Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, opines that conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. They fought the civil rights movement. They fought women’s rights. Now they’re fighting gay rights.
He writes:
They have never once been right.
Did you ever notice that? Do you ever think about it? Never once.
Oh, in matters of, say, foreign affairs or military strategy, one might contend that conservatives have had their moments, made arguments that, arguably, made sense. But on matters of social evolution, they’ve compiled a remarkable record: They’ve never been vindicated by history. Rather, they’ve always been repudiated by it, always been wrong…
Barry Goldwater once saying that he had nothing against a woman running for vice president, “just so she can cook and get home on time…”
Nor are the right’s wrongs limited to matters of human freedom. Every art form that ever dared deviate from status quo — music, film, books, comic books — has had to run a gauntlet of conservative opprobrium. As far back as the 1920s, they were up in arms over a new music called jazz.
It’s a history that provides a jaundiced context for the latest right wing crusade. Meaning the one against LGBTQ kids. Florida’s Legislature passed its obnoxious “Don’t Say Gay” bill last week. Gov. Ron DeSantis, evidently determined to leave no principle untrampled in his hoped-for march to the White House, is expected to sign it….
Which brings them into conflict with conservatism’s reflexive terror of anything that does not fit inside the white picket fence of its imagination. That tendency to look ever backward toward an imagined better past, that timorous inability to face the future — heck, to face the present — and the challenges of change, is what had conservatives at odds with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Martin Luther King to Gloria Steinem.
Now it has them standing between children and their teachers and doctors. It is cold comfort to know that these acts of invasive cruelty will one day stand condemned by history, but they will. We’ve seen this movie too many times to doubt it. You’d think that would matter to conservatives; you’d think they’d think about it. Then you remember that fear and thought are incompatible; it’s almost impossible for them to exist in the same space.
So LGBTQ kids and their allies can only put their heads down, work for change and take such satisfaction as they may find in the fact that, where social evolution is concerned, conservatives lost the 20th century.
Now they’re about to lose the 21st.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I love Leonard Pitts, Jr.
He’s right.
Unrelated but interesting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/03/14/school-reopening-test-scores-covid/
Media report companies still doing business in Russia (March 15)
Koch Industries, specifically,Molex Global 1-800-786-6539, Guardian Glass, 1-248-340-1800 ( based on my experience, hold on and eventually you get an operator, after giving your message, she hangs up on you), SRG Global Manufacturing which has a submission form for messages and Koch-Glitsch, e-mail address, info.wichita@kochglitsch.com
Other companies, Amway- reportedly, 500 employees generating through its vertical marketing $200,000,000 in revenue.
Marriott, Hyatt, Abbott Labs, Herbalife and Halliburton.
The Detroit News reports Amway is pulling out of Russia- public outcry against the company provoked the move?
scAmway’s doing Russia a favor by pulling out.
Cutting the company’s revenue but, I take your point.
You’re right about that, Uncle Albert. It’s shocking that these multilevel marketing scams haven’t been brought up on RICO charges.
Isn’t Amway the scam that made what’s her face’s husband’s family wealthy (our erstwhile education secretary)?
Betsy DeVos is the Amway heiress.
Thank you. My age (and dislike) is showing.
Diane, I think Amway is the DeVos’ business. Betsy’s family, the Princes, made their money through auto parts, specifically vanity mirrors for sun visors. How Erik Prince makes his money is a different question.
Herbal Life, by the way, is another multi-level marketing scheme, aka a pyramid scheme.
Abbott Labs (1-224-667-6100) Marriott e-mail, investorrelations@marriott.com
Halliburton e-mail, investors@halliburton.com
Hyatt e-mail, shareholdercommunication@hyatt.com
Cargill has a submission form at its site
Anyone who has actually read the Florida bill would recognize this as at the very least disingenuous. Reasonable people can disagree, but it is not a “don’t say gay” bill, it is a “don’t say anything” through the third grade bill. It also prohibits lessons in other grades unless they are “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate.” Have we reached a point in our society where that is unreasonable?
Good or bad, like it or not, the US is a center-right country, politically, and culturally, The fact that these issues keep coming up, including in non-deep red states proves this. Right now nine other states are considering similar proposals. That number is likely to grow. Mass public K-12 education should by its very nature be politically neutral without a perceived political agenda. Efforts by both the left and the right to force their own political values into the public schools is wrong.
While many here will say this is not political, the fact is, it is political. The entire article is about political ideology and attacks the right for pushing a political agenda in the schools.
The failure of American schools to teach large numbers of kids to read and write over the past 70 years and the growing focus on political ideology in the schools on both sides is driving more and more parents away from the public schools. Who could blame them.
MjGB,
The Florida law (“Don’t Say Gay”) applies to K-3. It’s a law that bans something that doesn’t exist. Is there any evidence that K-3 teachers are teaching about sexuality? None that I have seen.
The law is purely symbolic. It symbolizes the Republicans’ hatred for gay people. It insults and demeans them. It has no other purpose.
The thing is, it would be hard not to teach about sexuality at the K-3 level. Every story about moms, dads and kids is inherently about sexuality. But no one thinks about it that way until, instead of, say, a story about Sally going on a trip with her mom and dad, she goes with her two moms or her two dads and then people get outraged about “teaching sexuality”. If we’re going to “not teach” about sexuality, we’d have to eliminate all stories that have anything to do with families, which I’d think conservatives would be even more upset by.
The law is purely symbolic. It symbolizes the Republicans’ hatred for gay people. It insults and demeans them. It has no other purpose.
This is exactly the case. It is red meat for the LGBTQ-hating Repugnican base. Period.
yes, and the law and its wording are very useful in hyping up voter anxiety
Wow, Bob! I never knew herring was red meat!
Dienne77 makes a good point. There is always a hidden curriculum, and it’s often the most important one. The French Marxist critic Luis Althusser called the learnings from this background curriculum interpellations. Oh, Mom, Dad, and the kids in the single-family home in the suburbs, normal. Everything else, deviant.
This even though a minority of Americans now live in such circumstances, in such families.
Republican red herrings are red meat. LOL. Hilarious, Roy!
MjGB– Those who read these laws and find the wording reasonable are missing the point. There should be no such laws. States’ learning standards should be positive statements of learning to be attained at various stages, period. There have always been ‘programs’ floating through curriculum discussions which reflect current social and cognitive thinking; they come and go. To my mind, it’s a stretch to call ‘equity’ programs a ‘focus on political ideology in the schools.’ They are little different from programs promoting various pedagogical approaches, or social trends such as more ed about sex/ reproduction which eventually make their way into learning standards, or fall out of favor. Hardly political red flags waving that ‘require’ laws to squelch them. Such laws are just political theater.
As for parents being ‘driven away’ from public schools for their ‘failure to teach large numbers of children to read and write over the past 70 years,’ that’s utter nonsense.
Leonard Pitts is correct. I just don’t understand why Democrats & all lefties don’t yell from the rooftops or any venue they appear on, and simply lay out these differences between the two parties to the majority of the masses out there who have benefitted from Democratic policies over the years. I know Republicans are shameless in taking credit for achievements that they actually voted against, like the recent infrastructure legislation, but Democrats need to continually & clearly make the folks out there understand which party really is more for them than the 1 percenters.
I completely agree with you. Clinton, Obama, and now Biden (though unintentionally) have done more to help the school choice movement then Reagan, Bush I & II or Trump ever did. The Democrats should shout that from the rooftops. That truly is for the people.
That truly is for the people . . . who run charter management organizations and siphon off from these taxpayer dollars to pay for their private planes and mistresses and pool boys and golf trips with their fellow con men
Finally, a voice of reason. Thank you. I might suggest to the author to look more deeply into his history. Women’s rights, slavery elimination and civil rights were issues that the Republican party championed.
That is conveniently forgotten. The author has no interest in the truth. It is just another hit job.
The Republican Party today is not the same one that ended slavery and promoted women’s rights and civil rights.
Thay is very true. They have lost their way.
The Republican Party today is subservient to a man who is racist and misogynistic. They support civil insurrections. They support hoodlums who break into the U.S. Capitol and vandalize it while beating up law enforcement officers. They are a party of cranks, extremists, fools, and the greedy.
The GOP is the party and embodiment of Charles Koch.
The spin tanks he funds made the case that Americans should/would ignore Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. IMO, the Ukrainian misery happened because Putin drew the wrong conclusions based on Koch-initiated misinformation.
The D.C. Catholic Universities (Georgetown and Catholic University of America) that embrace Koch instead of rebuking him demonstrate the accuracy of Jefferson’s warning about priests and despots.
The Republicans today oppose honest teaching of history; oppose women’s right to make a medical decision with their doctor; and oppose teaching about civil rights. What are Republicans in favor of, other than Trump?
Yes, a long time ago, the Republican Party wasn’t traitorous, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, fundamentalist, fascist, and slavishly subservient to the stupidest and most ignorant person who ever disgraced American politics. So, what’s your point, April?
Are you really saying those in the Republican party are cranks, extremists, fools, and greedy (greedy I will give you)? You are talking about roughly 40% of the population.
This language is exactly why the nation is so polarized.
No, the language is an accurate description of a once-proud party that is under the thumb of a very ignorant tyrant. I worked in the administration of George H.W. Bush. I am not reflexively anti-Republican. As someone who lives in NYC, I have known of Trump for many years as a con man, a playboy, a liar, and a womanizer. He has polarized the country with his lies.
Their leaders are all of that. The followers are, to be charitable, duped by propaganda. They follow a charlatan who has had six bankruptcies, who is unapologetically racist and sexist, who lies without shame, who is subservient to Putin and to the dictator of North Korea (they exchanged “love letters,” said he). The leaders are fearful of him, and the followers believe in him.
exactly
Most of them (members of the Repugnican base) are among the poorest Americans–working class folks, and yet the party they support consistently supports legislation that takes from them, from ordinary Americans, and gives to the richest. These Republicans generally know very little of what is actually going on, get all their news from Fox, and vote against themselves over and over and over again. It’s really sad.
Bob, that is the greatest mystery of all: why people of average means vote for the party of the rich.
Ignorance, and being isolated on their Galapagos Islands of Fox, Breitbart, etc. They only get propaganda and jingoism.
I go back to Thomas Hobbes to understand why people vote to cut off their noses to spite their faces. The reason is fear, plain and simple. Hobbes witnessed public executions and was driven out of fear of death to promote monarchical rule. He wanted order.
Modern Republican are afraid, plain and simple. They witnessed acts of terrorism and vandalism in this century. They are driven out of fear to promote bombing and invading foreign countries, building border walls, giving carte blanche to police forces, and forcing people to act harmlessly submissive in uniformity. They want order.
The only way to undo conservatism is to somehow allay conservatives’ fears by showing them that the violence terrorizing them comes from within their own hearts, not from foreign hordes or domestic, well, hordes. Gandhi and MLK had the right idea.
We had to fight them to get minimal Social Security and Medicare, collective bargaining rights for workers, separation of church and state, women’s rights, voting rights, gay rights. We had to fight them on Vietnam and Iraq, which even Repugnicans now admit were horrific, ghastly errors that unnecessarily cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And now they want to ban books and gut Medicare and Social Security and cut taxes for the richest people at a time of unprecedented income and wealth inequality. And they want a fascist nationalist curriculum forced upon our schools and to divert taxpayer dollars into private schools that teach religious superstition and bigotry.
But they have lost the young, and they have lost people of color, and unless they seize the moment, these troglodytes of the Greying Old [white people’s] Party will go with way of the Know Nothings.
You name it, if it was of benefit to ordinary Americans, Republicans fought against it.
cx: go the way of
Well said. Republicans get credit for their economic policies that do nothing more than cut taxes for the wealthy and blow up the deficit. Their patriotism is little more than jingoism. Republicans are first in line for photo ops with members of the military. Behind closed doors they vote to cut military benefits and pensions. Republicans excel at hypocrisy.
A liberal is someone who believes what Anne Frank wrote in her diary, that “people are really good at heart,” and will make the world a better place if given the chance to govern themselves. A conservative is someone who believes that people are really no more good or advanced than wild beasts, and will kill each other if not kept under strict, authoritarian control. It’s not just that conservatives never get anything right; it’s that conservatism is based on fallacy about human nature.
Nailed it. And, indeed, there is a LOT of research to back this up. Republicans tend to be driven by fear, of the Other, of losing what they have, of Those People, of Socialists or CRT or transgender young people (or whatever the current moral panic is). Back in the 1990s, they were sure that there was a vast Satanism epidemic among teenagers, and con men were making a mint giving workshops on this in police departments around the country. LOL. They are the most war-mongering, the most tough-talking, and yet the most cowardly. They are Cadet Bone Spurs Donnie Trump.
Lct: nice way of putting it. We teach children (well, at least I do) that fundamental views of government arise from philosophical views of the basic nature of man. Hobbes thought man was brutish and needed monarchies to control them, Locke saw man as neutral, and thought ownership of the today was the best hope of tomorrow through government chosen by the owners. And so on. Each idea about good government comes from a notion of who man is
Yes. So do I. And I include Rousseau.
Mostly, I think, Republicans are slow learners. Republican pundits like George Will were all rah rah about the Second Iraq War. Now he writes about what a terrible mistake that was (but not about the fact that he was one of the ones who made the mistake–that is carefully forgotten). And they are backward. They have no notion how far beyond them the country has moved:
NB: All statistics in this essay are from Pew Research unless otherwise noted.
Republicans face an existential crisis, but they have a plan.
First, young people don’t share their ideologies (racism, ultranationalism, laissez-faire Capitalism, fundamentalist Christianity). Consider Millennials. Only 12 percent describe themselves as “Mostly conservative” or “Consistently conservative.” Only 29 percent say that “belief in God is necessary to be moral.” 67 percent (two-thirds) support government health care coverage for all. 77 percent think that the way to achieve peace is through “good diplomacy.” 68 percent say that the country should make changes to achieve racial equality. 79 percent say that immigrants strengthen the country. 73 percent support gay marriage. 62 percent say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. 81 percent say that there is solid evidence of global warming. 70 percent say that they would vote for a Socialist. Only 32 percent say that they are “Republican” or “Lean Republican.” Only 27 percent approved of Trump’s job performance. In recent midterms, only 29 percent supported Republican candidates.
Second, the demographics of the country are changing in ways that do not favor Republicans. Even though Trump has often claimed, in his racist way, that “The Blacks love Trump,” only 19 percent of Black men and 9 percent of Black women voted for Trump. Overall, according to Roper, 87 percent of Blacks voted for Biden, 65 percent of Hispanics, 61 percent of Asian Americans, and 55 percent of people of other nonwhite racial groups.
And, of course, these two sets of facts are related. Younger cohorts are more racially and ethnically diverse. The percentage of whites in the U.S. is declining. According to the Brookings Institution, the decline in percentage of the white population was just shy, by a fraction of a percentage point, of 20 percent since 1980. 79 percent of Silent Generation Americans were white, 72 percent of the Boomers, 61 percent of Gen X, and 56 of Millennials.
Furthermore, with quite minor exceptions, these gains for progressives and losses for Conservatives have held consistent, as trends, in every case, over DECADES.
Now, you might be thinking that, well, of course young people are progressives, but as they grow older, they become more conservative. That’s the conventional wisdom. But as is often the case with received ideas, that’s wrong. Political scientists have done many studies of this question. Political leanings tend to persist over the lifespan. (You might be surprised to find that for most of the Vietnam War, most young people in the U.S. approved of it, and most older people opposed it. So, the emergence of Reaganism wasn’t that surprising after all.)
But, back to the current situation. The complex of idiocy and reaction that is Repugnicanism is dying. So, what’s a fire-breathing Repugnican to do? How does the GOP, the Greying Old Party, keep from going the way of the Know-Nothings?
Well, the do-or-die moment is coming. Thanks to gerrymandering, laws to restrict access to voting, voter apathy (the tendency of people not to vote in Midterms, for example), Republicans have an opportunity, in 2022, to retake complete control of the Senate and the House. If (when?) that happens, the Republicans won’t need Manchin and Sinema to render the Biden administration ineffectual and sway people against it. Then, if (when?) they take the Presidency in 2024 because the Democratic Party has once again chosen a “moderate” who will inspire no one, the Repugnicans will control it all. And they can even, with a simple majority vote, expand the already conservative Supreme Court into an ultra-right-wing nationalist Extreme Court, pass a version of the German Enabling Act to be rubber stamped by that court, and dramatically restrict voting rights.
And that’s how a minority party regains and retains power. By becoming a Fascist party and engineering a Fascist state. The Fascists love iconography. Perhaps they should chuck the elephant and adopt a Phoenix symbol for this, The Party, rising from THE ASHES OF DEMOCRACY.
All this seems quite possible. In fact, right now, it’s looking highly probable, that we are Germany in 1932. There’s a flaw at the heart of democracy that Fascists can exploit: Just once, you have to get enough people to vote against themselves. The founders of the United States could not envision the fatal combination of near universal suffrage with mass consumer culture idiocy.
The fall of American democracy will happen while people are busy watching Spiderman: No Way Home on their TVs and eating chips from a bag that was 3/4ths empty when they opened it. That mostly empty bag is deeply symbolic.
Not with a bang but a whimper. A pfoooot of the kind that comes when opening that bag of potato chips.
BUT, the Repugnicans have no notion how impossible it will be for them to establish an autocratic, ultra-nationalist, fundamentalist Christian, fascist state here. Why? Most people are light years beyond them, already in another galaxy far, far, away.
Don’t be too quick to stand on the aircraft carrier, in 2025, and announce, “Mission Accomplished,” Pugs. Be careful what you wish for.
There is nothing Republicans won’t believe. They are followers. If Don the Con tells them that Putin is a pal and wouldn’t lie to them, they believe him.
I have to give them one thing: they are very good at organizing to keep the ignorant and bigoted and fearful riled up about Guns, God, and Gays.
It’s really shocking how such intelligent people have such limited and closed minds… on both the left and the right
When I say that the Republican base is characterized by ignorance, I mean that. Let me give you an example. Don the Con ran and won in 2015-16 on racist fear of immigrants. And over and over and over (he still does this), he made the claim that “they’re taking your jobs,” they are “rapists and murderers and very bad people.” Well, both these claims have been extensively studied. Immigrants, like everyone else, consume things and create demand, which in turn creates jobs. And immigrants start businesses that employ other immigrants AND Americans at ten times the rate of nonimmigrants. And so, the net result of immigration is about a one percent INCREASE in job creation. And, of course, new immigrants often take the worst jobs, the ones that citizens don’t want. And, all one has to do is to visit the statistics pages posted by the Department of Justice to find out that undocumented immigrants have THE LOWEST CRIME RATES OF ANY SUBGROUP IN OUR POPULATION. Yup. The lowest.
So, both claims are simply false. Demonstrably, objectively false. But the Republican base doesn’t know these things, and Fox isn’t about to tell them. And the Democrats do a TERRIBLE JOB of getting the truth about such matters out.
In any group, there will be bad apples. So, what do Fox and Breitbart and the Daily Stormer and the other right-wing propagandists do? Anytime, anywhere, some one of millions of immigrants or people of color commits a horrific crime, they lead with this. It’s the Willy Horton tactic. And it works. It stokes fear and hatred, which are powerfully motivating to the ignorant.
Well said. Robert B. Parker’s fictional detective Spenser has an encounter with a conservative, smooth-spoken but of antediluvian principles; his remark: “He’s afraid America’s about to be taken over by Americans.”
The Republican base is just as ignorant as the Democratic base. The point is, both are ignorant and highly partisan, and both are part of the problem. The “squad” and the fringe of the Tea Party” are equally destructive.
I’m guessing you think the Squad is destructive because they are “far left” or something, right? Exactly the opposite, actually. The Squad is destructive because they only cosplay at being left. In fact, their job is to play the “left-wing” of the Democratic Party to keep left-leaning people in the party. But they never actually use the power they have, and always enough of them can be counted on the vote the right way so that anything the Democrats want to pass gets passed and anything they don’t doesn’t. Each of them are allowed to “rebel” on their pet issues to appeal to their votes and look “left”, but it’s just as much an act as Manchin and Sinema at the other “end of the spectrum”.
When the play is over, they, along with the Republicans, all meet up at the same cast parties and have their laughs – all the way to the bank.
Fortunately, however, there are real, non-cosplaying leftists among us who sufficiently appreciate Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. LOL.
Contrast the money spent by Charles Koch on politicians, spin tanks, ALEC, universities, etc. vs. the coffers of the Squad
It is what it is. Republicans won’t even be dragged into modernity. Eventually, they die, and the world moves forward.
It’s not as abrupt a change as you suggest, as we’ve seen with the new crop like Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoules ( an event that featured Milo had the Bishop for Cleveland, Oh. giving the blessing.)
In the case of the Catholic Conferences and Ryan Girdusky and Christopher Rufo, their success in destroying public education will retard efforts at equality going forward.