the times | Thursday August 6 2020 1GM 25Comment
Obama joins Democrats’ lurch to the left
Two former presidents’ eulogies to a civil rights leader show how the debate over race is being radicalised and polarised
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826government’s measures to restore
order in the nation’s cities during this
summer of disorder. “George Wallace
may be gone. But we can witness our
federal government sending agents
to use tear gas and batons against
peaceful demonstrators.”
This is, by any stretch of the
imagination, an extreme caricature
of the state of the US. While no one
doubts that racism remains a dark
reality, the idea that today’s nation
treats African-Americans as the
infamous governor of Alabama did
in 1968 is ridiculous.
Mr Obama didn’t stop there. He
offered a practical solution for
modern revolutionaries. Denouncing
the Senate’s procedural rule that
requires a 60-vote supermajority to
pass legislation, as a “Jim Crow relic”
from the age of racial segregation, he
called for its abolition if Democrats
win control in November.
This would be truly radical. It
would do away with a vital balancing
check in the political system that has
long been regarded as central to
ensuring some stability by requiring
a wide consensus for change.
In the age of Donald Trump, and
perhaps even more in the post-
Trump age, the poles of American
politics are diverging and there’s no
clearer evidence than the divergent
paths of the last two Democrats to
hold the presidency.opinions. These included
observations about Jews that were
widely regarded as antisemitic,
including denunciations of Israel and
its supporters as “Zionist pigs”.
Mr Clinton, by dint of his cultural
roots in the south and an almost
preternatural feel for African-
American voters, was often jokingly
called America’s “first black
president”. But that’s the kind of joke
that would get you banned from a
university campus these days and it
seems Mr Clinton has surrendered
any right to the title in any case.
Minutes after Mr Clinton, his
successor as Democratic president
took to the pulpit. Mr Obama’s
oration was radically different in
tone and content. The former
president who, remember, was also
elected in part because he
articulated an inclusive, constructive
approach to political change (“There
is not a black America and a white
America and Latino America and
Asian America — there’s the United
States of America”), delivered a
speech of raw partisan demagoguery.
In recounting Mr Lewis’s
resistance against the racist thugs
who controlled the Deep South in
the 1960s, he suggested that the
America of 2020 was little changed.
He directly compared the violence
used by police against the civil rights
marchers back then with the federalbe uncontroversial, but it caused a
firestorm in Democratic ranks. Mr
Clinton was widely denounced in his
party, most notably by influential
African-Americans. “Who is Bill
Clinton to show up at a Black funeral
and attack Stokely Carmichael?”
tweeted Patrick Gaspard, a former
senior official in the Obama
administration who serves as head of
the George Soros-funded Open
Society Foundation. “Stokely is ours.”
The debate over civil rights has
reached a new intensity this summerand leading commentators seized on
the former president’s remarks in
now familiar terms. Van Lathan, a
talk-show host, described Mr
Clinton’s words as an avowal of
“white supremacy”.
It’s worth recapping what Mr Ture
stood for. He is mostly remembered
as an advocate of a black-only civil
rights movement. He rejected the
views of those such as Mr Lewis who
sought to work with white allies to
achieve progress. He was hounded by
Edgar Hoover’s FBI and eventually
fled into exile. But he was known too
for some highly controversialU
nseemly though it can be,
the funeral oration has
long provided a platform
for politicians to draw
attention to themselves
and their causes. From Pericles and
Mark Antony to the animated
speakers at the infamous requiem-
cum-rally for Democratic senator
Paul Wellstone, killed in a plane crash
in 2002, ambitious eulogists rarely
miss the opportunity of a reflection
on lives lost to make a case for how to
change lives still being lived.
Last week, as the great civil rights
leader John Lewis was laid to rest,
the obsequies provided a fascinating
glimpse of the changes in American
politics in the past few years, in
particular the sharp shift to the left
in the Democratic Party.
In the same Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta where Dr Martin
Luther King Jr had been pastor,
three former presidents delivered
panegyrics to the man who had
marched and suffered with Dr Kingfor the human rights of fellow
African-Americans, who later served
with distinction as a congressman.
George W Bush, now enjoying the
customary reverence the media has
for all former Republican presidents
which they never get during their
time in office (wait till he dies: he’ll
be a saint), noted Mr Lewis’s
commitment to nonviolent protest.
But it was in the contrast between
the speeches of Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama, especially the
reaction to them, that important
clues about the direction of their
party lay. In praising Mr Lewis, Mr
Clinton emphasised the way he had
pursued change through peaceful
protest. He noted approvingly that
Mr Lewis had fought an internal
battle with Stokely Carmichael, his
more radical rival, for leadership of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee in the 1960s.
Mr Lewis won back control of the
direction of the civil rights
movement from Mr Carmichael
(who later changed his name to
Kwame Ture) after, as the former
president put it, “the movement went
a little too far towards Stokely”.
It was an aside, intended primarily
to emphasise Mr Lewis’s resilience in
the face of a setback, and you might
think that a nod towards the case for
a more nonviolent and inclusive
approach to political change wouldThe speech by the
first black president
was raw demagoguery
Gerard
Baker
@gerardtbakerd