Liberals from the party of Jim Crow think GOP want to go there

Jonah Goldberg:

When will liberals stop living in the past? Specifically, when will they accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow?

I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation.

It’s bizarre. I spend most of my time talking or listening to fellow conservatives, and I never hear anybody talk about wanting anything of the sort. But to listen to liberals, that’s all we care about.

Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits — a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act — thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once comprised the Confederacy. These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.

Just this week, in an essay for The New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — the first female Indian American governor in America — for appointing Rep. Tim Scott to retiring Sen. Jim DeMint’s seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite. So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

“Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment,” Reed writes, “so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests.”

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When Herman Cain — another inconveniently black man — was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in the Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

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More recently, liberal writers apparently convinced themselves that Republican opposition to Susan Rice becoming the next secretary of state was payback for the Emancipation or something.

“Angry over the reelection of the nation’s first black president,” vented a writer for The American Prospect, “a handful of old white senators — one of whom hails from the cradle of the Confederacy — launch hysterical and dishonest attacks on . . . a well-qualified African-American woman.”

The Washington Post editorial board also noted that of the GOP legislators expressing their reservations about Rice, “nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.” Of course, the same racist representatives of Dixie also thought it fine to confirm Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for the same job.

It’s like a metastasizing cancer of delusion. To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

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It could be that liberals are that misinformed about the motives of conservatives who support black politicians.  But, I tend to think they are frightened that other blacks may join the conservative cause which would be the end of political viability of much of the Democrat party.  For them that is really scary   For me it would be progress for blacks and for the country as a whole.  Escaping from the party that destroyed the black family and the party that is keeping their kids in failing schools would definitely be a step up the ladder of success for blacks.