Matt Purple: Glenn Beck: A Legend Fit for a King
[Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.]
[Glenn Beck] rings true in one sense. The left long ago abandoned [Martin Luther] King's dream of racial unity. Instead craven progressive operators use the word "racist" as an assault weapon against their political enemies, to the point that the word has lost its real meaning. The left has cynically exploited the civil rights movement to its advantage. Beck is completely correct about that.
He's also correct that, to the extent that King's dream was equal opportunity under the law, conservatives are again his heirs. The left, with its obsession over preferences for different groups, long ago abandoned this tradition.
But Beck also can't neatly fit his own agenda into King's dream. There's been a larger argument made implicitly by Beck and explicitly by a handful of other commentators that were King alive today, he would have been a conservative. David Horowitz has declared outright that "Martin Luther King, in my view, was a conservative."...
But in any hagiography, certain inconvenient details must be omitted. In Martin Luther King's case, our traditional understanding ignores the radical and collectivist thinking that defined his activism. As historian Clayborne Carson has noted, "The historical King was far too interesting to be encased in simple, didactic legends designed to offend no one."
King wanted agitation and action. Despite his pacifism, he fought the battle for civil rights as a hero fighting a villain. Those who didn't join his cause were either bigots or queasy liberals who needed to straighten their spines and choose sides. The issue for King was not earning liberty but seizing it. King wanted not to shake his opponents' hands, but squeeze them so tightly that they relented....
IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that King was a radical and not a conservative. He was the heir of an intellectual clash within the civil rights movement almost a century earlier. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois locked horns over the future of the civil rights movement.
Washington, a Virginia slave freed after the Civil War, was a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke. He contended that political rights for former slaves could only be achieved once the black community had bolstered itself from within. He believed that racism was an evil with roots buried deep in American history that had wreaked havoc on both blacks and whites. Any attempts to suddenly throw it off would cause chaos....
Du Bois, an educated black sociologist from western New England, initially admired Washington. But he eventually grew tired of the slow social progress of blacks, which he blamed on Washington's "accommodationism." He charged that Washington was harming the black community by portraying African-Americans as inferior and putting too much emphasis on the glories of manual labor. Du Bois was the idealist to Washington's realist. Washington wanted blacks to climb up the ladder. Du Bois wanted to knock the ladder over....
The most important way for conservatives to honor King is to understand him in his entirety, not just through the soothing legend we've written for ourselves. We can disagree with King's greater idea of economic revolution while still honoring his struggle to make America the very best that it can be....
Read entire article at American Spectator
[Glenn Beck] rings true in one sense. The left long ago abandoned [Martin Luther] King's dream of racial unity. Instead craven progressive operators use the word "racist" as an assault weapon against their political enemies, to the point that the word has lost its real meaning. The left has cynically exploited the civil rights movement to its advantage. Beck is completely correct about that.
He's also correct that, to the extent that King's dream was equal opportunity under the law, conservatives are again his heirs. The left, with its obsession over preferences for different groups, long ago abandoned this tradition.
But Beck also can't neatly fit his own agenda into King's dream. There's been a larger argument made implicitly by Beck and explicitly by a handful of other commentators that were King alive today, he would have been a conservative. David Horowitz has declared outright that "Martin Luther King, in my view, was a conservative."...
But in any hagiography, certain inconvenient details must be omitted. In Martin Luther King's case, our traditional understanding ignores the radical and collectivist thinking that defined his activism. As historian Clayborne Carson has noted, "The historical King was far too interesting to be encased in simple, didactic legends designed to offend no one."
King wanted agitation and action. Despite his pacifism, he fought the battle for civil rights as a hero fighting a villain. Those who didn't join his cause were either bigots or queasy liberals who needed to straighten their spines and choose sides. The issue for King was not earning liberty but seizing it. King wanted not to shake his opponents' hands, but squeeze them so tightly that they relented....
IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that King was a radical and not a conservative. He was the heir of an intellectual clash within the civil rights movement almost a century earlier. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois locked horns over the future of the civil rights movement.
Washington, a Virginia slave freed after the Civil War, was a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke. He contended that political rights for former slaves could only be achieved once the black community had bolstered itself from within. He believed that racism was an evil with roots buried deep in American history that had wreaked havoc on both blacks and whites. Any attempts to suddenly throw it off would cause chaos....
Du Bois, an educated black sociologist from western New England, initially admired Washington. But he eventually grew tired of the slow social progress of blacks, which he blamed on Washington's "accommodationism." He charged that Washington was harming the black community by portraying African-Americans as inferior and putting too much emphasis on the glories of manual labor. Du Bois was the idealist to Washington's realist. Washington wanted blacks to climb up the ladder. Du Bois wanted to knock the ladder over....
The most important way for conservatives to honor King is to understand him in his entirety, not just through the soothing legend we've written for ourselves. We can disagree with King's greater idea of economic revolution while still honoring his struggle to make America the very best that it can be....