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Editor's
note: In the current issue of The American
Prospect, staff writer Nicholas Confessore explains
just why opposition to John Ashcroft, now George W. Bush's attorney
general, was so ineffective. National Review editor Rich
Lowry responded
to Confessore's article a few days after it was posted on the web.
Here, Confessore responds.
 'm never sure whether
to be insulted or gratified when a writer for the National Review
accuses me of
"McCarthyism,"
given the magazine's founder's notorious association with the man
who gave birth to the word. And given that Rich Lowry assails me
for name-calling, there's an awful lot of it in his own piece. (It
seems I'm lazy, cowardly, and weak-minded) This sort of thing
plays well on Crossfire, I guess, but it doesn't make for
thoughtful debate. And the conservative slot on Spin Room
is taken, big guy.
But let me address Lowry's appraisal of my recent article about
John Ashcroft on the merits.
Lowry compares blaming the Republicans for David Duke with blaming
the Democrats for the North Vietnamese. "[The] analogous argument
near the end of the Vietnam War would have been: The North Vietnamese
agree with the Democrats' positions on the war, therefore those
positions are communist. This is a cowardly and weak-minded way
to argue." I agree. Too bad many Republicans made precisely
these arguments against Democrats during the Vietnam War —
which, by his verb tense ("would"), I presume Lowry did not know.
(As my colleague Thomas Lowenstein points out, one Republican challenger
often attacked his late father Al Lowenstein, then a U.S Representative
from Long Island, as a "Vietcongressman.") The apt analogy would
be this: For Ashcroft to grant an interview with Southern Partisan
and praise their neo-Confederate revisionism is not unlike a Democratic
senator traveling to Vietnam in the 1970s, granting an interview
to The People's Daily, and praising the glories of life under
communism.
But two wrongs don't make a right. So, again: To the merits.
Effective critics seek out the weakest parts of a subject's argument
and aim their fire there. That's fair. What's less fair is to zoom
in on parts of your subject's argument and deliberately distort
them, as Lowry has done.
Lowry's epigraph has me writing, "Who, exactly, was branding Ashcroft
a racist?" as though I were considering everything that has ever
been written or said about John Ashcroft. He then carts out Jack
White's TV quote to cut my legs out from under me. Readers of my
actual piece will know I was referring to Ashcroft's hearings before
the Senate judiciary committee, during which all of his opponents
conceded that he was not a racist. There's a reason why they were
compelled to do so: Today, in the realm of respectable political
debate, you're either Bull Connor or a disciple of Martin Luther
King, Jr. And if you're not the former, Lowry and the Republicans
have argued, you must necessarily be the latter.
Essentially, Lowry wants to box me out: If I can't point to any
quotations in which Ashcroft identifies himself as a racist, or
argues explicitly for discriminatory policies, then how dare
I accuse him of not being squeaky clean on race? Lowry's
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“If
there was no firm middle ground to be staked out against
Ashcroft, moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats
wouldn't be able to vote against him. And that is what
happened.”
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argument
sounds stupid when stripped down like that. That's because it is
stupid. Stupid, and very rhetorically convenient: If Ashcroft has
never identified himself as a racist or called for a repeal of the
13th Amendment, but only these would qualify for questioning him
on the race issue, then anyone criticizing Ashcroft must be a racemongering
character assassin.
But I should thank Lowry, because his attack on my piece perfectly
parallels the general Republican strategy during the Ashcroft fight:
Divide the world between radical left-wing activists who argue that
Ashcroft is a racist, and those who saw only a fine, upstanding
family man. If there was no firm middle ground to be staked out
against Ashcroft, moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats
wouldn't be able to vote against him. And that is what happened.
There was, of course, a middle ground. It just wasn't delineated
clearly enough. To call Ashcroft's Ronnie White vote "an appeal
to race," or "strong evidence for those who believe the Senate treats
minority and women judiciary nominees unequally," is not to imply
that Ashcroft is a racist as Lowry uses the term. It is an effort,
albeit a clumsy one, to point out Ashcroft's repeated willingness
to pander to and mobilize racial animus for his own political benefit
— regardless of what his own personal feelings about
blacks may be. To Lowry, this argument makes me a bleached-out Al
Sharpton. But I've never, ever argued, as some on the loony left
do, that simply to oppose affirmative action or welfare spending
is racist, or that scoring poorly on the NAACP report card is indicative
of latent racism. That's dumb.
But does Lowry not know that, as a matter of historical fact, Republicans
intentionally crafted a political approach that appealed to racists,
and continued exploiting it for years? If not, maybe he needs to
take another look at some of the seminal documents of his own political
movement, starting with Kevin Phillips' 1969 book, The Emerging
Republican Majority. Phillips, a loyal Republican, was an advisor
to Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. By that point, Phillips wrote,
the GOP "had decided to break with its formative" — that is,
racially liberal — "antecedents and make an ideological bid
for the anti-civil rights South." How? By identifying the increasingly
unpopular redistributional and social policies of the Democrats
as closely as possible with the much loathed, post-Voting Rights
Act rise of black political power. Phillips bloodlessly called this
"Negrophobe" politics, which is cute, but the meaning is clear.
In fact, Phillips argued that the Nixon Administration should continue
to enforce black voting rights, as doing so was "essential if southern
conservatives [were] to be pressured into switching to the Republican
Party." And what of the resulting racial tension? "[G]iven the immense
midcentury impact of Negro enfranchisement and integration, reaction
to this change almost inevitably had to result in political realignment."
Translation: Sorry, Negros. You're the Democrats' problem now.
I'm willing to cut Phillips a little slack — this was 1969
— but Lowry should know better. "Confessore accuses Ashcroft
of seeking to 'benefit' from racist support without bothering, say,
to argue why it was actually wrong to oppose Ronnie White, or why
court-ordered busing in Missouri…actually helped black kids,
or why quotas and race preferences don't represent a betrayal of
America's ideals." Lowry's missing my point entirely (and deliberately).
It goes without saying that there are principled arguments to be
made against, say, racial quotas. But it matters how you make them.
You can argue on the merits, or you can argue that affirmative action
gives lazy minorities a leg up on God-Fearing Real Americans. There
is a difference, and Lowry knows it.
Since I think Lowry is basically a good guy, and I don't see him
defending Southern Partisan or the Dixiecrats, I'm also willing
to believe he doesn't quite mean this as an endorsement of race-baiting,
i.e., "those wedge issues." But the point is that whether or not
Republican ends in the 1960s and 1970s were legitimate doesn't affect
the fact that the means of mobilizing support for those ends
was often disgusting. So is the modern, somewhat ameliorated, Ashcroftian
version. What, Ronnie White voted once for the retrial
— not the acquittal — of an African-American defendant
whose judge had recently opined that blacks are not taxpaying, law-abiding
citizens? Geez, how "pro-criminal" can you get? If there
really was a principled case against White, Ashcroft should have
had the balls to make it before blindsiding White on the Senate
floor, not after being nominated for attorney general.
Am I a McCarthyite? No. Unlike hoary old Joe McCarthy, I would never
call for John Ashcroft's banishment from public life, his imprisonment
(or that of the folks at Southern Partisan) on charges of
treason, or a witch-hunt for putative racists in the Ashcroft Justice
Department. But there should rightly be a political consequence
to his brand of pandering. In the end, there is no good reason why
Ashcroft's Southern Partisan interview alone, on its face,
shouldn't have been an acceptable basis for Democrats and Republicans
alike to oppose his nomination to be attorney general of the United
States.
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