Posted on 12/29/2002 8:35:58 AM PST by TLBSHOW
The Neocons & Nixon's Southern Strategy
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child.
Lear's reflection upon ingratitude comes to mind as one reads of the squabble among neoconservatives over who among them was first to stick his nail file in the back of Trent Lott.
Charles Krauthammer enters a claim for the Kristol-Bennett crowd, while Jonah Goldberg of National Review and cashiered Bush speech-writer David Frum insist they, too, played supporting roles.
Whether Lott may have been innocent of any hate crime, or whether they might have had a moral duty to step in to stop a lynching of one of their own -- even had Lott blundered -- seem to be thoughts that never once intruded upon these tiny minds. Yet their collusion in ruining Lott, their relish in the pats on the head they are receiving from the Left, confirm the suspicion. Neoconservatives are the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.
With Lott gone, Bill Kristol is now collaborating with The New York Times in its rewrite of the history of the 1960s, a decade of liberal debacles, to credit racism for the Republicans' success.
"Lott is really virtually the last of the products of Richard Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' to be in major positions of power in the Congress," Kristol assures the Times. "With his leaving you will have cleared out people who ... have a somewhat compromised image to the country as a whole."
Now, as a co-architect of the Nixon strategy that gave the GOP a lock on the White House for a quarter century, let me say that Kristol's opportunism is matched only by his ignorance. Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with a column on the South (by this writer) that declared we would build our Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the "party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice."
In that '66 campaign, Nixon -- who had been thanked personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 -- endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.
In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for V.P. Why? Agnew had routed George ("You're home is your castle!") Mahoney for governor of Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.
When the '68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent, Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.
Between 1969 and 1974, Nixon, who believed that blacks had gotten a raw deal in America and wanted to extend a helping hand:
-- raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
-- doubled the budget for black colleges;
-- appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
-- adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
-- invented "Black Capitalism" (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4000 percent;
-- raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, "It has only been since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation has taken place in the South."
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is a lie. Nixon routed the Left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on our campuses.
Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. To see Kristol colluding with the Times to rewrite that history to make liberals heroes and Republicans villains tells us more about him than about the era.
And where were the necons, when Goldwaterites and Nixonites were building the New Majority? Going all the way with LBJ.
Neoconservatives are the useful idiots of the liberal establishment.
Perhaps it is the reverse which is true: neocons are liberalism's fifth column within the conservative movement. They certainly have succeeded in pushing "conservatives" leftward on quite a few issues.
Kristol and Buchanan are absolutely useless to conservatives.
Perhaps, but for different reasons. The important thing to note, however, is that conservatives themselves are now absolutely useless to anyone.
Useful Idiots
In my opinion, conservatives in the Republican party, are used in exactly the same manner as Blacks are used in the Dem. The PTB, keep them around as tokens, to ease the bases concern.
Allot of good it does if you come back and lose yet again.
Russell Kirk observed that what really motivated the neo-cons was not conservative principles or limited government or any kind of American identity, but rather identification with the State of Israel. That about sums them up. Their "rightward" shift happened because the left was losing its earlier affection for Israel, and becoming anti-American (which, in the context of contemporary politics, meant anti-Israeli, too). In reality the neo-cons have never understood or had any kind of instinctual sympathy for the traditions or ideals of American conservativism. They were quite happy with the left and with big government, until their interests dictacted a move "rightward". On many important issues, they are still instinctive Marxists. They will chose the big government option every time; anything which gives them a chance to lobby and politic for more power for themselves and their allies.
Why the personnel 'Patsy' attack, does it mean you have nothing to say? Geeze!! !
Now, this I can use.. I can think of many examples here.
Multitudes in fact.
People who slime Pat for leaving the Republican Party are hysterical and hypocritical; Pat tried playing by their rules and was spat on at every turn by the GOP hierarchy.
In several states they even kept his name off of the Presidential Primary ballots, solely on the authority of GOP bigwigs. They made it perfectly clear to Pat that he would never get a fair shake from within the GOP. They have no one to blame but themselves if Pat took them at their word, and chose to run outside the party instead.
To gain loyalty, you have to show loyalty, and that is something which the GOP leadership has never done; in fact, Reagan's presidency can now be seen as nothing more than a brief interruption between the rule of the usual GOP hierarchy and their pet establishment types. There is nothing they hate more than the idea that the GOP rank and file might actually prefer a real, genuinelly conservative candidate.
Reagan was the exception, not the rule.
How so? He blasted the Bushes and the party through 2 election cycles.
Good stuff.
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