A Black Day, Indeed

The unseemly squabble over the corpse of Martin Luther King mirrors that over the corpse of George Orwell. Both are overrated, but that is not for today. Rather, just as the patriotic, socially conservative, anti-Communist British Left is the tradition in which Orwell, at his best, genuinely stood, so at his best, King stood in the same tradition as those black and Hispanic votes reaffirmed traditional marriage in California and Florida on the same days that those states gave their Electoral College votes to Obama, with the black churches playing a pivotal role. The tradition of the late C Dolores Tucker and of Father Michael Pfleger on decency in the media.

To stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the Congressional Black Caucus, and with anyone who had a black base, on halting and reversing the national emergency of unrestricted and illegal immigration, and on making English the only official language of the United States. To make common cause with various other people around the fact that the black male is the victim of a triple genocide in the womb, on the streets, and on the battlefield. To make common cause with the regular readers of Philip Giraldi, uniting their vigorous patriotic hostility to Israeli espionage against America with the righteous anger of the victims of the Israel Lobby's sustained campaign against black candidates as such, a campaign which kept Florida from electing the only black United States Senator last year, as must not and will not be forgotten when Chicago's registered Democrats are deciding whether or not to nominate Rahm Emanuel as their candidate for Mayor.

More broadly, to stand in that tradition would be to make common cause with the unions on the protection of American jobs. To make common cause with the Congressional Progressive Caucus on fair trade agreements, on repealing much or all of the USA Patriot Act, on ending completely the neoconservative war agenda, on strict campaign finance reform, on a crackdown against corporate influence in general and corporate welfare in particular, and on tax cuts for the poor and the middle class. To make common cause based on practical proposals for energy independence, proposals that would or should appeal to unions and others whose fight is primarily for jobs. To make common cause based on the importance of government action in bringing about and then conserving pro-life, pro-family and patriotic measures against poverty, in defence of traditional marriage, and in support of agriculture, manufacturing, coal, oil, and nuclear energy.

And, yes, to make common cause with the Congressional Asian and Pacific Islander Caucus against the unfair consequences, and therefore the unfair principle, of the "affirmative action" that Colorado voted to end on the same day as it voted for Obama, and against the Ivy League's and other top universities' systematic exclusion of whites from poor and middle-income backgrounds, and from small towns and rural areas.

Martin Luther King was a registered Republican, just as Richard Nixon was far more sympathetic towards Civil Rights than was the deeply ambivalent John F Kennedy. King's traditional Christian moral values, even if he did not always live up to them, were precisely what made him an opponent of unbridled capitalism and of wars such as that in Vietnam, that double opposition on that basis being the historically conservative position in America, whatever the old Trots of the neoconservative movement may have been astonishingly successful in putting about. But that movement has turned most of his followers into Democrats. Either party could therefore make itself worthy of the best of his legacy. Or both of them could. But as things stand, neither of them is.