But Liberals are the Elitists
That the National Review wants to filter voters using some unknown criteria should come as no surprise.
The National Review is out here showing its whole, elitist ass with the suggestion that some voters are better than others. No points for guessing that whiteness is a reliable indicator of quality according to them, although they won’t say so out loud. Now, anyway.
In 1957, the National Review, in the voice of its founding editor, William F. Buckley, was not so circumspect. Happily, as it always does in the liberal United States, the conservative side lost. It often takes longer than we would like. Slavery lasted longer than it should have, as did segregation. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both won two terms. Donald Trump won at all. But eventually, the conservatives, no matter how degraded they be in the United States, lose the argument.
Buckley wrote to defend segregation. Remember that the basic position of any conservative is that change is suspect and likely bad. Conservatives prefer the status quo, the existing order, which was overtly racist by law in the United States before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and 1965. Congress did enact a tepid, ineffective civil rights law in 1957, which was the occasion for Buckley to muse, writing: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.” He was quite right about this. Let us note in passing that he merely advocates simple majority rule here.
Let us also note that the measures “the White community” found necessary included murder, of Medgar Evers, and of four Black girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing at least. No doubt, Buckley piously intoned his disapproval of these events when they occurred, but they are plainly part of the program he had advocated in 1957. Conservatives are very fond of trying to disown the violence their philosophy encourages after it has occurred.
And note that Buckley here admits what we knew, that preventing African Americans from voting was just part of the larger program of perpetuating racial segregation more broadly, which in turn was the blunderbuss solution to social and cultural arrangement the former slave owners thought up once they could no longer hold African Americans as slaves after they lost the Civil War.
Undoubtedly one of the most clever tricks “conservatives” ever pulled on the public in the United States was circulating the ridiculous claim that liberals are elitists. This claim flies in the face of centuries of political philosophy. Before the Nixon administration, anyone who knew anything knew that conservatives were unabashedly elitist, believing that orders and ranks of men (!) were discernible and reliable guides to human affairs and decisions, and that only the best men (!) should govern. They accused liberals and radicals of “leveling,” of ignoring the obvious fact that some people are more fit to govern than others. In the Anglo-American dispensation, conservatives are monarchists, believing that heredity is a valid basis for choosing who shall rule.
The claim that liberals are elitists was part of the Republican agit prop of the Nixon administration, which effectively, and entirely cynically, sundered the New Deal electoral coalition by pitting working and middle class white people against African Americans, in part by advancing the claim that civil rights is a zero sum game, such that gains for African Americans came at the expense of white people.
On this logic, the Democrats, who took the lead in enacting major civil rights legislation, were the elitists, imposing a new racial order on poor, put upon white people. In the United States, anyway, conservatives, such as they are, can never be honest. They know, whether they realize it or not, that ours is a distinctively liberal polity, with a distinctively liberal Constitution, however badly we may have implemented the ideas of liberalism with slavery and racial segregation for much too long.
One could ask the folks at the National Review exactly what criteria they want to use to winnow voters. One rather doubts that they would answer honestly that they want to use race as a major factor, perhaps restoring the literacy test or the understanding of the Constitution test that segregated jurisdictions used before 1965 to prevent African Americans from registering to vote. Such tests might serve conservative purposes by allowing their favored Negroes, such as Clarence Thomas and Candace Owens, to vote. That such tests might let the likes of Kamala Harris slip by is just a regrettable fact of life. As long as the test excluded most African Americans, and most poor whites (grandfather clause?) it would serve their purposes.
It is well to note that this foray into the realm of voting policy comes at the very moment that the republic as a whole is discussing the topic because the last president, a “conservative,” or at least, the candidate of the “conservative” Party, refused to accept the outcome of what was, by all honest accounts, a free and fair election. The conservative position, necessarily and by obvious historical evidence, is to discriminate against African Americans in voting rights. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were triumphs of liberal politics and policy, as “conservatives” at the time admitted by fulminating against both. The people of the United States had a free and fair opportunity to choose between the liberal and “conservative” positions in 1964 and decidedly chose the liberal position.
The boys at the National Review, and conservatives in general, are disgusting and reprehensible and no one should hesitate to say so. I shall vocally denounce them and their racism and I encourage all thinking people to do the same.