Civil rights at bayonet point. (Insider Report).

"When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it," declared incoming Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) at a retirement party for Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." The second observation, according to the December 7th Washington Post, was greeted with "an audible gasp and general silence."

As a renegade Democratic governor of South Carolina in 1948, Thurmond ran for president on the Dixiecrat Party, which rejected incumbent Democrat Harry Truman's support for federal "civil rights" laws. Thurmond declared at the time: "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."

Because Lott refused to specify what he meant by "all these problems," the Post and other Establishment media organs enjoyed the luxury of casting Lott's remarks as an endorsement of the Dixiecrat Party's segregationist views -- rather than the party's ironic defense of constitutional federalism. Predictably, Lott's statement provided fodder for Jesse Jackson (who demanded his resignation), Al Sharpton, and other professional race-baiters. But it was also condemned by neoconservatives who support big government. William Kristol, editor of the neocon Weekly Standard, condemned Lott's comments as "ludicrous." David Frum of the neocon National Review complained that Lott "did himself and the Republican Party serious damage" with the remark.

Ending government-imposed racial segregation was a worthy goal, but the means employed to accomplish it -- federal intervention in local communities -- arguably created even greater and more deeply entrenched problems. In the name of "civil rights," the federal government claims an essentially unlimited power to intervene in the economic, social, and personal affairs of Americans.

One timely example: Last September the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a "civil rights" lawsuit against RD's Drive-In Restaurant in Page, Arizona. According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, the federal agency contends that the restaurant's English language-only policy is "a violation of the employees' civil rights." That lawsuit typifies the "civil rights" vision expressed by Gilbert Casellas, the first Clinton-era chairman of the EEOC, who admiringly spoke of the IRS's ability to terrorize taxpayers with a phone call. "By the end of my term," declared Casellas in 1994, "I hope people worry when they get a call from the EEOC."

Of course, it's extremely unlikely that a Strom Thurmond presidential victory in 1948 would have spared our nation from the creeping totalitarianism advancing in the name of "civil rights." But people of all races and backgrounds who cherish individual liberty should share his opposition to federal social engineering at bayonet point in the name of "civil rights."