Today is the 50th anniversary of the 1963 civil rights March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.\u2019s \u201cI have a Dream\u201d address.<\/p>\n
A commemorative march will climax with speeches on the same site as Dr. King\u2019s storied remarks. President Obama will take the role of star speaker, clearly a marker for how much the nation has changed in the years since that long-ago day \u2013 as will be the presence of former president\u2019s Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Southerners and (unthinkable for major politicians from the South in 1963) both strong supporters of civil rights. The day will mark great and essential transformations in American life.\u00a0 It will also mark great misunderstandings about the past and the present.<\/p>\n
Start with the present.<\/p>\n
There will be much talk about jobs and justice.\u00a0 In a reality-based world, for this president to embrace a true jobs agenda would require an about-face in his current economic policies.\u00a0 He would cut taxes and regulations, rather than try to increase them.\u00a0 He would abandon his health care reform for the free-market agenda.\u00a0\u00a0 He would call for the repeal of two other major job-killers \u2013 Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley.\u00a0 He would approve the Keystone pipeline and call the EPA off its lawless romp against American industry and agriculture, including its attempt to defy Congress and impose a radical climate change policy on the nation.<\/p>\n
Then, too, in a reality based world, a presidential call for justice would signal an about face on the administration\u2019s recently renewed opposition to school choice and the minimum wage.\u00a0 Blocking school choice and increasing the minimum wage are the modern equivalents of Jim Crow laws for young, poor African-Americans in particular.\u00a0 They raise barriers against these young men and women gaining an education that can lead to a satisfying career, as well as barriers preventing initial jobs from even being available to them in the first place.<\/p>\n
But Washington today is far from reality based.\u00a0 So we can expect the speakers and especially the president to double down on the failed policies of the last four and a half years.\u00a0 For those concerned about real jobs and real justice in the real world, the rhetoric at today\u2019s ceremonies will feel unreal.<\/p>\n
What about the misunderstanding of the past?<\/p>\n
Start with a remark Lyndon Johnson supposedly made after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, almost exactly a year to the day following the 1963 march.\u00a0 The story is that he said his signature would end the Democratic Party\u2019s dominance of the South.\u00a0 Liberals have taken the remark as meaning that segregationists would go to the Republican Party, making it the anti-civil-rights party and explaining their party\u2019s losses in the region in the year\u2019s that followed.<\/p>\n
In fact, from the Civil War through the end of the Civil Right era, the GOP was united behind full equality before the law for African-Americans.\u00a0 This solid wall of support included the party\u2019s most prominent dissenter from the 1964 Act, Barry Goldwater.\u00a0 Goldwater considered the goal right but the means mistaken.\u00a0 His massive defeat in the subsequent presidential election came because so many Republicans considered his Senate vote unacceptable.\u00a0 The 1964 election only confirmed that so long as segregation was an issue, an enduring north-south coalition within the Republican Party was out of the question.\u00a0 Traditional Republicans would not stand for it.<\/p>\n
Johnson\u2019s signature spelled the legal end to segregation, with the quiet diplomacy of Richard Nixon\u2019s Justice Department five year\u2019s later ending segregation in fact.\u00a0 After that, the pre-Civil War North-South Whig coalition reformed over defense and economic issues, accounting for Nixon\u2019s huge win in 1972.\u00a0 Eight years later, Ronald Reagan attracted other South voters concerned about social issues, leading to the South\u2019s politics of our time.\u00a0 But again, none of this transformation would have been possible until the end of segregation.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s speakers will be clueless about both the present and the past.\u00a0 Still, however mistaken they are, on one fact all Americans can agree: the nation is far better and in critical ways truer to its founding ideals today thanks to the marchers and speakers of 50 years past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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