In recognition of the holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., I thought I’d note a terrific column from Rick Perlstein about how and why the right still doesn’t get the civil rights icon.
Not too long ago, conservatives considered King an enemy, or at the very least, a leader of a misguided movement worthy of scorn. Upon King’s assassination, one high-profile conservative said it was just the sort of “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” The conservative who argued that King more or less deserved his fate? Ronald Reagan.
Now, however, Perlstein explained that the right not only reveres King’s memory; they actually go so far as to suggest he was “one of them — or would have been, had he lived.” Perlstein sets the record straight, explaining that for the right, hating King’s doctrines was “one of the litmus tests of conservatism.”
The idea was expounded most systematically in a 567-page book that came out shortly after King’s assassination, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King, by one of the right’s better writers, Lionel Lokos, and from the conservative movement’s flagship publisher, Arlington House. “He left his country a legacy of lawlessness,” Lokos concluded. “The civil disobedience glorified by Martin Luther King [meant] that each man had the right to put a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on laws that met with his favor.” Lokos laid the rise of black power, with its preachments of violence, at King’s feet. This logic followed William F. Buckley, who, in a July 20, 1967 column titled “King-Sized Riot In Newark,” imagined the dialogue between a rioter and a magistrate:
“You do realize that there are laws against burning down delicatessen stores? Especially when the manager and his wife are still inside the store?” … “Laws Schmaws. Have you never heard of civil disobedience? Have you never heard of Martin Luther King?”
King was a particular enemy of Chicago’s white ethnics for the marches for open housing he organized there in 1966. The next year, the Chicago archdiocese released a new catechism book. “One of the leaders of the Negro people is a brave man named Martin Luther King. … He preaches the message of Jesus, ‘Love one another.'” Chicago Catholic laymen, outraged, demanded an FBI investigation of the local clergy.
The point is not just to reminisce about how wrong conservatives were about King at the time; it’s to remind the political world that conservatives don’t get to claim King’s mantle now.
Regrettably, they keep trying.
Andrew Busch of the Ashbrook Center for Public Policy, writing about King’s exegesis on just and unjust laws, said, “In these few sentences, King demolishes much of the philosophical foundation of contemporary liberalism” (liberals are moral relativists, you see, and King was appealing to transcendent moral authority); Busch (speaking for reams of similar banality you can find by searching National Review Online) also said that “he rallied his followers with an explicitly religious message” and thus “stands as a stinging rebuke to those today who argue that religion and politics should never mix”; and Matthew Spalding of the Heritage Foundation wrote in National Review Online that “[a]n agenda that advocates quotas, counting by race and set-asides takes us away from King’s vision” (not true, as historians have demonstrated). Still, why not honor their conversion on its own terms?
The answer is, if you don’t mind, a question of moral relativism versus transcendence. When it comes to Martin Luther King, conservatives are still mere bean-counters. We must honor King because there wasn’t a day in his life after 1955 when he didn’t risk being cut down in cold blood and still stood steadfast. Conservatives break down what should be irreducible in this lesson into discrete terms — King believed in points X, Y, and Z — but now they chalk up the final sum on the positive side of the ledger. But this misses the point: King alone among contemporary heroes is worthy of a national holy day not because he mixed faith and politics, nor because he enunciated a sentimental dream. It was because he represented something truly terrifying. […]
The conservative response to King — to demonize him in the ’60s and to domesticate him today — has always been essentially the same: It has been about coping with the fear that seekers of justice may overturn what we see as the natural order and still be lionized. But if we manage to forget that, sometimes, doing things that terrify people is the only recourse to injustice, there is no point in having a Martin Luther King Day at all.
Of all the offensive right-wing campaign ads of the 2006 cycle, perhaps the one that bothered me most was when the National Black Republican Association did advertising in Maryland claiming that Dr. King was a Republican. For the right, ironically, King’s principles are now their principles.
Nonsense. They don’t get to demonize him in one generation and then claim him as their own in the next. The United States has made great strides over the last four decades, but King’s drive to upset the established order in 1967 has literally nothing to do with the right’s drive to be the established order in 2007.