My God, Quin Hillyer, what would it take for you to acknowledge that the people who pointed a finger at the Chris McDaniel campaign and called it racist had a good goddamned point? Sometimes, when people say someone or some thing is racist, it’s because they or it are racist. Why spend all this time excoriating Haley Barbour for supporting attacks on the McDaniel campaign and their Tea Party supporters and then come right out in the end and admit that the McDaniel and his campaign are racist pieces of shit?
If we inverted Hillyer’s column and put the second half at the top, the whole thing would make no sense whatsoever. That’s because the first half of the piece is devoted to the idea that people erroneously and unfairly maligned McDaniel and his supporters as being racists. Then in the second half, Hillyer is begrudgingly forced to admit that the McDaniel campaign actually went to court and specifically complained not about Democrats voting in the Republican primary but about blacks voting in the Republican primary.
Based on scientific, reliable methodology, a comparative analysis of county-by-county increases [in votes cast from the first primary to the runoff] indicates that Cochran’s vote increases were correlated to the percentage of blacks that live in each county. A regression analysis of county vote results from both the June 3 and June 24 elections with the percentage of blacks and non-blacks who make up each county’s population shows that, without the predominantly Democratic voter participation in the Republican runoff, Cochran would have lost the runoff election by about 25,000 votes.
Things are still bad enough down in Mississippi that there are lawyers who think this is a winning argument in court. “Your honor, the statistics clearly show that my client won the non-nigger vote and should be awarded his rightful victory.”
I’ve never met a lawyer who would make that argument in a legal filing. It’s incomprehensible unless you understand how conservative Mississippi judges are apt to be.
They even prepared a press release that specifically complained only about blacks voting. Someone had the good sense to nix that, but it was good enough for the Mississippi court system. Unbelievable. What further proof would someone need to understand the racism involved in that primary? If anything, Cochran and his allies were too soft on the issue for fear of alienating some of their own supporters.
Let’s get something straight. Black folks down in Mississippi have a very good reason to prefer Thad Cochran to Chris McDaniel, and they made sure to express their opinion. That is as it should be. It’s how it always should have been.
The right:
Voting is allowed if you vote for us. If not, it’s a suspicious activity that must be curtailed.
Deficits are OK if we run them, for wars and such necessities, but if someone else runs one it is the worst thing ever.
Etc.
It’s like having to share power with an 11-year-old bully whose parents have always given him everything he wants.
I’m going with four-year olds. And my four year old is not that bad at sharing.
Well said. This wasn’t some prank like Markos telling Michigan Democrats to vote Santorum in the 2012 presidential primary. Awful as he may be, Cochran really is a better senator than McDaniel would have been, just more interested in the needs of his constituents over batty theory and more responsible.
Cochran is about as decent as a rock-ribbed conservative can be. Chris McDaniel is a neo-confederate.
Not a hard choice.
Cochran is about as decent as a rock-ribbed conservative can be.
That’s like calling him the tallest midget in the circus. Cochran and McDaniel were going to vote exactly the same every darn time. Cochran would just do it quietly.
Chocran is a cockroach. He’s just polite about. His mama raised him right.
Keep checking on Hillyer. He’s still digging over there.
“It’s incomprehensible unless you understand how conservative Mississippi judges are apt to be.”
Isn’t it sad that “conservative” is now inextricably tied to “racist”? Was it always that way?
Certainly in the 1870-1920 period and also in the post Brown vs. Board of Education period.
Also in the 1920s to 1930s. The second incarnation of the KKK and all. And don’t forget Hoover backstabbing the blacks after he got them into office. And the Dixiecrats derailing any Civil Rights’ legislation during the FDR administration.
Let’s just face it: while conservatism doesn’t axiomatically mean racism, the ‘othering’ and violent hierarchical domination that conservatism demands almost inevitably leads to it. It’s like saying that you’re going to be eating several pounds of meat a week but you’re not going to kill any animals. While it’s possible to hold this stance without contradiction, 99.9% of the time you’re either going to have to give up meat-eating or non-violence.
The American frontier was constructed to use the Indians and slaves as hostile forces counter to each other. Conservatism always aims to preserve that system, from the 1600s onward. Thus conservative attitudes to Hispanics, the surrogates for American Indians in keeping the exploitation of labor going.
The frontier system of settler colonialism provided free land. Slavery provided free labor. The recurrent financial panics and bankruptcy law provided free capital. What a system! No wonder the economy of white America grew so fast. After the Civil War, the immigration door was wide open until 1920, when free land effectively ended–although the Cliven Bundys of the West are trying to wrest away the remaining public land.
That system was racially based. Considering it a tradition as many conservative history textbook revisers want means preservation of racism. It’s familiar. It’s what they know. It gives them some of the only status and dignity they have. And it enriches the Southern elites.
Nina Simone nailed the situation in Mississippi fifty years ago in response to the Freedom Summer assassinations.
I thought about that when I wrote it because it stuck in my craw a little bit to put it that way. But I left it that way because they deserve it.
I ‘love’ talking about American Civil Rights, because that topic more than anything shatters the moderate/liberal delusion that conservatives ever had a point since Burke puked out his screed where it wasn’t anything but a gangrenous limb on the body of human society. I mean, if you try hard enough you can elide the class warfare and imperialism and misogyny and pretend that tokens like T. Roosevelt and Eisenhower represent conservatism more than Hooker and Calhoun and Buckley, but the conservative worship of racial domination pretty much forms an unbroken line from the drafting of the U.S. Constitution to today.
Can I just take a moment to marvel at the fact that the McDaniels campaign is so goddamned racist that it makes Haley Barbour look good by comparison?