Kevin Williamson responds to the many critics of his "the GOP is the party of civil rights" essay. One of his stronger points:
[L]iberals look back at history, identify the social changes of which they approve, and define “conservatism” as opposition to those changes, since conservatism is, in this reading, opposition to social change. Thus the hilarious New York Times reference to those seeking to maintain Communism in post-Soviet Russia as “conservatives.” This doesn’t hold up to very much scrutiny: The abolitionist movement, for example, was populated largely by people who would be viewed with contempt by modern liberals, because they were crusading Christians who sought to write their own interpretation of morality into the law. (Or, in the case of John Brown, militant anti-government activists pursuing Second Amendment remedies.) One of the things I like most about Frederick Douglass is his economic analysis of slavery.
Bernstein counters:
Williamson attempts to reclaim civil rights Republicans by noting that they were in favor of integrating black Americans within the market economy, which (he appears to assume) only conservatives support. But of course that’s not true at all; virtually all Americans, and certainly all mainstream political movements, support a market economy. He says, “a lot of those so-called liberals from the northeast who supported civil rights look pretty good by today’s Republican standards: sober, free-enterprise, small-government guys.” The larger point? There’s simply no question that folks such as Jacob Javits, Hugh Scott, and Clifford Case could not be nominated in today’s Republican Party; that everyone at the time considered that wing of the party “liberal”, and that everyone at the time considered the Goldwater wing of the party “conservative,” and that it was the Goldwater wing which opposed civil rights. The bottom line: a Republican Party which actually treated people like Javits, Scott, and Case as “pretty good” would be a completely, totally different party from the one we actually have.
The Dish 