Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Reflections on the Ku Klux Klan
Let’s review what happened yesterday:
The polls are still putting Trump ahead in Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. Substantially ahead. The only Super Tuesday state in which he’s not leading is Texas — Cruz’s home state.
For years I’ve had an obviously narcissistic conceit. No one appointed me, but I’ve taken it upon myself to be the American Ambassador, everywhere, mostly because I’ve always been baffled and not a little angry that our appointed ambassadors don’t see it as part of their jobs to defend Americans against calumnies in the foreign press and imagination. I don’t expect them to do that with outrage, or undiplomatically, just calmly to confront lies with facts, and point people to sources where they can learn more, if they’re so inclined. I’m not rude when people say crazy things to me about Americans; I’ve almost always judged them to be misinformed, not bad. But I’ve never absented myself from the conversation, either. I’ve seen it as my personal responsibility to give them better information.
Years of living as an expatriate has made me keenly aware that the United States is unusual — that is to say, exceptional — in many ways. But two ways, in particular, strike me as particularly unusual and are for me a source of real pride.
The first is our conception of freedom of expression. I can’t tell you how many people don’t understand it at all, or don’t believe me when I tell them, “There is literally nothing you’re forbidden to say in the United States.” In Turkey, I’d read in the press and be told, repeatedly, that “every advanced country” has laws against “hate speech,” or that “no country” would allow certain kinds of people to hold rallies.
Again and again, I’d say, “No, that isn’t true.” It does happen to be true of most developed countries. You all know why those neo-Nazis in Germany don’t brandish swastikas: They’d go to jail. Holocaust denial is illegal in France. Britain has extensive “hate speech” laws. When our campus wingnuts grow up, we may have them, too. But we don’t have them now. Our campus wingnuts remain, for now, campus wingnuts.
I like explaining this to people. I like explaining the brilliance of the phrase, “Congress shall make no law.” It’s quite different from constitutions that splendidly express a positive commitment to freedom of expression. Our constitution takes a much dimmer view of abstract promises to have Good Things. Ours denies the government the power to make any law infringing upon speech. It’s a big difference, and a consequential one.
People tend not to believe this at first, or don’t quite understand it. It’s a hard concept to understand, especially because it’s deeply unnatural, or so I’ve concluded from conversations in which I explain it. It seems, to most people, appalling and indecent to allow people who seem to mean it to march about shouting, “Heil Hitler.” In countries where ethnic tensions have in recent memory resulted in ethnic cleansing, it also seems, frankly, stupid. Do you want to see a Turkish mob screaming that they’re going to do to the Kurds what they did to the Armenians? No, neither do I. So yes, I do understand why well-meaning Turkish liberals think hate speech laws in Turkey might be an excellent idea. I disagree, because I know they’ll be used, in reality, to prosecute anyone on the wrong side of the government. But well-meaning people can disagree.
Usually I tell people about Brandenburg v. Ohio and National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. These really were landmark cases. I think even many Americans, if not most, aren’t fully aware that our modern conception of freedom of speech dates from these verdicts almost as much as it does from the Constitution itself.
Clarence Brandenburg, as I’m sure you all know, was a Ku Klux Klan member who held a rally in Hamilton County, Ohio. “We’re not a revengent [sic] organization,” he said, “but if our President, our Congress, our Supreme Court, continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race, it’s possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken.” Others in the film footage were hooded, but they were armed, burning crosses, and muttering, “This is what we are going to do to the [racial epithet],” “Send the Jews back to Israel,” “Bury the [racial epithet],” “Freedom for the whites,” and “[racial epithet] will have to fight for every inch he gets from now.”
Brandenburg was convicted, sentenced to prison, and fined $1,000 under Ohio’s criminal syndicalism laws, which made it illegal to advocate “crime, sabotage, violence, or unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform,” or to assemble “with any society, group, or assemblage of persons formed to teach or advocate the doctrines of criminal syndicalism.” Brandenburg (or his ACLU lawyers, to be precise; he wasn’t that sharp) argued that these laws violated the First Amendment. The case went to the Supreme Court, and the Court unanimously agreed with him. They struck down Ohio’s laws.
The Court used a two-part test to evaluate speech: (1) speech can be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and (2) it is “likely to incite or produce such action.” [My italics.] That “and” is important.
I’m sure I’m telling you nothing you don’t know, but I promise you that no one outside of the US has heard of the Brandenburg test. I don’t know why. You’d think explaining this would be part of our public diplomacy worldwide, because it’s such an important part of our history, culture, and mores, and it’s something of which we can be so justly proud.
Sometimes they think I’m just making this stuff up. So I show them this:
There you go. We Americans do not ban this kind of speech or that kind of rally.
One of the most common wacko beliefs about the US is that we literally forbid anti-Semitic speech. Yes, this is actually a conversation you can really have, in many parts of the world — you can find real people who believe there’s something hypocritical about our objections to Iran’s sponsorship of Holocaust-denial conferences, because at least they allow such things to be said, whereas we just lock up our anti-Semites and our Holocaust deniers.
Yes, many people believe this. But no, it’s not, generally, because they’re stupid. How could people know otherwise, if that’s what they’ve heard everywhere and we make no effort to explain our culture and our legal system? That’s why they need Ambassador Berlinski. Fortunately, that one’s easy to disprove. “Ah,” I’ll say, laughing. “Let’s see. Google David Duke.” They may not know his name, but they pretty much always know what the Klan is. I guess we must make a lot of movies about the Klan.
David Duke, the American white nationalist, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Sufficiently famous around the world that I can win the same argument over and over and over again by pointing out that David Duke is still very much alive, at liberty, saying whatever the hell he pleases, and denying the Holocaust. You can also buy Mein Kampf on Amazon and have it delivered the same day. Want a copy of The Communist Manifesto? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? We don’t ban any of it.
I’m proud of our First Amendment.
But there’s another thing of which I’m just as proud, and I’m not sure whether it makes sense to be proud of both at the same time, although I am. I’m proud that we’re the kind of country that can let Nazis and Klansmen disgrace themselves in public, because Americans are basically decent. Such views just could not gain wide purchase.
I’ve asked myself many times whether these court verdicts truly represented an originalist interpretation of the First Amendment. Did they reflect a principled commitment to the plain meaning of the Constitution? Or is it possible that this jurisprudence seemed a plausible interpretation only because these cases followed such a long period of peace, prosperity, and social stability? Did we come to see ourselves as too decent to be corrupted by such obviously vile ideas? So decent that the Supreme Court justices just knew, deep down, that American Nazis and the Klan weren’t ever going gain purchase in the United States of America? Yeah, we can put up with the occasional Sieg Heil and a few flaming crosses. That stuff’s never going to get anywhere with Americans these days.
That’s the other calumny I try to correct everywhere I go. The notion that Americans are deeply racist. I would have sworn, until yesterday, that people who insisted to me that this was still a significant political sentiment in American life were out of their minds. I genuinely thought this was, overwhelmingly, a left-wing fantasy.
I still believe the first part to be true.
But I believe Trump knew exactly what he was saying. There’s no such thing as an adult American who’s never heard of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s no such thing as an adult American who’s never heard of David Duke.
The United States’ history of practicing human bondage is real. It was based on views about race still espoused by David Duke. This is known to every American adult.
That such a comment could come out of the mouth of a frontrunner in the GOP polls is a disgrace to all of America. Any attempt to pretend he didn’t really say that or it didn’t mean what it sounds like will be about as convincing as efforts to persuade Americans that Ahmadinejad was simply expressing a lively disdain for the world’s suffocating political correctness.
This one wasn’t the hypersensitive Left’s wild imagination. This was the real thing. People who vote for him tomorrow can’t say they have no idea what he stands for.
Published in Politics
Lazy
It is also the latest and greatest in a long list of reasons why I won’t vote for Trump. Living in non-swing-state Texas, I didn’t vote for McCain or Romney either, since I couldn’t honestly endorse either man for the office of the Presidency. The Republican Party offered up bad options, and I passed. Looking back on it, I had no idea how good I had it. But I will not endorse Trump for that office. And I will tell others to do the same.
So your ethical posture is based on being in a nice safe Republican state?
Many of us don’t have that luxury, and our choices WILL have an effect on whether Hillary is elected.
You know, lying, traitorous Hillary with real American blood on her hands…
We need to be really careful here.
I don’t see a racist in Donald Trump’s remarks on the KKK, especially since he said this in 2000 (quoted in David Sussman’s post):
And I don’t see someone who is against our First Amendment rights who brings up the libel issue.
I do see Republicans’ overreacting to these two things in our chronic defensive mode of “We’re not racists-sexists-whateverists.”
We have much more to fear from making too much out of Trump’s remarks taken out of context–Clarence Thomas–than we have from anything Trump has said or done in this regard.
I think this started with the Republican’s punishing Trent Lott for attending Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. The Salem witch trials couldn’t have done a better job.
I believe I would have held my nose and pulled the lever for Romney or McCain if I lived in a swing state, but I’ll never know for sure. But yes, even if it comes down to Trump/Hillary, I will not vote for Trump. I will tell friends in swing states to do the same, and argue the same on this site.
I think we need to review the existing libel laws too, and I’d be interested in what Trump has in mind.
That said, Mark Steyn said this week:
I don’t want to see Mark Steyn get hammered by Trump’s changes.
I do try to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, but it gets increasingly more difficult. :)
Re comment # 26
How do Democrats get away with branding as racists people who want strong borders ? Would it make a difference if we more often talked about people who are, or have been, concerned about a possible influx of a large number of immigrants when the immigrants are, or have been, people of their race ? In the early 1990’s, West Germans who had anxiety about a flood of East Germans moving west were not racist against East Germans. People in the Dominican Republic aren’t racist against people from Haiti.
Re: comment 34
I’m convinced raving lunatics only gain power and influence by being right about some things. Trump has convinced me.
Lazy
I believe I would have held my nose and pulled the lever for Romney or McCain if I lived in a swing state, but I’ll never know for sure. But yes, even if it comes down to Trump/Hillary, I will not vote for Trump. I will tell friends in swing states to do the same, and argue the same on this site.
Lazy
I believe I would have held my nose and pulled the lever for Romney or McCain if I lived in a swing state, but I’ll never know for sure. But yes, even if it comes down to Trump/Hillary, I will not vote for Trump. I will tell friends in swing states to do the same, and argue the same on this site.
See I will do anything I can up to voting for a red (Coc) baboon to keep that criminal out of the White House. She’ s put our national security at risk and has blood on her hands, not to even mention the trail of lying, conniving and outright corruption since the Watergate hearings.
I actually hadn’t thought about this, and now I’m thinking I’ll have to vote in every Presidential election, even in cases like Clinton/Trump where I believe that either option would be awful for the country. I refuse to help cut off a man’s leg, on the grounds that if I don’t, the people I would be helping might cut off his arm instead.
But the troops deserve better. And the troops deserve better than either of these idiots. But I don’t know, which would the troops prefer? Hillary Clinton, who let some of them die? Or Trump, who they might have to disobey?
Want to bet? The principles of this country have been unique where the country had sufficient influence where its principles actually had any kind of impact on the world.
We probably showed that we had lost this battle when the electorate picked “more Obama” over Romney. The current debacle is just an extension of that.
And I can very much see how deep this is in the country. Just go around Ricochet comments and see how many people trash Paul Ryan as a RINO Establishment Sellout, or, indeed, rail continuously against The Establishment, or complain that the Republicans should have undone all of Obama’s “accomplishments” since the 2014 election.
People would rather throw temper tanTrumps than understand and work the long hard slog that is government.
Claire,
The exchange between Trump and Tapper is very, very troubling. The KKK and David Duke need no special introduction. For Trump to want time to check “who they are” is completely absurd. We need to look into this issue not just because of dangerous fringe groups and Trump’s willingness to turn the other way but something else.
Ann Coulter has been on the verge of saying it all along. Why does she create a super litmus test out of immigration? Single Payer would do more lasting damage to this country and make us much more dependent on the government. Trump would fail such a litmus test completely. Immigration is very serious but doesn’t take the top spot. There is a stink about this that I can’t stand smelling anymore. Marco Rubio is Spanish and son of an immigrant. This is real prejudice being shown not for Mexican illegal immigrants but for Spanish descent Presidential candidates.
The robo-calls in Texas said what Ann has wanted to say all along. Don’t vote for the Cuban. The lame stream media who endlessly babbled about a man who was the son of a white mother and an african man, not a black american with a slave ancestry, is now silent on this. The issue with them is never racism but leftism. They exploit every situation to enhance the leftist agenda. When real racism shows its ugly orange colored head they are dead silent.
Regards,
Jim
Glad you’re advocating for America over there, Ambassador Claire.
But it would be a mistake to assume that most Trump supporters are aware of this. Like all of us, they are probably exhausted by this political season already. Many have probably stopped paying any attention to media that are critical of Trump. And many others probably never payed much attention to news media to begin with.
The simple, sad reality is that — now and throughout human history — most voters will not investigate candidates half as thoroughly or regularly as the average Ricochet member. Most people are averse to politics and avoid discussion of it as much as they can.
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
I agree with you on the first, but have my doubts about the second. In 2011, only 15% of Americans in an Annenberg survey knew that John Roberts was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Probably 100% of Ricochettis know who Duke is, but we are not average. :-)
Correction – Trump is not leading in Minnesota either. The polls that have been taken are older but none show Trump winning. Most have Rubio up.
From the New Republic:
I get the feeling that people here are not per se disturbed about the Klan (awful, unsurprising) but about who is inside the Republic Big Tent and how much they do, or do not, matter to winning the primaries and the election.
Is that right?
I love that our United States government can make no law infringing our speech.
And that includes my right to vehemently, both publicly and privately, to disavow the words and philosophy of the likes of David Duke.
And Donald Trump.
We just need hordes more people to see the light. Or we will end up in darkness.
Which one? I’m at a loss to pick a name from the World list.
Trump claims no one owns him??
He can’t disavow David Duke???
What might he lose in disavowing such a despicable brain wrapped in human skin as David Duke?
Start here (the US is currently 11th on economic freedom); look at our trend (negative and accelerating) and compare it to some of the countries in the “Mostly Free” category that have positive and accelerating trends. It doesn’t take much imagination to see the US continuing to fall as several other countries continue to pick up the mantle we are shedding.
I’m not talking next week or next month, I’m talking 20 to 30 years out.
And, let me remind you, our next President is likely to be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, neither of whom are big supporters of free-market capitalism.
Switzerland (or Liechtenstein).
Interesting list and visionary thought.
Even my rose-colored-trump-stained glasses don’t permit me to share it.
I’ll be dead by then, if nothing but from broken-hearted frustration with my voting peers.
If forced to pick, I could agree. But that is a remnant of what-could-have-been.
Not sure I understand your question. I’ve never been very disturbed by the Klan because I’ve assumed they were a joke — a tiny, tiny group of morons who put on white robes to feel superior to someone else and forget what total losers they really are.
I’m beginning to wonder though…
P.S. To be clear I mean today’s KKK. They certainly were no laughing matter during the Jim Crow era.
Sorry if I was unclear. If Trump didn’t distance himself from Duke pronto because he thought that he would lose more support than he would gain by doing so:
What is the quantum of this support?
How significant is it in the Republican Party?
All unknowable, I guess, but I wondered if that was part of why people were so disturbed by this rather than by the Klan which is awful but known and not surprising.
New York City is the home to immigrants from every part of the country and the world; my roommates were from Mississippi, Texas, and South Dakota. I am from Michigan. Nobody regarded us as uneducated racist hicks and frankly, I resent people who have probably never set foot there- yet alone lived there- making generalizations about the greatest city in the world.
Yes, that’s part of it. I have been confidently defending the proposition, for years, that the idea of white supremacy, as a political program, was absolutely dead in America; that the Klan and people who genuinely believed in the genetic superiority of white people or called for formal, legal discrimination against black people were a completely marginalized joke — long since utterly defeated and discredited, politically and morally. I have confidently been saying that to be sure, genuine anti-Semitism still existed in the US, but it was to be found on the far-left. I would have said it was inexistent in the GOP, which if anything took philo-Semitism to an unnerving excess. And I would have said that the idea that conservatives in America are deeply racist or anti-Semitic was quite simply a slander, one made more grotesque by what was emanating from the fever-swamps of the left.
To speculate that there may be a significant number of voters in the Super Tuesday states who do indeed still fancy the idea of race-based politics, Duke, and the Klan — so many that Trump didn’t wish to alienate this important constituency — is obviously not pleasant.
I don’t know that this is the case, for sure, but I’ve certainly had my confidence shaken, and I think for good reason.
Re comments 54, 55 and 56
Joseph Stanko, that was my reaction. Like you, I’m used to thinking white racists are, and have been for a long time, just a tiny group of yahoos. But Trump wouldn’t be being this careful to avoid offending these potential supporters if he thought their numbers were small.
The only thing that has shaken my confidence in recent years is the absolute refusal of the of the Republican leadership in Washington to represent the people it shamelessly solicits votes from every election cycle.
No longer.
This party’s over.