More Light for the Colorblind

Progress usually starts with an argument. But we don’t get far until we reach an agreement. For that reason, we can say “thank you” to Trent Lott.

By letting slip his bitter nostalgia for segregation and falling on his sword, Lott pulled down the camouflage. Bigots suddenly have less room to hide in American politics. The perfidious wink-and-nod tolerance of bigotry in the Republican Party has been exposed and denounced -- finally from within as well as from without.

That’s a step forward. As any shrink will tell you, overcoming your troubles sometimes means squaring yourself with your past.

In the 1960s, the Democratic Party came to its own moral reckoning over racial injustice, the nation’s greatest shame. The triumph of the civil rights wing of the party over its segregationists turned politics on its head. But it did not close the argument.

Republicans, although voting for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in Congress, soon made room for bigots and adopted the coded language by which prejudice was given a veneer. Remember, Strom Thurmond was one of those unhappy Democrats who stormed over and set up camp with the friendly Republicans.

Now Lott has brought the GOP to its own moment of truth. And the best, smartest and most foresighted among conservatives didn’t duck. In fact, they were among those leading the charge that brought him down.

What a switch. Just a month ago, the U.S. concluded midterm elections that only served to harden the nation’s philosophical disagreements. Now the elements of the right have converged with the left -- who could have guessed? -- on a truly important principle: delivering race-baiting to the dustbin.

The best thing that could happen to the nation is for high-minded conservatives to continue to press ahead, particularly the young and the reigning “neocons,” or whatever they want to call themselves, who supply a lot of the intellectual energy to the GOP. For beyond the question of shoving Lott aside, they have opened the door for a real moral house cleaning, not just the apologetic sweeping of dirt under the rug.

Back to business? This, friends, is good business.

“It’s quite simply about the soul of the Republican Party,” says writer Andrew Sullivan, who was early to conclude that Lott was a “menace to the future” of the GOP.

Yes, Lott’s fatal burst of candor touched off plenty of internal fuming, self-pity, anger, hypocrisy and backstabbing among Republicans. But writing in the National Review, editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg noted the most salient fact: “To date, no reputable conservative has come out in defense of Lott’s remarks.”

I guess that itself was a sign of progress, if only to see die-hard Lott apologists like Pat Buchanan disregarded as no longer reputable.

To my thinking, conservatives have a long way to go, maybe impossibly far, to reconcile their claims of compassion with their zeal for winner-take-all economic Darwinism. But if there really is anything to their dreamy ideals about a colorblind society, we won’t know until the party breaks cleanly with those whose values were so cogently expressed by the former Senate leader and the segregationists of 1948.

The answer to racial intolerance? Intolerance. Follow the path of the Democrats: Drive it out of the party. Strike the Confederate flag. Enough of the code-speak. Fumigate. This time, there is nowhere for bigotry to go, except the fringe, where it richly belongs.

Self-interest is a powerful motive in politics and can lead to surprising places. Smart conservatives are aware that trying to survive on the point spread of white voters is an increasingly shaky proposition in the U.S.

Anyone with lingering doubts ought to look in on California, where conservatives pushed against immigration as a wedge issue a few years ago. Many principled people ended up being tarred as bigots in that effort, chiefly because they were found associating with bigots. And now Republicans hardly fill the backbench in the state Capitol.

What’s wrong with America? This: Nearly half of the white population thinks the country is going in the right direction and nearly two-thirds of African Americans see it headed wrong. That’s according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

Lott’s fall from grace is one of those rare things that we can all agree is a step forward.

And if it proves to be just the beginning of the GOP’s return to Lincoln, the shock waves won’t take long traveling across the aisle and rousing the Democratic Party from its torpor.

Hasn’t it been apparent for too long now that African Americans deserve better than they’re getting from what has become a one-party system for them (90% went for Al Gore; two-thirds voted against Lott)?

All Americans rate the dignity of choices.

That’s something we could call real progress.