Allan Bloom on undermining the American vision
[NOTE: Here’s a blast from the not-so-distant past—a repeat of a post I first wrote in May of 2016, close to two years ago. At the end of the original post I added a note stating that, despite my strong opposition to then-candidate Trump, one of his biggest appeals was “the fact that he ascribes to the traditional vision of America described by Bloom, the one that so many people (including me) are angry at having seen undermined for so long.”
True of President Trump as well, although I credit him now with more additional pluses than I thought he had back when he was running for office.]
I’ve written in praise of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind several times before, but here I go again.
It was published in 1987, which is now very close to 30 years ago. And yet its relevance has only grown in the intervening years. Here’s an example that resonates today:
Contrary to much contemporary wisdom, the United States has one of the longest uninterrupted political traditions of any nation in the world. What is more, that tradition is unambiguous; its meaning is articulated in simple, rational speech that is immediately comprehensible and powerfully persuasive to all normal human beings. America tells one story: the unbroken, ineluctable progress of freedom and equality. From its first settlers and its political foundings on, there has been no dispute that freedom and equality are the essence of justice for us. No one serious or notable has stood outside this consensus…All significant political disputes have been about the meaning of freedom and equality, not about their rightness. Nowhere else is there a tradition or a culture whose message is so distinct and unequivocal—certainly not in France, Italy, Germany, or even England…Belonging to one of these peoples may be expained as a sentiment, an attachment to one’s own, akin to the attachment to father and mother, but Frenchness, Englishness, Germaness remain, nonetheless, ineffable. Everybody can, however, articulate what Americanness is…
But the unity, grandeur and attendant folklore of the founding heritage was attacked from so many directions in the last half-century that it gradually disappeared from daily life and from textbooks. It all began to seem like Washington and the cherry tree—not the sort of thing to teach children seriously. What is influential in the higher intellectual circles always ends up in the schools. The leading ideas of the Declaration began to be understood as eighteenth-century myths or ideologies. Historicism, in Carl Becker’s version (The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas, 1922) both cast doubt on the truth of the natural rights teaching and optimistically promised that it would provide a substitute. Similarly Dewey’s pragmatism—the method of science as the method of democracy, individual growth without limits, especially natural limits—saw the past as radically imperfect and regarded our history as irrelevant or as a hindrance to rational analysis of our present. Then there was Marxist debunking of the Charles Beard variety, trying to demonstrate that there was no public spirit, only private concern for property, in the Founding Fathers, thus weakening our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, 1913). Then the Southern historians and writers avenged the victory of the antislavery Union by providing low motives for the North (incorporating European critiques of commerce and technology) and idealizing the South’s way of life. Finally, in curious harmony with the Southerners, the radicals in the civil rights movement succeeded in promoting a popular conviction that the Founding was, and the American principles are, racist…
Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.
Every sentence of Bloom’s usually contains more food for thought than most entire books do. The Closing of the American Mind is so dense with thought that the reader has to pause frequently to mull it over and digest it, as one would a particularly rich meal. And not only do I agree with most of it, but it’s expressed in prose so clear and yet so lively, so succinct and yet deeply erudite, so detailed and yet broadly linking widely disparate thoughts and knowledge, that my admiration for the author (who continued in his lifetime to identify as a liberal, by the way) is enormous. Bloom was a man who was not only unique in his thoughts, but courageously unafraid to speak and write them regardless of where it might lead him and who might disapprove.
If you read the above passage of Bloom’s and think about our political position at the moment, I think you will realize that Obama was no anomaly, no outsider come to undermine America, but the culmination (so far, anyway) of at least a century of hard work. The ground was prepared long ago, and what Bloom wrote in 1987 could be considered a sort of prophetic vision of things to come, but not one of the extra-sensory variety.
I remain grateful for your 2013 recommendation of Bloom’s work, which precipitated my reading it.
Bloom’s 1987 list of American historians pre-dated Howard Zinn’s perversely influential work. I would love to have seen them face off.
You said he was “courageously unafraid to speak and write . . . regardless of where it might lead him and who might disapprove.” I can think of no finer tribute for an author or speaker. It applies to Jordan Peterson also.
CapnRusty:
Indeed. Peterson is sort of like a more telegenic, psychologically-trained Bloom for the YouTube age.
It’s interesting that both are academics. Bloom was earlier of course. But they both notice things because they are in the belly of the academic beast. Bloom’s degree was in philosophy, by the way. Peterson is a psychologist but is heavily into the philosophical side (Jung, for example). It’s interesting that both disciplines are often thought to be airy and disconnected from real life, but both men are (and were) very practically grounded in the very real things that are going on in the world and in the academic world in particular. And both purported to sometimes give advice to young people (although Peterson is more heavily into that). Both are somewhat socially liberal, as well, and yet conservative at the same time. Both go beyond the usual categories of these things.
I read this book just about the time that Obama was elected and I told everyone I spoke with about this book, that if you want to understand how we arrived at a place where Obama would be elected as he was (unvetted etc etc), you should read this book. Prescient in so many areas–culture, education, politics.
I’m not sure that Bloom didn’t confuse cause and effect.
It’s certainly true that today almost the entire educational system is closed to fair consideration of any POV that contradicts PC memes. But that arguably is the result of 100 years of cultural sedition.
First, in ‘proving’ that America’s history is ‘evil’ and secondly, that support for its culture is supportive of evil.
Nor is it just the intelligentsia, according to a Pew Report, 60% of those who SELF-identify as “strongly liberal” rarely if ever feel pride in being an American.
It seems highly probable that nearly all in that category fully agree with George Soros; “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.”
Can there be any loyalty whatsoever to an America that they believe to be evil? Does anyone believe that the young David Hogg is an anomaly, rather than representative of what the Left has wrought?
True of President Trump as well, although I credit him now with more additional pluses than I thought he had back when he was running for office.
And that is something I knew about him from my dealings in the A-list gigs… nothing anyone can say, can convince another person that they are misreading, underestimating and off balance without knowing it, and have them believe and so on.
Kim is at the table for denuclearization, tariffs are turning into trade deals and quota’s, and few now get that prior to today’s professional paranoid self-serving power grabbing politician, much of the field was taken up by people with experience in the real world.
Almost EVERYONE misreads him, he knows it, and he likes it!
and he has learned to play it to his advantage causing fear in the short term and gaining the goal in the longer term. the fear of leaders who are not ideologically bound is what? to listen to the dems and their air bubble you oppose opposition because they are opposition, trotskites in perpetual war… but businessmen/women they want the goal…
MEANS oriented vs GOALS oriented
normal politicians tend to be means oriented
successful people who tend to outdo them, are goals oriented
oh, and their goals are complex, not mono goals.. uni goals, whatever word i cant drum up… having many points of which others tend to think they give up on one to get the other. no, thats like wanting a car as a goal, but not caring about the tires, license, etc.
when you read this, think about the different personalities that go to academia and politics vs business (not as administration of things others built) vs builders of business and creators…
In a means oriented culture the key feature is the way in which work has to be carried out; people identify with the “how”. In a goal oriented culture employees are primarily out to achieve specific internal goals or results, even if these involve substantial risks; people identify with the “what”.
In a very means oriented culture people perceive themselves as avoiding risks and making only a limited effort in their jobs, while each workday is pretty much the same.
In a very goal oriented culture, the employees are primarily out to achieve specific internal goals or results, even if these involve substantial risks
the president is also externally driven, not internally driven..
you do not succeed well being internally driven, where i work is bad because of it…
In an internally driven culture, people feel that they know what is best for the clients and customers and act accordingly, and business ethics and honesty matter most.
In an externally driven culture, the emphasis is on meeting the needs and wants of customers, results matter most, and a pragmatic attitude prevails.
goals oriented, externally driven…
strict work discipline, professional culture…
open culture, work oriented…
his opposition tends to be:
means oriented, internally driven, loose work discipline, local culture, and employee oriented
People work for six main reasons: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia. While the first three motives help increase performance, the last three don’t. And a high-performing culture maximizes the good motives and minimizes the bad ones.
i do not have to describe which is which in this..
most people have no idea that in between playas and politics there is a whole other world of motivation, positiveness, working methodologies and more..
Align informal mechanisms and cultural interventions with formal organisation components. The reason is that the formal organisation offers a rational motivation for employee actions, and with the informal organisation, employees will become emotionally committed, leading to high performance.
you should read this book. Prescient in so many areas—culture, education, politics.
maybe we all should read what bloom read, in addition to bloom like i did… all the old histories. many out of print and almost impossible to get. to see that span is quite interesting, even more so when you start way before pliny with the book of the dead and work your way forwards.
not that it matters… unlike a gifted child, once we are adults every idiot is a genius, and we have all that we can use… (paraphrasing Car Wash Blues)
anyway.. if ya want fun, look up milo yianapoulous, bloom, regnery publishing, utley (again), buckley, mcarthy, etc.. they all come together if you know where. (and i can even paraprhase what neo said about peterson into the dialectical materialism camp and the metaphysics campp of the classic past…
imagine if i went to school..
even more fun, for extra credit can anyone mention the Straussians?
you speak of exoteric women’s liberation, but your getting esoteric hidden eugenics – which kind of becomes clear if you read Harvard papers and such.
Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning
and under marx politics and philosophy are one.. the tools of one become the methods of the other… etc.
In 1951, Strauss apparently coined the phrase “reductio ad Hitlerum”, when he used it in an article he wrote.
.
he saw what reletivism would do.. (too bad they erased the great stuff on women being the reserve of intelligence in our species, and how this reserve acted as a lynch pin that moved societies general intelligence forwards – until they fixed that i guess. and you cant find those papers again. at least i havent)
whats for me (hoi aristoi) is not for you (hoi polloi)..
Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form (which is oriented toward universal freedom as opposed to “ancient liberalism” which is oriented toward human excellence), contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism:
The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered
The second type–the “gentle” nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies–was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic “permissive egalitarianism”, which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.
-=-=-=-=-=-
Strauss actively rejected Karl Popper’s views as illogical.
maybe, just maybe because:
In political discourse, he [Karl Popper] is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing open society possible. His political philosophy embraces ideas from all major democratic political ideologies and attempts to reconcile them: socialism/social democracy, libertarianism/classical liberalism and conservatism.
ah.. this can go on forever..
Artfldgr,
“The reason for this is that philosophy is dangerous. Philosophy calls into question the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends,”
Disruptive, nihilistic ‘philosophies’ like Marxism and our current multicultural trans-nationalist philosophy that George Soros promotes opposes “the conventional morality upon which civil order in society depends”. The philosophy of America’s Founders supports the morality upon which civil order in society depends.
“The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought“
The ‘philosophies’ upon which the Nazi and Marxist regimes rest was not and are not descendants of Enlightenment thought. They are perversions of Enlightenment thought that spring from the corrupted French and German schools. Epitomized in Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”.
“Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria.
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
I’m still not sold on the virtues of Alan Bloom, but the excerpt above does remind me of the annual American Legion Oratorical contest as I witnessed it at my high school in the late sixties.
The contest, still ongoing, pits a group of high school seniors to give a speech before a high school assembly on some aspect of American history and a panel of American Legionnaires judges the best speech.
In 1969 the topic was the Constitution and the class ahead of me gave the speeches. I don’t remember much but one of the brighter guys gave a revisionist speech to the effect that the Constitution was really about preserving the power of landowners and slaveholders. I don’t think he won but he was impressive.
I’ve forgotten the topic in 1970 but my best friend gave a prank speech in which he dramatically built up to the conclusion that communism was the answer, then he collapsed — James Brown-style — at the podium.
He paid for that. The principal screwed him on his college applications.
That stuff was definitely in the wind even at the high school level. One of my favorite books then was “How Old Will You Be in 1984,” a compilation of articles from underground high school papers.
https://www.amazon.com/How-old-will-you-1984/dp/B0007FDFDW/ref=sr_1_1
Glad you highlighted this Neo. I have just ordered six copies–used of course– for my daughters and grand children.
I can only hope that they will crack them open–because I know they do not open my emails, unless I flag them as strictly personal.
BTW, my grandson attends Biola University in the LA area (formerly Bible Institute of Los Angeles). Today, they had a scare because it was learned that a student had an AR-15 and a 9MM pistol in his locker. After he was arrested and charged with four different crimes, it was announced that there was no threat to the campus population. I don’t know any more than that. The sad thing is that in conversation with my daughter, a senior health care executive with a Doctorate degree, she commented about the automatic rifle the boy had. After some discussion, in which I pointed out that it was not an automatic, and would not fire any more rapidly than her mother’s 22 cal semi auto with 15 shots, she ended with, “well, what does AR stand for?” (She had no idea from the sources where she gets her misinformation, that it simply stands for Armalite, the company that developed the design.) Such is the level of ignorance in any discussion of guns, even among the intelligent.
Artfldgr asks, “who are the Straussians?”
Well my wife’s uncle was one. Educated by Strauss at U. Chicago, as was Allan Bloom. Uncle B. and I would drink whiskey and talk politics into the wee hours during his visits. Strauss was not a political scientist but rather a political philosopher, which is the sum total of my knowledge of him. Shame on me!
Thanks for the reminder. Read this thirty years ago avidly and it’s time to reread. Tremendously important book, along with “Losing Ground,” by Charles Murray, in shaping my political thinking. Just ordered it through your Amazon link.
Onward, clc
The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. — Robert A. Heinlein
GB: I certainly love Heinlein. There are a couple dozen writers who changed my life and RAH was one.
That quote reminds me of when my mother took us kids to visit our wacky hippie uncle, who in 1968 had just moved from Haight Street to a New Hampshire cottage so he could support his son in Boston who was fighting the draft as a conscientious objector.
My uncle and his wife, who were then known as Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle, picked us up at Logan Airport, then drove us to said NH cottage. When we crossed the Mystic River bridge, Peter Pan and Tinkerbelle giggled mysteriously.
The next morning we awoke to the smells of incense and marijuana, and the sounds of “Hari Krishna, Hari Krisha” playing on the turntable.
Somewhat later, after my uncle had sussed us out, he did his guru-thing (my uncle was a guru of sorts, though not particularly reliable) and told me, “You don’t want power,” which was high praise in his scheme of things.
He was correct. Much of my life has been a flight from having power over people and other people having power over me.
Beyond the amusing anecdote I mention this as an ex-hippie because conservatives have such a shallow, stereotypical understanding of hippies — e.g. Allan Bloom’s dismissive comments on rock music in “Closing.”
There was a strong libertarian streak to hippies. You do your thing; I do mine. I’m still trying to unravel how the SDS/Weather Underground won out and their progressive fascism took over.
Half the male hippies I knew are now conservatives. Half of those became enthusiastic Trump supporters.
The female hippies I knew all went for Obama and hate Trump.
FWIW.
@Huxley Well it makes sense to me that more old hippie men would support Trump than women. I was a late beat or early Hippie myself. Trump, as well as Jordan Peterson, are examples of the return of the masculine principle, which according to jung was ‘knowing what you want, and how to get it.’ Jung would be quick to point out that it is both sexes, but one of the imbalances we now are experiencing is that the negative masculine is everywhere pointed out as is the positive feminine. So in Trump the masculine has returned in the form of someone who is apparently a complete lout who constantly offends against all of what is deemed to be good a right – the very political correctness that is smothering us (pun intended) in our very expensive and precarious safe spaces. Alma mater has become the overprotective devouring mother. That is why women who can look at Trump and not be panic stricken – like Neo – are really important right now. Women have many good reasons to not like louts. My reaction to Trump before and after the election has been very similar to Neo’s. I voted for him reluctantly and on election night when I saw Pennsylvania go for Trump I walked into my bedroom and thought, ‘Thank God we are really not going to get Hillary…that means we are going to get The Donald…Katie bar the door!’ Like many of the rest of us here I have been pleasantly surprised by his accomplishments since and delighted to see the Swamp Creatures increasingly exposed for all to see. If they regain power they will heave a sigh of relief and discover that no one believes a thing they say anymore.
How does Trump ascribe to Bloom’s vision of America?
To wildly over-simplify matters, we have “Nation of Ideas” vs “Nation of People”. Bloom’s vision is the former.
He uses the Civil Rights Movement to illustrate this. By standing up for Natural Rights, they were the real Americans.
Opponents to the movement…segregationists, dixiecrats, confederates, Robert Byrd, Robert E Lee, Jefferson Davis, WF Buckley, Barry Goldwater…were only American in the “Nation of People” sense.
But they were traitors to the Idea of America, not unlike subsequent Black Power movement.
So I ask, cautiously, what my fourth-grade granddaughter is learning in social studies. Nothing objectionable so far. But I did make the case when they were studying George Washington, clearly and age-appropriate I hope, that George Washington did something so rare that it is nearly invisible in history. He overthrew an existing government, had a loyal army at his back….and went home.
His officers after the war formed the Society of The Cincinnati, which demonstrates they had to go back two thousand freaking years to find an example.
If GW had done the usual thing, we’d have been screwed six ways from Sunday.
He was a very great man and we had God’s own favor that he was here when he was needed.
I intend to keep an eye on things and “correct” anything untoward, although so far nothing has occurred.
Richard Aubry,
Yes! 100% correct.
As you remarked, we Americans pass political power, for the most part, without violence. That is an extremely rare thing to do.
The fact that George Washington held absolute power and gave it up makes him one of the greatest men in history.
Here’s the latest….
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/03/27/hofstra-activists-want-to-remove-thomas-jefferson-statue.html
Certainly, as American patriots increase the escalation of the conflict with the Leftist alliance, their minds and hearts will close even further: emulating the enemy and then becoming the enemy in the end.
The online world is not immune from this, given people putting their identities and skin backs on the line with social media.
The worshipers of Hussein as their messiah and American savior will become indistinguishable from the worshipers of Trum as their hero king and messiah.
Then the independent libertarian cynics will finally get it right: the right and the left will have become the same thing. They were just jumping the gun by a few decades.
Just as the mere possibility and feasibility of a civil war in the US was unfathomable to people in 2007 that thought I was crazy to talk about it (Trum gets a lot of same things I’ve seen before), the same is true now. People can’t see into the future any more than they could back 10 plus years ago. The future is still unfathomable to them.
There was a strong libertarian streak to hippies. You do your thing; I do mine. I’m still trying to unravel how the SDS/Weather Underground won out and their progressive fascism took over.
Lucifer’s agenda was much like liberty/equality for all. Of course by liberty what he meant was “do as you will”.
Which also means that the more powerful human and demi-human and non human entites will also do “as they will”.
It was quite predictable that hippies became cannon fodder later on.
The Left was undergoing mind control research about the same time as Mk Ultra program was undergoing the same experiments.
It’s not hard to control the minds and hearts of humans with mind control tech.
Individuals are also weak against an organization. It’s why the Christians got nearly exterminated by the Greek/Roman authorities, and later on they got suppressed by all the religious believers of the goyim when they hijacked the church authorities.
The Roman Empire had a lot of authority and organization, power from the people. The Pontifex Maximus got rid of uppity Christian competitors via the power of religious authority and control.
The hippie tree lovers may have wanted freedom and individual autonomy, but they lacked the duty and discipline to produce the human power organization needed to uphold it. Freedom without duties and responsibilities just produces slaves.
Even Today Americans refuse to believe slavery is ongoing in the US.
What would Bloom say about this:
Pope Francis says, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”
huxley Says:
March 28th, 2018 at 10:38 pm
I’m still trying to unravel how the SDS/Weather Underground
easy peasy, i put the information up, and at least the starts of it are here
(the ends get cut, so i cant speak for that)
you have to trace it back.. to the lid, and other things and you will end up in interesting place… i could give you lots of names to look up what would make you lose sleep
So conservatives have lost the war–what to do about it? How can I say we lost the war with Republicans controlling Congress and the Presidency? The last spending bill points out the fallacy of this argument.
The Left has the will to control and the Republicans do not. Small example. The Republicans have the majority in the Pennsylvania state House and a 2/3 supermajority in the state Senate. My understanding is that means they could impeach and convict and expel the 5 Supreme court judges responsible for the clearly unconstitutional power grab on redistricting. So far all I have heard from the Republicans is meek acceptance of the edicts of their black robed masters. If this happened to the Democrats, what would they do?
Is all that is left for conservatives is to gather bullets, beans, and bandaids and head to the hills to escape the Leftist tyranny?
Manju:
Barry Goldwater and Buckley were not against civil rights.
I assume you’re well aware of that, but in case you’re not, get up to speed on the truth: see this and this, for example, about Goldwater.
As for Buckley, see this, which describes the change he underwent on the subject, so that by the mid-60s he was a proponent.
Funny. Incoherent for the most part, but funny nonetheless.
And I am happy to know that in complacently watching you writhe dying in six inches of dirty and frigid ditch water, while professing a belief in natural rights, I can on your view remain a patriotic American. After all my duty is to an idea, not to you. Finally! An ideological concession from a progressive that I find pleasing.
But, aside from what Buckley or R.E. Lee believed about natural rights, many prominent modern liberals and progressives famously don’t subscribe to the doctrine of natural rights. So you “forgot” about them being traitors too.
That would of course include most highly ideologically informed Democrats, as well as both Elena Kagan “… I don’t have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution.”, and the Wise Latina legal realist on the S.C. ”
You know what? I have a suspicion that when you say “natural rights” it does not mean …
Well, you know how that saying goes.
Ymar Sakar Says:
March 29th, 2018 at 11:03 am
…
The hippie tree lovers may have wanted freedom and individual autonomy, but they lacked the duty and discipline to produce the human power organization needed to uphold it. Freedom without duties and responsibilities just produces slaves.
* * *
skeptic Says:
March 29th, 2018 at 1:25 pm
The Left has the will to control and the Republicans do not. … So far all I have heard from the Republicans is meek acceptance of the edicts of their black robed masters. If this happened to the Democrats, what would they do?
* * *
A dedicated (and willing-to-be-violent) few can almost always dominate a less-committed (or more peaceful) many.
Tying back to the comment on Washington, he had the first group (Rebels) in opposition to the second (Loyalists) (it’s an analogy; don’t get bogged down in the details!), but the ideology of his “Left” was very different from the ideology of the Left today.
Thank goodness.
It’s the dedication, not the dogma, that leads to victory.
I bought Allan Bloom’s book a few years ago and started to read it. I didn’t find it all that interesting and stopped reading it. I will have to find the book and force myself to read it.
TUvea. WRT George Washington. I told my granddaughter this, in a cut down version. Just in case all she hears next time US history comes around is SLAVES!
Somewhere in the eighties I picked up a newspaper and saw a photo of George Wallace, the controversial and outright racist governor of Alabama, later gunned down during his 1972 run for the presidency, in a wheelchair surrounded by blacks giving him an award.
I can’t find that picture today, but I’m sure it was true. For George Wallace had changed.
Following the 1976 defeat [for the Democratic presidential nomination], Wallace returned to Alabama to complete his third term. At the same time, his second marriage, to Cornelia Wallace, came to an end.
What followed was a period of reflection. “And so, one by one, he picks up the telephone and he begins calling his old enemies, the people who he had used as kind of punching bags in the 1960s and asked for their forgiveness,” says Dan Carter. One of the people Wallace called was civil rights leader John Lewis, who had been beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. “He literally poured out his soul and heart to me. It was almost a confession,” says Lewis in the film.
Whether it was his conscience or political expediency that sparked him to ask for forgiveness will never be known. But when he reentered politics for the 1982 governor’s race, he sought and won the vote of black constituents, and he worked with black leaders once elected. Citing his health, Wallace chose not to run for another term and announced his retirement in 1986.
https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2000/marchapril/feature/racism-redemption
People can change and for the better.
here is a bit of history we all forgot.
i read a lot of the out of print books in the archive
when you watch companies help the left and the system, remember, history repeats…
Even IBM made punch clocks for the Germans before they made computers….
Full text of “IBM and the Holocaust”
https://archive.org/stream/…
Aided by the company’s custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith svstems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assem-bled. The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organiz-ing of concentration camp slave labor.
IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich’s needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.
They were. I think you mean to say they changed their positions.
That’s fine. The same could be said for Byrd, though he flipped much later than most liberals realize. But that doesn’t change the fact that he took to the senate stage in 1964 to tell us black brains were smaller than white ones, in the most vile speech of one of the most un-American filibusters ever.
“they were traitors to the Idea of America, not unlike subsequent Black Power movement.”
Haha. You are so transparently phony, manju, throwing in that gratuitous little shot at a long-gone radical movement to show how “even-handed” you are. It is the Democrats today who are relentlessly trying to shove identity politics down our throats even as they consort with Louis Farrakhan.
“I assume you’re well aware of that, but in case you’re not, get up to speed on the truth”
I don’t know whether he knows or not but I do know he doesn’t care. manju is a dishonest propagandizing troll. End of story.
Manju:
Do you bother to read what people write, and/or the links they give?
I said that Buckley changed his point of view. And I provided a link that explained. His final point of view—from around 1965 on, lasted for the last 42 years of his life. He wrote that racist piece in 1957, when he was 31 years old, and by 1963 he had made major reversals in his position. By the time of the civil rights legislation of the mid-60s, he supported it and went even further than that. And for the remainder of his long life (he died at 82) that was his position.
How you translate that into being opposed to the civil rights movement is beyond me. Yes, at one point when he was young he was, but by the time the major civil rights legislation was being passed he was for it and remained so for the rest of his life.
And if you read those links, you would have seen that Goldwater was almost always a backer of civil rights, even before the mid-1960s. You either didn’t read the links, didn’t comprehend them, or pretend not to and continue to repeat your talking points. Here’s an excerpt from one of those links I gave you about Goldwater. I don’t expect you to pay attention, but others might read it:
I have not seen any evidence that Buckley publicly supported the major civil rights bills. The biggie, 1964, seems to be before his conversion. That leaves 1965 (voting rights act) and 1968 (fair housing).
The article you link to is cryptic. It highlights various positions Buckley took that were sympathetic to blacks. One could do that with most segregationists. Strom Thurmond opposed to the Klan, poll taxes, and literary tests. Byrd voted for the 1968 CRA (housing) but was still a segregationist. How do I know? He opposed the 1970 Voting Rights Act.
Buckley was a public intellectual. I want to see evidence of his public support. Don’t tell me he whispered it into Sean Hannidy’s ear.
Manju, you’re more than simply a troll. Your’e an ass.
Manju:
Ah, so the great Manju demands more evidence, because of course he can’t Google it himself, nor can he read the links already given.
So let’s see. From the link already given:
There are many other discussions of Buckley’s conversion and the years after, easily find by Googling. There’s this, quoting Buckley as saying that “it was a mistake for National Review not to have supported the civil rights legislation of 1964-65, and later supported a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…He debated George Wallace quite strenuously in the late 1960s.”
Buckley also “admitted in 2004 that he was wrong about the Jim Crow South; his years of getting publicly and willingly shellacked by people like Baldwin left him a better citizen and a better thinker.”
Buckley was far from a model of modern racial thinking, and his 1950s past seems quite clearly to have been racist, but he did publicly change positions and stated that with some frequency. Did he retain some racist thinking? Certainly by some definitions he did–but by those same definitions, which require agreement with equality of outcome standards, and call every opponent of Obama a racist—most people today are racists.
When Buckley died (in 2008) there were many articles written about his racism, mostly focusing on that 1957 piece. So of course there’s plenty of grist for that mill.
Neo, the quote you pull from Buckley goes a long way in disproving your assertion. We are left with the 1968 Fair Housing Act. If you are able to find Buckley endorsing it, I’m all ears.
Yep, an ass.
Manju:
It is not racist to not have supported those acts for constitutional reasons. That was the case with Goldwater, as already discussed.
Also, as previously explained, Buckley lived well beyond the 60s (over forty more years), although his change occurred sometime during the 60s.
The exact precise date of his change probably does not exist on the record, which is true of most political and opinion changes. It occurred somewhat gradually, as far as I can tell, during the 60s, and lasted the rest of his life, and he’s on record about that. No doubt if you read a biography of him, or checked all his writings, you could get more details on it, but I doubt you actually will do that.
But how you think a quote from an article describing him having supported civil rights in the 60s disproves that he supported civil rights in the 60s is a mystery. And by the way, the quote “is NOT from him, it’s from an article describing (that is, not directly quoting him, but describing his positions) thusly—that “it was a mistake for National Review not to have supported the civil rights legislation of 1964-65, and later supported a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr…He debated George Wallace quite strenuously in the late 1960s.”
I have no idea what the actual quote from Buckley was, but my guess is that in 1964-65 the magazine itself didn’t support the legislation, and the reason for that was not racism on his part (by that time, unlike in 1957 when it was racism), but rather the Goldwater-type position on the acts’ lack of constitutionality.
Your false equation of the two positions—racism and federalism—is typical, of course.
To summarize Buckley’s position as best I can reconstruct it—originally (1950s) he was against such legislation for both racist and constitutional reasons. Later (some time in the 1960s) his opposition was just for constitutional reasons. A bit later he advocated such legislation and regretted his earlier positions, and that seems to have been his position for the rest of his life, which lasted till 2008.
Re: Goldwater
Barry G opposed Brown v Board. That’s state discrimination and thus doesn’t pass the libertarian smell test. I can pull the quotes from Conscience of a Conservative if you don’t believe me.
Now, contemplate that while reading the Bloom quote about America being all about of freedom and equality.
As an aside, personally I think the equality part needs a qualifier. America is about equality under the law. Full stop. Bloom, as far as I can tell, didn’t have much passion for economic freedom. So maybe he puts more weight on word.
But the point is Goldwater’s position on Brown V Board doesn’t even meet my standard, the most basic standard of equality.
Regardless of motive, this is UnAmerican. That’s why I included him on the list (tho, I’m aware of his evolution).
Manju:
I don’t have quotes from Goldwater explaining his statement that Brown didn’t meet his smell test as “law of the land.” I do know that his personal history indicates that he was anything but a racist. As Neo points out above, he was an early financial supporter of the NAACP and a member. Your pathetic attempt to paint him a racist is right out of Think Progress talking points.
https://thinkprogress.org/goldwater-and-civil-rights-f776ce938115/
So we know exactly where you are coming from, what sent you here, and what you are up to. You are fooling no one.
It’s interesting that someone like Yglesias, excuse me I mean Manju, focuses on Goldwater’s alleged sin of racism, without mentioning that he was an advocate of marijuana legalization and as a retired Army Major General supported gays in the military. Both of these positions put him into the libertarian category more than traditional conservative. If you wanted to discredit Goldwater on a right wing message board, these would seem to be better targets than his supposed passive support of segregation.
It’s also rank hypocrisy for a leftest to go after icons of the right because they weren’t fully consistent in ending discrimination back in the 1950s, when the left itself has now come full circle with segregated college dorms, reverse discrimination, and the obscenity of Evergreen College. Given the lefts devolution in this area, the right has become the only refuge for equality, as well as freedom.
Bugs the hell out of you Manju, doesn’t it!
Manju:
Once again, because you label something, you think you’ve proven your case. But you haven’t even addressed the issue, which is that it is possible to oppose legislation because you think it’s unconstitutional rather than because you oppose the more basic goal of the legislation. Happens all the time to those who actually care about the Constitution.
This (from a link already given in a previous comment addressed to you) explains why Goldwater opposed the 1964 Act even though he agreed with the goal of equal rights for black people:
There’s your racist. He also had supported earlier civil rights acts that did not involve this particular issue. Or perhaps you’d prefer that straight from the horse’s mouth:
Goldwater was for liberty, of black people and white people and all people. He also respected the Supreme Court, as you can see from that video clip.
OK, lets explore this. Goldwater opposes Brown v Board for constitutional reasons.
Since this ruling concerns the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, we are in the red hot center of one of two core principles Bloom identifies as central to our regime. Equality.
Goldwater’s interpretation allows for state-sponsored segregation in public education. He would leave Plessy vs Ferguson intact, at least in this context. But privately, he’s opposed to segregation. That leaves 2 possibilities;
1. Goldwater believes the State should be allowed to discriminate, if the majority wishes to do so. He would be in the minority, however.
2. Goldwater believes the State should not be allowed to discriminate. However, the Equal Protection Clause does not forbid it.
#1 means he’s “undermining the American vision”, as he is rejecting a core principle, equal protection under the law, not to mention the idea of tyranny of the majority.
#2 is more defensible but raises the question as to why Goldwater reveres a document that doesn’t provide for one of the core principles Bloom lays out.
By any standard of liberalism as classically defined, blacks would have a “natural right” to rebel, to take up arms. Did the man famous for saying; “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” concede this point? If not, why?
manju keeps almost literally beating a dead horse, trying to defame long-deceased conservatives Goldwater and Buckley. But he has no problem with Democrats consorting with Farrakhan, including Obama.
What do you have against Jews anyway, manju?
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