Our man in Fukushima

tom van dyke in reply to Bill Hubbard says:

Mr. Hubbard, I’ve been thinking on Moynihan this very hour:

The quote seems wiser than it is, in praise of politics, when viewed through the prism of America’s historical shame on race issues.

As it turned out, Brown vs. Board, overturning legal segregation via Plessy, was finally a fulfillment of our constitutional principles [incl. the 14th, of course]. Our constitutional principles, perfectly wrought, are not “political” as such. [Politics is the realm of opinion, not “self-evident” truth.]

And yes, there was a decade of battle on the ground [Little Rock, Selma, Bull Connor].

And I give no small credit to Lyndon Baines Johnson, the cracker who twisted every arm he’d ever met in Congress to bring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 home.

But in the end—and I think he was just speaking the American consensus—it was Sen. Everett Dirksen’s not-famous enough speech that broke the Dixiecrat filibuster:

“It is said on the night he died, Victor Hugo made this closing entry in his diary: “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.” Later it was put in more dramatic form: “Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose hour has come.”

This is the issue with which we have been wrestling for months. There will be continued resistance for one reason or another. There will in some quarters be a steadfast refusal to come to grips with what seems an inevitable challenge which must be met. The idea of equal opportunity to vote, to secure schooling, to have public funds equitably spent, to have public parks and playgrounds equally accessible, to have an equal opportunity for a livelihood without discrimination, to be equal before the law—the hour for this idea has come and it will not be denied or resisted.”

As it turned out, although they resulted in substantive political change, the civil rights marches were in the end cultural: they convinced the whites of the righteousness of the cause, but also convinced the blacks who marched that this was important enough to them to call on the American conscience.

[Non-violently, no small forbearance on their part, against Bull Connor’s firehoses. Anybody can riot when their ox is gored, see Greece of late.]

The other thing was how the Moynihan Report was vilified in its time, telling people what they don’t what to hear and the delegitimization directed against it. But one crisis at a time.

Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was political on its face [by its very name, “civil” rights], but a government and its laws cannot remake a society, for it cannot remake the human beings that populate it. The remaking of American society toward racial equality came about not through the civil rights legislation, but by changing the American mind. And the American mind was changed by the heroes who stood up to Bull Connor’s firehoses far more than those who simply “spoke truth to power.”

Talk is cheap.Report