Kevin D. Williamson: Yes, the Party of Civil Rights

Kevin D. Williamson writes for the National Review.

Greetings from sunny Madrid, where I am observing the disintegration of the Spanish economy. You wouldn’t know that the country was in crisis, though: The local soccer team seems to have won an important match, and the streets are filled with singing. 

I am pleased to see that my piece on Republicans, Democrats, and civil rights has generated a great deal of discussion while I was en route. The reaction from the Left has been more or less what I expected: hysteria, intentional misreading, denial, angst, wailing, content-free sarcasm, aspersion-casting, and a great deal of attention to William F. Buckley’s 1957 column on civil rights (and, of course, no attention to his subsequent thinking on the issue). 

I will address the criticism thematically rather than case by case. The arguments go, roughly:

First theme: Sure, Republicans were good on civil rights for a long time, but those were liberal Republicans, so you can’t claim them, since they’d be Democrats now. That is the not-very-smart take from Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. This line of argument has a lot going for it: It begs the question, inasmuch as it assumes the falsity of my thesis (that the parties did not “flip” on civil rights) without bothering to establish it; it is unfalsifiable; it appeals to the shallow rah-rah partisan instincts of those who are disinclined to account for the full depth of the Democrats’ culpability on civil rights. 

Built into this response is an intentional misrepresentation of what conservatism is. In essence, liberals look back at history, identify the social changes of which they approve, and define “conservatism” as opposition to those changes, since conservatism is, in this reading, opposition to social change. Thus the hilarious New York Times reference to those seeking to maintain Communism in post-Soviet Russia as “conservatives.”...