“Radicals of a different sort”: How the reactionary right is plotting to steal the White House

For all America's progress, the right's quest to control who votes just won't die. Here's their latest disgrace

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of what Think Progress’s Ian Millhiser called “the most perfectly radical presidential speech in American history.” It was the “we shall overcome” speech Lyndon Johnson gave before a joint session of congress in 1965, in which he said to a body composed of a large number of white supremacists of his own party (and a country filled with them), “we shall overcome,” echoing the rallying cry of civil rights activists in the South. He demanded of Congress that it pass the Voting Rights Act to make good on a centuries-old promise of full civic participation for African-American citizens.

This period in history has been the subject of controversy lately because of the portrayal of Johnson as being reluctant to push the act in the movie “Selma,” but as Millhiser points out, that’s irrelevant to the greatness of the speech he gave that day, which announced a pending indictment of America itself as a “failed nation” if it refused to act in the face of what had happened on that bridge and elsewhere. That is a radical notion, to be sure. If any American president today uttered the words, he’d likely be impeached.

Millhiser draws upon his book “Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted” to illustrate the America in which Johnson was speaking, a time of astonishing economic growth accruing to the benefit of generations who had lived through depression and war. In those days before the historic blunder of Vietnam engulfed the national consciousness, Johnson was able to use America’s idealism to finally force the nation to push through the institutional racial barriers that had been standing since the earliest days of the Republic and that even a bloody civil war had failed to properly dismantle. However he got there, it was a propitious use of a moment in history, to say the least.

Millhiser looks briefly at the man Johnson had just defeated in the 1964 election, Barry Goldwater, and makes an interesting observation about him that has resonance to the ongoing issues with civil rights we still see today:

Johnson’s speech was, in many ways, a test of just how completely he had vanquished his opponent in the 1964 presidential elections, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, and whether the ideology that drove Goldwater’s campaign could finally be cast aside in America’s golden age. Goldwater, for reasons that I explain in more detail in Injustices, was a somewhat unlikely champion for white supremacists. He’d supported weaker civil rights bills in 1957 and 1960. And he supported integrating the Arizona Air National Guard when he served as its chief of staff. Ultimately, however, the Barry Goldwater of 1964 cared more about a narrow, philosophical objection to government intervention than he did about the rights of African Americans struggling to break free from Jim Crow.

more
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/17/radicals_of_a_different_sort_how_the_reactionary_rights_plotting_to_steal_the_white_house/