Saturday, April 14, 2012

MLK and the Modern Republican Party

This passage from a 1964 essay by Martin Luther King, Jr., succinctly describes and predicts the emergence of the Republican Party as we have known it for the last 40 years or so, and it comments as as well on the basic sentiments that are activated to rally against President Obama:

For some Americans deluded by myths, the candidacy of a Goldwater seemed a solution for their ills. Essentially he identified big government, radicalism, and bureaucracy as the cause of all evils. Civil rights legislation, in his view, is not a social necessity—it is merely oppressive big government. He ignored the towering presence of discrimination and segregation, but vividly exaggerated crime in the streets. The poverty of the Negroes, he implied, is due to want of ambition and industry. The picture that emerged to delight the racist was that of undeserving, shiftless, criminally dangerous radicals who have manipulated government for their selfish ends, but whose grievances are largely fanciful, and will wither away if left to the states.

—"Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast"

1 comment:

aintstudyingyou said...

How could you say this, framiko? We all know that only the party of Lincoln opposes today's most insidious state racism: affirmative action, which has turned the US into post-apartheid South Africa with a corrupt black government and a menaced white minority.

We all know, in Sarah Palin's words, that King, the pacifist, was a patriotic supporter of the US military. (Her leap from Washington and Lincoln to King--and from King to supporting the troops--at the Restoring Honor Rally was a peroration that left me breathless).

Besides Bernice King leans conservative and she surely inherited her father's philosophy with his DNA. (Apparently her mother's staunch liberalism--including opposing discrimination against gays and lesbians--was not passed on to Bernice. No matter: Coretta Scott King clearly mistook her husband's vision of a Beloved Community which, as I recall, had neighborhood covenants banning gays and recipients of affirmative action).

Sheesh.