A. Serwer of TAPPED, who writes both frequently and well about issues of the policies, principles, laws, and politics of human rights and criminal, answers a persistent false equivalence raised by conservative defenders of racism-enabling policy advocates like Barry Goldwater or Rand Paul by noting the prior racism of advocates like Democratic Presidents FDR, LBJ, and JFK whose best-known policies substantially thwarted racism.

I care about as much as Kennedy and Johnson being personally racist as much as I care about Goldwater not being racist—which is to say that I don’t—at least, not very much. I care what they did. It seems really weird to give Goldwater all this credit for not being personally racist while championing a cause supported by racists, and say this is the same thing as Kennedy and Johnson being racist but supporting legislation that advanced the cause of black rights. This is part and parcel of thinking of racism in quasi-religious terms, a stain on the soul rather than a matter of actual behavior, and it’s part of why the American conversation on race remains so counter-productive.

Certainly the legacy of the Democratic Party on race is distinct from the liberal one, as much as the Republican legacy is distinct from that of conservatism. When my grandparents left segregated Tampa in the 1950s, they were Republicans. Were I alive at the time, I probably would have been one too. But by the time Johnson was running, they were Democrats. There’s a reason for that. 

Read the quote in context here.

(I’d just add that for obvious reasons no conservative apologist since, I think, an overzealous and ill-fated Ronald Reagan campaign staffer, has tried to brag that Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s father was a lifelong Republican. Because, hello? Abraham Lincoln? Once upon a time, not even that long ago,“Republican liberal” was not an inconceivable oxymoron. But I digress…)

I bring this up in part because the “moral stain on the soul” line of reasoning percolates through and through political and social activism on left and right.

For instance

• Liberals who passionately argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the uncontested evils of Ronald Reagan’s or George W. Bush’s thuggish administrations were preferable to the merely insufficiently pure Jimmy Carter or Al Gore
• Libertarians who’d passionately prefer to see thirty-three million African Americans denied service than see one fucking asshole be told he doesn’t have the freedom to turn them away
• certain women’s rights activists who’d rather see millions of sex workers perish of preventable illness than “accommodate trafficking” by distributing a single condom
• hard-line “pro-life” activists who oppose contraception not on principle but reductions in the need for abortion has been shown to reduce support for eliminating abortion
• certain completely-out-of-touch alt-sex publishers who passionately argue that it’s more noble for 10,000 sex workers be stalked, prosecuted, or worse than to criticize revenge-seekers who solicit, pay for, and publish sex-worker’s personal information

• activists who not only (sensibly) avoid a conference where a (sex-worker!) writer from aforementioned alt-sex publisher was present but also closed the iron door on any further participation with any future mixed-purpose conferences.

I mean, you can be that way, and I understand that a lot of people feel they have to be that way. And yeah, for the faithful, coalition building with prospects of greater understanding and eventual success vs. lonely personal eternal salvation against a sea of the insufficiently pure is always going to be a no brainer.

Or if you’re purity-agnostic like Serwer you can measure success by outcomes. I dunno.

Maybe I’m just sensitive (really sensitive!!!) after coming back from a funeral a week or so ago with folks so religiously conservative they seriously agonize about whether a friend or loved one was really going to heaven before risking attending the funeral. But results sort of matter too.