Rich Lowry had some fun yesterday listing a whole host of areas where Democrats have abandoned their traditional positions and moved rapidly in the opposite direction: states rights, federal intervention in education, Senate filibusters…. With more space he could have listed more, such as their former fealty to the First Amendment morphing into support for laws against hate speech, speech that fosters a hostile work environment, and political speech (aka campaign finance reform).
The jewel in this collection of inconsistencies with which he crowned the Democrats, however, is his likening them to the late and unlamented Sen. James O. Eastland of Mississippi.
Somewhere, the late Democratic Senator James Eastland deserves an apology. Not because the Mississippi segregationist’s substantive views look any less odious than they did 40 years ago. But because the same progressives who once excoriated the obstructionist tactics he used to block civil-rights bills in the 1960s have come, with the fullness of time, to see the wisdom of his procedural ways.
Eastland, were he still alive, would nod his head as liberals make the Senate filibuster sound like America’s last bulwark against tyranny, and as they conduct a flirtation with states’ rights. Eastland might be bewildered, but relieved that, at long last, his party was breaking his way.
The Dems actually have even more in common with the thuggish Eastland than Lowry mentions. Like the Dems of today, Eastland also rejected the first Justice Harlan’s insistence, in Plessy, that “our Constitution is colorblind,” and, like them, he didn’t think it should be.
In one sense, however, this comparison is not fair … to Eastland. He thought — naively, it is now clear — that the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he so strenuously opposed meant what its Democratic supporters said it meant, and what the plain meaning of its words say, i.e., that it barred bestowing any benefit or imposing any burden on any person on the basis of race.
Eastland, of course, thought that was a bad thing, as do today’s Democrats.
Seems to me this is a bipartisan problem. What ever happened to the Republican Party that believed in small government, balanced budgets, not sending our kids off to nation-build in foreign countries, keeping the government’s nose out of our private business, etc? The truth is, BOTH parties have long since abandoned any semblance of principles- theyr’e just about the naked competition for power and campaign cash.