fill a mistaken idea of their identity...
...Ultimately, it is a question of whether or not one is free...
...They are the harbingers of the new Confederate Nation...
...Currently, the American government is considering the addition of a new label—"multi-racial"—to accommodate the growing number of mixed-race Americans, who do not want to be forced by their government into a formal denial of one or more parts of their heritage...
...Gloria Steinem went to Texas to call Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" because Steinem disliked Hutchison's political theories...
...A decade before, another Democrat stated, "This nation was never made to be a unit of one, but a unit of many...
...Both devised ways to thwart public opinion...
...And back again we are thrust into the CSA...
...The Right now wants a national culture, a common transethnic identity...
...The liberal today is likewise embattled, his preference for the arbitrary and sometimes secret workings of the courts and agencies reflecting what the Edsalls called "the staggering difficulties of maintaining majority support for the liberal agenda" as it has come to be accepted and defined...
...Programs that help individuals reach their potential should be supported and strengthened...
...It is the law of nature...
...These, not the rising black middle classes, became the objects of pique for defecting Democrats, who were more against burning flags than for burning crosses as they moved into the Reagan era and defined themselves by their values...
...Thus, black groups back whites against black conservatives, while deploring the dearth of black faces...
...But while liberals in Congress backed themselves into corners, others were building bases of power, attracting the backing of many white voters, on the basis of common ideas...
...That would be racially, socially, ethnically and geographically, and that is finally, the best way...
...In 1986, black playwright August Wilson explained why he insisted on a black director: "We have different ideas about religion, different manners of social intercourse, . . . different ideas about language, . . . a different way of responding to the world...
...It is safe to say that while Calhoun would not have approved of the direction in which preferences flowed under the system attacked by California's Proposition 209, he would understand, and approve, the theory behind it...
...Too different to merge, these are better kept separate, past the danger of contamination...
...Openness is excluding some people...
...Each ethnic group has its own special culture, made up in turn of like-minded people, connected by genetic affinity...
...The belief that identity is not race-connected...
...In 1857, Morison tells us, a book called The Impending Crisis was published in the South, and then suppressed...
...But Nazi Germany, the old South Africa, and the South of the Confederacy and segregation never made claims to be fair...
...Pressures like these may exist in the culture, but the state ought to fight them, not back them, much less urge them on...
...The policy implications could be overwhelming," the Washington Times reported...
...Today, movement leaders greet changes of policy with charges of genocide...
...Guinier warns of the "simple-minded notions of majority rule...
...Guinier thinks in terms of "opening the system up to groups of voters...
...As King said, "We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience...
...Kennedy spoke of an intertwined culture, where "the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened...
...But 20 years later, the Democrats had become Calhoun's party...
...Sex is a class, and a new source of grievance...
...At the same time, Republicans should start a campaign to get all racial classifications removed from the Census, starting right here and now...
...And like those liberals, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King...
...Lincoln would probably find it appalling...
...Alas, no one has yet found a district where women reside without men...
...Both think in terms of channeling power from the individual and the central government to the organized and vocal interest groups...
...Civil-rights groups became more exotic...
...In 1832, Jackson broke with Calhoun and forced the South Carolinian from the national ticket...
...In 1919, the NAACP urged the "abolition of color-hyphenation, and the substitution of 'straight American' to describe all American citizens...
...The American government is heading in that direction as well...
...or whether they "belong" to the race and its so-distant spokesmen...
...Civil-rights groups and the federal government—at least the part of it ruled by Bill Clinton—were the ones fighting to retain color-based preference in the teeth of opposition from the public, the Constitution, and the courts...
...That will be the day of man as man...
...Confederate Nation By Noemie Emery And the word came down from above: Educators in the state of Texas were commanded to defy and circumvent orders enforcing a colorblind doctrine endorsed by American voters and citizens and backed up by federal courts...
...2) whites will not vote for blacks...
...It is destructive, insulting, immoral, and potentially fatal to the moral underpinnings of the American nation, whose promise has always been that a man is more than the sum of his ethnic components...
...Calhoun saw the South oppressed by "hostile legislation," a "handfull, in the midst of an overwhelming majority," a "fixed and hopeless minority," and said blacks "live in a different world from whites...
...The Confederate South had an array of racial classifications, based not merely on color, but gradations of it...
...Maximizing black power required diluting it—spreading it out to play balance-of-power...
...The first Confederate to run on the Democrats' ticket, McGovern lost 49 states to his rival, eight years after Johnson, running as the integrationist candidate, beat the states-rights camp in the Democratic party to its knees...
...Lani Guinier, meet John C. Cal-houn, concerned, like herself, with minority power, and in much the same turn of phrase...
...The Confederacy had not died...
...All these are under attack by the civil-rights movement, which not only aggravates the old fault lines of race, creed, and language, but actively seeks out new lines of division, based upon culture and sex...
...where bi-racial students are pressured to align with one "side" or the other...
...The things that they back tend to fragment the culture: bilingualism, mulNoemie Emery is a writer living in Fairfax, Va., whose work appears frequently in The Weekly Standard...
...In the 1960s, the Democrats moved it beyond segregation...
...Inclusion is best served by excluding dissenters...
...A century later, the pattern repeated: FDR's party of equal rights and the national interest became the province of the special-interest groups...
...Meanwhile, the middle classes of the North and West passed through the Whigs to the Republican party and to Abraham Lincoln, Jackson's political heir...
...These detours back to Confederate theory have taken us far off our course...
...John Kennedy's "equality of treatment" became Lyndon Johnson's "equality as a result...
...That was a point not lost on the four black congressmen who went to court to try to stop a redistricting measure in Ohio in 1993...
...In 1994, Tipper Gore went to California to urge female votes for Dianne Feinstein and Kathleen Brown in the interests of sisterly feeling...
...black and white...
...George Wallace—"segregation forever"—circa 1963...
...So are disabilities of any kind...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 35
