Kevin Williamson is in the category of Republican pundits that Mike Huckabee was in for most of 2008–someone who’s hardly an independent voice, but who occasionally says something reasonable and sometimes even against interest. He recently wrote a narrative about racism and Republicans that was deeply criticized, and his defense is expertly dissassembled by Jonathan Bernstein:

Williamson’s history was and remains one that ignores the Humphrey Democrats, ignoring that they became the dominant voice of the party by 1948; and one that ignores the very mixed at best record of movement conservative Republicans, the Strom Thurmand and Jesse Helms — and Barry Goldwater — Republicans, on civil rights. It is true that the legacy of the Democratic Party, including outside of the South, is also mixed (that is: horrible within the South, mixed in the rest of the nation); it is also true that Republicans up through 1965 had a long history of supporting civil rights.

And I’ll close by repeating what I said above and in the previous post. What I’d suggest is that the first step Republicans could take if they really want to be the party of Lincoln and the party whose liberal wing strongly supported civil rights would be to support the position of civil rights leaders on voting, right now, and give up on the various schemes Republicans have been pushing that will have the effect of reducing African American voting participation. I think it’s pretty clear which way Hubert Humphrey and Hugh Scott, and Jesse Helms and  (segregationist Democrat) Harry Byrd, would have come down on this one.

I read Williamson’s effort and found it to be lacking, especially in historical context. It’s as though he worked backward, starting with the conclusion, coming up with the logic that would get him there, and then using whatever assumptions were needed to support the logic. Only this sort of method makes you start with all Democrats (even Northerners!) being segregationists. Silly.

This is part of why I thought Ta-Naheisi Coates had one of his rare blunders a few weeks back when he argued that Republicans see being called racist as nothing more than an attack against the other guys. Big-time conservative thinkers wouldn’t be writing preposterous articles attempting to argue against their movement having benefited from racism, not if it weren’t a big deal. It’s a threat to their narratives and theories of politics, a weight that could tarnish their ideas. After all, Williamson and people like him are still arguing that, because the Democrats were sympathetic to segregationists 70 years ago, their current policies are somehow permanently tarnished. I mean, that argument has a logical conclusion for their ideas that they simply can’t bear to face, or at least that they haven’t quite thought through.

Personally, this subject has started to bore me. The facts are pretty clear: the Republicans used to favor civil rights for blacks, then after supporting The Bill that granted them, they flipped in order to pick up pissed-off whites. This happened very quickly. And after race riots began in 1965, they flipped even more. That’s just the historical record, and the voting record of, say, a Gerald Ford could tell the tale of those shifts. Does that mean that the concept of limited government is forever tarnished because cynical pols like Richard Nixon once associated it with racial grievances? I don’t think so. But that happened, and it couldn’t be less relevant if Republicans were to admit it and, far more importantly, try to do better going forward (as Bernstein suggests). They haven’t because doing so would enfranchise people who oppose them, probably destroying their coalition and forcing them to move to the center. Really, the common thread between 1965 and 2012 is opportunism–Republicans were all too happy to exploit racial inequities then for their benefit and they’re equally happy to do so now. Williamson’s argument is counterproductive–he ought to be making such a case instead of peddling flim-flam. Until he and his compatriots do, the conservative movement’s racial past will forever continue to dog it, and a million Kevin Williamson bullshit articles on history won’t change that.