Confederate Moral Panic and the GOP’s Southern Strategy

Go ahead and take down the Battle Flag, but don't let the Left replace it with the Rainbow.

There is not much reason to defend the Confederate flag. Those of us who love America and her freedom shouldn’t sweat for a flag first sewn to promote a war on behalf of slave-owners who wished to break the country up. The Confederate Battle Flag was later used by white supremacists who wanted to go on using the state to repress the basic human rights of their black American neighbors, restricting the freedom of contract, commerce and association in service of a false, racist view of mankind.

These are all reasons not to fly the Confederate flag at your statehouse or outside your home — leaving aside the grave offense it gives to patriotic, Christian African-Americans like those slaughtered in Charleston this month.

On the flipside, as Democratic Senator Jim Webb has courageously written, there are reasons not to let the flag disappear from view, not to airbrush American history of its human fallenness, its share of mankind’s accumulated guilt. Yes, the Southern colonies and states enriched themselves on stolen African labor. But which American state does not sit on conquered Indian land? There is no banner that represents our wars against the Indians except the Stars and Stripes. Will we ban it too, in ten years?

In a sense, the Confederate flag reminds and convicts us of sin as the wounds of Christ do in religious paintings. Should we hide such icons from view, and console ourselves with cheerful pictures of the resurrected Christ?

Should we ban Civil War books and simulations that accurately depict the flags on both sides of the conflict? Should we purge the works of Mark Twain and Flannery O’ Connor of the “n-word?” Where does the sanitizing process stop, exactly? And why restrict it to white people? Should black fraternities stop using Egyptian images like pyramids, since those structures were built by slaves? Virtually every Muslim state in history engaged in the slave trade — and Islam explicitly endorses enslaving non-believers. Should we ban the Quran?

You see, these are complex questions. But we now live in a country with no patience for such discussions, one ruled by fits of hysterical moral panic whipped up by the aggressive cultural left — a movement that equates Christian marriage doctrine with slavery and racism, and threatens to use the massive power of the U.S. government to tax faithful churches out of existence … including, somewhere down the line, most historically black churches, which reject same-sex “marriage” as unbiblical.

And it isn’t just Democrats. One conservative columnist, Matt Lewis, is helping to swap a simplistic myth for the complex reality. In “What the GOP Lost When it Won the South,” he uncritically accepts the leftist narrative of how the Republican party gradually became dominant in the South. In doing so, he implicates every winning Republican candidate from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush and most of our current primary candidates as at least complicit with vicious racism.

The Republican-Party-as-Secret-Racist-Conspiracy theory, often referred to as “the Southern Strategy” and popularized by embittered ex-Republican Kevin Phillips, runs like this:

Democrats were the party of the Confederacy, and after that of the Klan. But in 1964, Lyndon Johnson decisively shifted the Democrats on that issue, and made that party into the champion of society’s less fortunate. Racist holdouts quickly shifted to the Republicans, who cynically traded on the deep-seated bigotry of less-educated rural whites to turn Dixie from blue to red. The price they paid is that Republicans lost the moral high ground, becoming in effect the party of cynical white self-interest. Now enlightened whites are ashamed of the GOP’s racist past, so they’re shifting to the Democrats — and the only way to hold onto them, and win the votes of immigrants, is to imitate the Democrats by joining the moral panic over the Confederate flag.

There’s another way to look at the Southern Strategy, which can be gleaned from first-hand narratives like Pat Buchanan’s fascinating political memoir of Richard Nixon, The Greatest Comeback. From this angle, a genuine Christian movement for racial justice arose among mostly black pastors. It got shamefully little support from white Christians in the region; instead, most of the courageous Southern whites involved in the Civil Rights movement were all-purpose radicals and old-line Communists whom the Party had mobilized back in the 1930s to exploit Southern racial injustice. Too many conservative Christians were willing to conserve the evil as well as the good, so persecuted black Christians turned for help to leftists who wanted to throw out the baby with the bath water. Once the crucial battles to dismantle Jim Crow had been won, black Christians were firmly ensconced as liberal voters, whom their old radical allies could rely on to support candidates with other leftist views — even those profoundly at odds with black Christians’ faith.

How else can we explain Rev. Jesse Jackson’s conversion, from a pastor who called abortion “black genocide,” to a pro-choice, pro-gay leftist activist — whose “rainbow coalition” is the origin of the gay rights rainbow flag?

Worst of all, the success of the biblically grounded and morally righteous Civil Rights movement became the template for a series of social revolutions whose demands did not emerge from, but flouted, the Bible: radical feminism, “abortion rights,” gay activism and now the transgender movement. Each one could draw on the genuine rectitude of the Civil Rights protesters to claim the moral high ground.

What about the white conservative Christians, who’d been dead wrong on civil rights? Their social conservatism about every other subject — on which they were mostly right — now seemed tainted too. The hardline racists joined the resurgent Klan or campaigned for third-party renegades like George Wallace. Where should the rest of them go, the people who realized that they had been wrong to support Jim Crow, but who saw that there was something quite different about issues like abortion and homosexuality?

These people saw that the Democratic welfare state, the intrusive regime of affirmative action and forced school busing, of multiculturalism and mass, low-skill immigration hurt the people they claimed to help, and helped to grow an oppressively big government. There is nothing intrinsically racist about any of these insights — which is why black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Ben Carson have stepped forward to endorse them.

There was nothing wrong with Republicans stepping forward to offer conservative white Southerners a political alternative, so long as the GOP continued (as it always had) to reject the old Democratic policies of Jim Crow. The result was the Southern Strategy, which in essence said:

If what you really are is a racist, go work for George Wallace. Your racist agenda has no place on the platform of the party that ended slavery. But if you are willing to separate the things your daddy was right about from the One Big Thing he was wrong on, we have a cause for you. We will fight against radical social changes that mock the faith of Christians, black and white. We will oppose big government programs that treat poor people like pets, to be fed and controlled and, if need be, put to sleep in the womb. We recognize, with Edmund Burke, that not every citizen is a political philosopher. Sometimes their “prejudices” can be wholesome and on the money. But when a prejudice contradicts both reason and revelation, it will need to be dismantled. So Martin Luther King, Jr., was right, but Jesse Jackson is wrong. Don’t let the left spook you with your region’s guilt-filled past. Learn to love your black neighbors, turn on the air conditioner and let’s all get ahead together.

Not a bad message. Not bad at all.