The personal call and the timely intervention significantly bolstered Kennedy’s standing among black voters. They also strengthened the political alliance between the Democratic Party and African Americans. After his release, King praised Kennedy for exhibiting “moral courage of a high order.”
.. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he cemented a political alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party that continues to this day. But celebrating these landmark pieces of legislation makes it easy to overlook what black people in the United States lost when civil rights and equality for blacks were hitched to the Democratic Party.
.. As King understood, Democratic politicians acted more boldly on race issues in Alabama and Mississippi than in New York and Massachusetts.
.. “liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.”
.. After the 1964 election, where Republican candidate Barry Goldwater described the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional, black voters essentially found themselves in a one-party system for presidential elections.
.. This is a problem for black voters, because the Democratic Party’s vision of racial justice is also extremely limited. Northern liberals pioneered what scholars now call “colorblind racism.” That’s when racially neutral language makes extreme racial inequalities appear to be the natural outcome of innocent private choices or free-market forces rather than intentional public policies like housing covenants, federal mortgage redlining, public housing segregation, and school zoning.
.. “People have to understand that although the civil-rights bill was good and something for which I worked arduously, there was nothing in it that had any effect whatsoever on the three major problems Negroes face in the North: housing, jobs, and integrated schools…the civil-rights bill, because of this failure, has caused an even deeper frustration in the North.”
.. most white politicians and voters assume that the civil-rights revolution not only leveled the playing field, but also tilted it in favor of African Americans.
The Lincoln Caucus
First, the Lincoln Caucus would work with the rules committee to get rid of any party bylaws that inhibit delegate flexibility at the convention. Second, it would tell the Trump and Cruz campaigns this: After the second ballot, we will entertain offers for our support. You may offer us policy pledges, personnel positions or anything you think will win our favor.
.. It would also create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee who is not Trump or Cruz. Remember, the members of the caucus would be delegates, not Washington insiders. They would be a committeeman from Missouri or a state rep from Ohio. They’d be tied to the grass roots, and the press would be all over these people at the convention. This is the best way to get a non-Trump/Cruz candidate without sparking riots in the streets.
.. In our republican system, it is parties that choose nominees; not primary voters. Parties are lasting institutions that manage coalitions, preserve historical commitments, protect us from flash-in-the-pan demagogues and impose restraints on the excessively ambitious. The Lincoln Caucus would embody these legitimate institutional responsibilities.
I Fooled the Internet with a Petition to Allow Guns at the Republican Convention
This week, an anonymous internet person calling himself the “Hyper Rationalist” launched a Change.org petition calling for guns to be allowed at the GOP convention this July. It went viral, gathering more than 50,000 signatures and launching a bevy of incredulous news articles. Some people assumed it was a joke, or supported it jokingly, but others took it seriously enough that Donald Trump said he would consider it, and the Secret Service had to clarify that no guns would be allowed at the event.
It was, it turns out, a piece of satire from a self-described liberal, but you can’t blame people if they weren’t sure whether they should laugh—in 2016, it’s increasingly difficult to sort out satire from fact.
.. The goal was to write something earnestly in the words of somebody on the pro-gun side of the debate. Not the furthest right person on that side, not the most easily caricatured—I imagined someone who could easily get a guest spot on Fox News. I tried to use that sort of language, for the most part, with little tweaks, like the capitalization of “HUSSEIN” in “Barack Hussein Obama,” as clues for people who might be in on the joke. I wrote what I think Republicans should have written without me, in order to not be in contradiction of their own stated principles about guns.
.. My sense was that the vast majority of support was from people who knew that it was satire. But I don’t know. That’s very unscientific; I’m not going to comb through 50,000 comments and try to figure that out. I don’t necessarily think it took off because Republicans supported it—but I think it’s absurd that most Republicans were silent on it.
Donald Trump and the Stunts That Expose the G.O.P.
The petition, which gained more than fifty thousand signatures, turned out to be something of a Dada joke: an attempt, on the part of a gun-control enthusiast, to force gun fetishists to confront the logic, or illogic, of their own position. If guns bring order, why not bring them to a Cleveland delegate floor fight?
.. What Trump oddly does is X-ray the Republican id, pure and raw, without the quavers that they have learned to execute in order to get down the street without being stopped. Being a Republican candidate is like being a professional wrestler. You’re supposed to be maximally crazy, but you’re supposed to pretend to pay attention to the referee who is, sort of, there to enforce fair play. You’re supposed to hit your opponent over the head with a chair, but you’re supposed to pretend to hide the chair you are about to hit him with from the view of the referee. Trump is willing to be maximally crazy, when it comes to the more extreme positions of the G.O.P., but he can’t remember, or perhaps never learned, the minimally sane-sounding speech acts that the referees want you first to attach to the craziness.
.. The actual position of the Republican Party since the Bush Administration, for example, has been to violate Reagan-era treaties, reject the Geneva Conventions, and torture people—but you’re not supposed to say you favor torturing people. You’re supposed to say that you are opposed to torture, but what you’re in favor of isn’t really torture and anyway you would only do it when you had to and anyway they tortured us first. (Terrorism equals torture, so they started it.)
.. It’s the same with abortion and big government. The actual position of the Republican platform, where abortion equals murder, would demand the creation of a government bureaucracy, a full-time pregnancy police, with cops who spend all of their hours tracking pregnant women to those now-illegal clinics and district attorneys who specialize in prosecuting doctors and can, of course, only do so by intimidating women to get them to testify—you cannot have a law making something a serious crime and not have the police pursue it.
.. What’s useful about these little Dada exercises is that they end by doing the great and distinctly conservative work of revealing the actual beliefs of the people who are taking part in politics.
.. We know that even the most passionate believers in forced birth don’t actually believe that abortion is really like murder, and have no real desire to treat it as such; they just want to do all they can to make abortion once again difficult, dangerous, and heavily stigmatized. They are for torture, but they are ashamed of it, too, and would rather it were done far away and in secret.