Almost all of today's conservatives believe that their predecessors in the 1950s and '60s should not have opposed the civil-rights movement. Plenty of liberals counter that the right's wrongness on racial matters is by no means a thing of the past. This week, three Daily Kos writers advanced that idea.
Laura Clawson asserted on Monday that "for a hundred years after the Civil War, white people gave themselves the most extreme form of affirmative action by law and at gunpoint. Then for 50 years, they've insisted that any real steps to undo that damage were unfair."
On Wednesday, during which a ceremony on the National Mall marked the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, "Hunter" opined that he'd rather not hear at all from righties regarding such occasions:
I really wish conservatives would simply shut up during anniversaries like this one. Let the nice non-conservative folks celebrate civil rights victories, let them point out what things have not changed enough-just pipe down for a few meager days. Grousing and complaining about the anniversary or trying to refashion it as some secret conservative victory just serves to remind everyone what hard-right opposition to those victories sounded like at the time, and still sounds like...
About two hours later, "Hunter" added:
I think declining a speaking spot [at the ceremony] was a perfectly appropriate choice on the part of conservative leaders, or at least the more intellectually honest one[s]. Efforts to portray conservative reaction to the civil rights movement as anything less than hostile at the time (and hostile now) are insultingly dishonest...
And on Thursday, "Vyan" explained what he sees as the major difference in American race relations between 1963 and 2013 (short version: Republicans are the problem):
What we've now learned in 50 years is that we do not have a Crippling Racial Divide in this Country as we did before. We now have a Crippling Partisan Divide. 90% of Black People along with 70% of Latinos, 60% of Asians and just about 50% of Whites all generally agree that we still have changes to make, that the struggle against injustice continues.
And then we have the other party, who simply want to wallow in denial and change the subject every chance they get...
