Mob Scene: Trent Lott and the 'neo-lib-cons'

National Review, Jan 27, 2003 by John O'Sullivan

Trent Lott's resignation from the post of Senate majority leader was greeted by an outburst of self-congratulation on both left and right. Liberals were pleased that the Republicans, having been unmasked as closet racists, would be less able to craft covert racist appeals in the future; conservatives were relieved that they would no longer be burdened by connections to covert racists like Lott.

Not only is Lott no longer majority leader, but it seems universally acceptable to describe him with little or no qualification as a racist who defended segregation. Thus Peggy Noonan: "And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist." Or Jonah Goldberg: "Trent Lott's indefensible comments [and the conservative reaction to them] . . . represented the death rattle of conservatism's racist fringe, not its re-emergence."

But did Lott explicitly defend segregation? Not at all. He explicitly disavowed segregation, denied that his original remarks were intended to favor it, and apologized for speaking in a loose way that might have given people the impression that he was defending it. So what happened?

The words that provoked the outrage were that "if the rest of the country had followed [Mississippi's] lead" in voting for Strom Thurmond in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years . . ." To be sure, this comment could be reasonably interpreted as a defense of segregation if we knew nothing about the circumstances in which it was made. But -- as prominent Democrats such as Tom Daschle and former senator Paul Simon conceded later -- they were a mixture of joke and birthday-party flattery expressed in ill-chosen off-the-cuff words. And no one actually present, including several mainstream journalists with no love of Lott or the GOP, interpreted them as a serious political argument.

Lott's critics chose to interpret this jocose flattery as a conscious defense of segregation -- and treated their own interpretation as a plain fact. But even if we treat Lott's words as expressing a serious opinion, they do not necessarily imply a defense of segregation. They could equally be an argument that America should have relied on market pressures, social change, moral suasion, and the example of greater racial equality in the rest of America to effect the dismantling of Jim Crow. Some conservatives argued quite sincerely for this approach at the time. They warned that federal intervention would bring about such evils as judicial imperialism, racial quotas, and an expanding regime of federal social controls. And they argued that an internal social evolution would be a surer foundation than federal intervention for long-term racial harmony.

The case for "the road not taken" was not inherently unreasonable. After all, something like that actually happened in South Africa -- starting from an even worse racial status quo. A combination of internal market pressures, external diplomatic pressures, sanctions, and moral argument compelled the apartheid government to gradually dismantle a sophisticated structure of racial oppression. Eventually it surrendered power through negotiation and held free elections.

A similar process would almost certainly have occurred more rapidly in the U.S., where cultural and economic pressures would have been much more powerful. My own sense is that it would still not have moved quickly enough to justify the federal government's waiting for social evolution to give southern black U.S. citizens civil rights. But someone who took a more optimistic view would not necessarily have been a bigot or a segregationist.

Lott, however, was treated as both by critics who placed the worst possible interpretation upon his words. Such lack of scruple would be discounted as mere partisanship if it came solely from liberals; but libertarians, conservatives, and neo-conservatives (hereinafter the "neo-lib-cons") also endorsed this interpretation -- indeed, they were the ones who pushed it most strongly and gave it real political clout. And once that happened, Lott was in serious danger. Admittedly, he contributed to his own misfortune. In the first few days, he failed to take the storm of protest with sufficient seriousness. So the storm grew -- and Democrats exploited it. Then Lott declared himself a supporter of affirmative action. He was disavowed by conservatives, by President Bush, and finally by the GOP regulars.

The Republican senators who dispatched Lott knew that the "segregationist" charge was unjust, and that the kind of "evidence" that had destroyed him might convict half the nation. They also sensed uneasily, even as they wielded the knife, that similar accusations based on the same kind of evidence would be extended to their entire party. This uneasiness was prescient. Since Lott's demise the media have been relentlessly advancing three claims: 1) that the rise of the GOP in the South is morally illegitimate because it is based on a racist appeal; 2) that the appointment of conservative judges or opposition to racial preferences would be similarly immoral; and 3) that the first test of the GOP's racial decency will be whether the White House opposes racial preferences in the impending Supreme Court case.