Mob Scene: Trent Lott and the 'neo-lib-cons'.

Trent Lott's resignation from the post of Senate majority leader was greeted by an outburst of self-congratulation on both left and right. Liberals were pleased that the Republicans, having been unmasked as closet racists, would be less able to craft covert racist appeals in the future; conservatives were relieved that they would no longer be burdened by connections to covert racists like Lott.

Not only is Lott no longer majority leader, but it seems universally acceptable to describe him with little or no qualification as a racist who defended segregation. Thus Peggy Noonan: "And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist." Or Jonah Goldberg: "Trent Lott's indefensible comments [and the conservative reaction to them] . . . represented the death rattle of conservatism's racist fringe, not its re-emergence."

But did Lott explicitly defend segregation? Not at all. He explicitly disavowed segregation, denied that his original remarks were intended to favor it, and apologized for speaking in a loose way that might have given people the impression that he was defending it. So what happened?

The words that provoked the outrage were that "if the rest of the country had followed [Mississippi's] lead" in voting for Strom Thurmond in 1948, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years . . ." To be sure, this comment could be reasonably interpreted as a defense of segregation if we knew nothing about the circumstances in which it was made. But -- as prominent Democrats such as Tom Daschle and former senator Paul Simon conceded later -- they were a mixture of joke and birthday-party flattery expressed in ill-chosen off-the-cuff words. And no one actually present, including several mainstream journalists with no love of Lott or the GOP, interpreted them as a serious political argument.

Lott's critics chose to interpret this jocose flattery as a conscious defense of segregation -- and treated their own interpretation as a plain fact. But even if we treat Lott's words as expressing a serious opinion, they do not necessarily imply a defense of segregation. They could equally be an argument that America should have relied on market pressures, social change, moral suasion, and the example of greater racial equality in the rest of America to effect the dismantling of Jim Crow. Some conservatives argued quite sincerely for this approach at the time. They warned that federal intervention would bring about such evils as judicial imperialism, racial quotas, and an expanding regime of federal social controls. And they argued that an internal social evolution would be a surer foundation than federal intervention for long-term racial harmony.

The case for "the road not taken" was not inherently unreasonable. After all, something like that actually happened in South Africa -- starting from an even worse racial status quo. A combination of internal market pressures, external diplomatic pressures, sanctions, and moral argument compelled the apartheid government to gradually dismantle a sophisticated structure of racial oppression. Eventually it surrendered power through negotiation and held free elections.

A similar process would almost certainly have occurred more rapidly in the U.S., where cultural and economic pressures would have been much more powerful. My own sense is that it would still not have moved quickly enough to justify the federal government's waiting for social evolution to give southern black U.S. citizens civil rights. But someone who took a more optimistic view would not necessarily have been a bigot or a segregationist.

Lott, however, was treated as both by critics who placed the worst possible interpretation upon his words. Such lack of scruple would be discounted as mere partisanship if it came solely from liberals; but libertarians, conservatives, and neo-conservatives (hereinafter the "neo-lib-cons") also endorsed this interpretation -- indeed, they were the ones who pushed it most strongly and gave it real political clout. And once that happened, Lott was in serious danger. Admittedly, he contributed to his own misfortune. In the first few days, he failed to take the storm of protest with sufficient seriousness. So the storm grew -- and Democrats exploited it. Then Lott declared himself a supporter of affirmative action. He was disavowed by conservatives, by President Bush, and finally by the GOP regulars.

The Republican senators who dispatched Lott knew that the "segregationist" charge was unjust, and that the kind of "evidence" that had destroyed him might convict half the nation. They also sensed uneasily, even as they wielded the knife, that similar accusations based on the same kind of evidence would be extended to their entire party. This uneasiness was prescient. Since Lott's demise the media have been relentlessly advancing three claims: 1) that the rise of the GOP in the South is morally illegitimate because it is based on a racist appeal; 2) that the appointment of conservative judges or opposition to racial preferences would be similarly immoral; and 3) that the first test of the GOP's racial decency will be whether the White House opposes racial preferences in the impending Supreme Court case.

The GOP lawmakers know that they are now on the defensive; only in the world of the neo-lib-cons is the Lott affair seen as a glorious advance for the Right. The optimists have been declaring themselves "relieved" that they are no longer allied to closet racists, and so are now able to argue for colorblindness with a clear conscience. But in fact, they are making an extremely damaging admission: that they have been colluding with racists. Thus Maggie Gallagher: "What is new is the determination of Christian and other conservatives not to let politics trump human dignity." Really? So until now these people have been letting politics trump human dignity, have they? James Carville will be delighted to have this so authoritatively confirmed. Or take Noemie Emery in The Weekly Standard: "It is a chance for the GOP to clean up its act and its household, haul tons of old rubbish out of the attic, and banish some shopworn old ghosts." Those tons of old rubbish -- they would be what exactly? Bob Herbert in the New York Times had no difficulty in translating Emery's metaphor into a useful critique of the GOP. And those "shopworn old ghosts" turn out to be almost every Republican politician since Eisenhower.

Emery, Gallagher, and others would doubtless deny this interpretation of their words -- just as hotly as Trent Lott denied their interpretation of his words. But what credibility do they have? After all, they have just admitted to colluding with closet racists and trumpers of human dignity all these years. Reagan? Well, he kicked off his 1980 campaign in a town where civil-rights workers had been killed. George Bush? Willie Horton. George W. Bush? Bob Jones University. See how easily convictions can be obtained once your standards of evidence evaporate.

How come the neo-lib-cons -- all of them sophisticated, almost all of them writers I like, respect, and generally agree with -- allowed themselves to be ideologically wrong-footed in this way? One explanation is that the universe of web-loggers -- where the anti-Lott campaign was effectively launched -- lacks a device for encouraging deliberation and second thoughts. On the whole the so-called blogosphere is an advance for democratic debate. In this case, however, the various web-loggers, rather than debating the Lott case from different directions, essentially egged one another forward with the same arguments and moral slogans. And though the anti-racist slogans were morally unimpeachable, a self-righteous mob is still a mob.

A second factor was that even those neo-lib-cons who saw that the case against Lott was dubious were on a moral roll. They were prepared to convict Lott in order to demonstrate that conservatives were simon-pure on race. Thus, web-logger Howard Owens wrote: "Trent Lott may not have deserved what he got. . . . But again the import of the moment isn't whether Lott is a racist; it is the symbolic act of conservatives taking him to task." Quite apart from the cold morality implied by this argument, it also carries with it the practical difficulty that, to convict an innocent man, you have to resort to elastic standards of evidence. And those standards can then be used to smear the very conservatives whom his conviction was intended to benefit. This is neither decent morality nor prudent politics.

And, finally, there is the psychology of the case. Neo-lib-cons had internalized the liberal version of civil rights history, which holds that liberals fought for civil rights, and conservatives were "on the wrong side." But the truth is somewhat more complicated. Although some conservatives were indeed on the wrong side, others sought to achieve racial equality by means other than federal judicial impositions. And once the Civil Rights Act had been passed, its implementation in the South was not achieved by stern high-minded liberal activism but by a combination of different pressures -- including some brought to bear by the GOP.

Remember that the Jim Crow South was created by the Democrats and ruthlessly sustained by them for decades. From 1968 onwards, however, the national Democratic party embraced the reverse: a Jim Crow politics of racial preferences. This policy broke Democrats in two: National Democratic candidates wanted to impose reverse discrimination, and local Democrats led by George Wallace wanted to resist even "color- blind" civil rights.

Into this political gap stepped the Republicans -- including Trent Lott -- to persuade a resentful region to accept a steady movement toward racial equality. In order to soothe the South into accepting the Civil Rights Act, such politicians had to treat their constituents not as bigots but as essentially good people open to change. They had to depict the South not as an apartheid society but as a civilization that was decent in many ways but marred by racial injustice in others. They had to make occasional gestures of solidarity with the southern tradition; and they had to make speeches to bodies like the White Citizens' Councils.

What did those speeches say? Usually, behind closed doors, they went like this: "Look, boys, I know you all are decent folks. But we gotta admit we treated the Negroes badly, and there have to be changes. Some of those changes I don't like any more than you. Others -- let's admit it -- are long overdue. And all of them will help us attract new industries and make everybody, white and black, better off. But we need responsible leadership. And that sure as hell doesn't mean the northern Democrats."

This kind of politics is uninspiring, which explains why a master of it, like Trent Lott, strikes Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan, and the philosophers of the blogosphere as insincere and opportunist. But that is how democratic politics works. And it did work: Yesterday's South has been transformed into a region much like the rest of America. Selma has a black mayor; there is a two-party system; schools are integrated. And all of this has been achieved with very little conflict since the 1960s.

Liberals should realize that Lott and other politicos fostered racial equality -- even if they did so at the expense of the Democratic party. Conservatives should break off from their moral self-congratulation to ponder that under Lott both the GOP's partisan interests and the cause of colorblind equality made major advances. And both sides should ponder the consequences of the truth that in a democracy the voters have to be persuaded out of their prejudices.