Perlstein's Greatest hits (6): Conservatives and Martin Luther King | OurFuture.org
The idea that Conservatives had any lost love for Martin Luther King is the most noxious of ruses. Ronald Regan casually suggested he was an instigator who had it coming. Jesse Helms tried (and was largely successful in states of a Redder composition) to prevent his birthday from being a national holiday. Some of these people resented his upsetting of the apple cart, others tried... to obstruct the civil rights they're trying to "reclaim" at every point. Its a gross misapplication of the the entirety of the man's life and work to pretend that Beck can reclaim anything he did while trumpeting the ideology of the people who decades prior conspired against him.
To do this, to speak on the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech this way, requires a willful, blithe disconnect from the true meaning of civil rights, in addition to the way the grand majority of political power holders felt both about King, and about what he was trying to accomplish. Politically empowering and educating a minority group many politicians either feared, loathed or considered a “problem people” in earnest? It was by no means an invitation to the upper echelons of America’s power base. King was considered a rabble rouser, despite his earnest and dignified approach to pressing this “agenda”. The politicians and pseudo-kingmakers that appropriate him now felt his pressing of civil rights and honesty were complicit in his assassination. A conservative that has become the face of what Republican politics today, Ronald Regan, didn’t care for King, and openly expressed disapproval for the Civil Rights Act of 1967, stating that he would have infact, voted it down. How is it other conservatives can so conveniently feign ignorance on this while clinging to every other idea the man uttered? If the modern Republican hero made no bones about opposing the overall aims of Martin Luther King Jr, how is it that modern Conservatives can, with a straight face assume that their party as a whole are even remotely connected to the honoring of civil rights activism in any capacity? At present I find myself wondering; what if Dr. King were alive today? Would he be considered a champion by the Becks and Palins of the world? Invited on their news shows to talk about the nobility of civil rights activism? Would they embrace dreams, and "change" and champion the underdogs daring to dream them? Would King be considered a radical agitator for daring upset the status quo? If the Conservative Media News Machine existed in his day, would King be shouted down on the O’Riley Factor? I find it stunning, if not curious, that so much revisionist history is required to make this slight of hand work convincingly. How disremembering the dreams of the not so distant past require the active misrepresentation of political truth in order to champion a cause that was never theirs to begin with. This is the longest con. Conservative myth that requires little more than a cursory Google search to parse out, but will likely in such a racially fractured and politically charged cultural frame as this be sumarrily swallowed and perpetuated. This is an attempt to co-opt the dream and ignore the dreamer. I suspect I'll lose sleep over how this subversion seems to be working.
Perlstein's Greatest hits (6): Conservatives and Martin Luther King | OurFuture.org