First Principles

For a long time, I’ve believed that Jimmy Carter was a decent man at some point in the past who was in over his head as president, did good things for charities, and had grown bitter and stupid with age.  Certainly, I believed his behavior in the last few years has been reprehensible, but accepted the generally held notion that he was at his core a good man.  But I learned this the other day, and it’s something to keep in mind the next time this person dares to lecture us on racism.

As Laughlin McDonald, director of the ACLU’s Voting Project, relates in his book A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, Carter’s board tried to stop the construction of a new “Elementary Negro School” in 1956. Local white citizens had complained that the school would be “too close” to a white school. As a result, “the children, both colored and white, would have to travel the same streets and roads in order to reach their respective schools.” The prospect of black and white children commingling on the streets on their way to school was apparently so horrible to Carter that he requested that the state school board stop construction of the black school until a new site could be found. The state board turned down Carter’s request because of “the staggering cost.” Carter and the rest of the Sumter County School Board then reassured parents at a meeting on October 5, 1956, that the board “would do everything in its power to minimize simultaneous traffic between white and colored students in route to and from school.”

It turns out that Mr. Carter’s odiousness isn’t anything new after all.  For some reason, I’m having visions of glass houses and people throwing stones…

Unless the foundation of your political philosophy is built upon the supremacy of the individual generally and his liberty specifically (as Mr. Carter’s is NOT), there is no fundamental barrier to racist policies except as a casual preference one way or the other.  This is why Progressivism is so comfortable looking at the world through the prism of race – it is a philosophy which sees all people as mere cogs in The Greater Good.  And the thing about cogs is that they’re easy to segregate, classify, and re-machine to fit other needs.  They also tend to be dispensable if they don’t quite fit the planned schematic.

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Racism and Conservatism are incompatible.  No philosophy based on the supremacy – indeed the sacredness  – of the individual can reconcile itself with the belief that you can judge a man’s worth merely by looking at the color of his skin.  Racism is hateful to a Conservative in a way that it is not – at least not philosophically and logically – to a Progressive.

Our history proves this incompatibility.  Our founding documents were predicated on a belief in the devinely ordained sovereignty of the individual, yet large portions of our society at the time revolved around the classification, exploitation, and dehumanization of certain groups of people based on nothing more than their skin’s melatonin content.

The result of trying to force these two ireconcilable philosophies together was the death of one American out of every 50 men, women, and children alive in the country at the time, and another century of racial violence.  And that was the good outcome.  Things could have been much, much worse.

The vast, vast majority of Americans – no matter who they vote for or what political philosophy they claim – are not racists.  Indeed, this vast majority understands in their souls that racism is deeply, fundamentally wrong, and reject it at every opportunity.  But that only proves that Margaret Thatcher was right when she said that “The facts of life are Conservative.”

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Let me say this again:  Racism and Conservatism are incompatible, and it’s time we as Conservatives say this over and over and over again whenever someone suggests otherwise.  (That goes double when that person is a hypocritical scold like jimmy Carter.)  The problem is that, by our nature, we don’t even like to think about it, because it’s so wholly irrelevant to us.  And so we tend to ignore it altogether, along with the insipid prattle of the liars and/or fools who imagine that every conservative (or anti-Obama) argument is somehow motivated by a secret racism.

But now, our silence has allowed this word to stick to us, however unfair, absurd, and false we know it is.  One of the great victories of the civil rights movement was to make the epitaph “Racist!” one of the worst and most offensive labels one could apply, but once done, it became a potent tool for the dishonest and unscrupulous. I personally find it so offensive that I consider being called a racist fighting words.  Conservatives don’t deserve such a foul descriptor, and should react accordingly when we are so slandered.

(Fortunately, I think this tactic is starting to backfire.  When everything is racist, nothing is.  Sadly, that means that the remnants of real racism are that much harder to confront with the deserved vigor…)

To be sure, there are some  – a tiny minority – who claim the label of conservative who still hold on to their racism.  I say they cannot be both.  Some people forget exactly what it is we are trying to “conserve”.  When those people pop up, they lose elections by landslides and are repudiated by the GOP establishment.  Whatever they call themselves, true conservatives reject them.  If liberals didn’t try to prop them up as “mainstream” in order to fit a false narrative of “conservative = racist”, no one outside of backwater state legislature precincts would even know their names.

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Like so many issues – health care, education, public safety – we aren’t Conservative because we don’t care about racism.  We’re Conservative because we do – and more importantly, because we understand that only by embracing Individualism rather than “corrective racism” will we ever truly be the colorblind society that we should and can be.  Like Chief Justice John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

As part of our mission to preserve and protect liberty everywhere, we need to aggressively and affirmatively work to end racism as only Conservative principles can do.  We can’t do that if we hide from ridiculous slander from the likes of Jimmy Carter.