The Long Tentacles of Conservative Revisionism

ROTHENBERG: I simply wanted to add, Wolf, that if you want to know who to blame ultimately for this confrontation that we have now, I think you can almost make the argument that can you blame court, because the court got us into these kinds of issues in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Before that, when you and I didn’t have so much gray hair, we didn’t talk about these issues. But the court decide these issues were relevant and individual rights needed to be protected. And so now they’ve gotten into the whole other area. (CNN, 5/18/05)

The post-Brown backlash in the south manifested itself in at least two different ways. First, there were clear instances of racial retrogression–reversal of racial reforms that had occurred before Brown. Second, politics in every southern state moved significantly to the right. One dramatic racial retrogression in the post-Brown South was the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan… (Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 392)

Great catch by Digby.

I know I keep hammering on this hobbyhorse, but seeing this crap from a relatively moderate commentator should make clear how dangerous the lie that conservative criticism of “judicial activism” was a product of Roe v. Wade is. The reason this is such an effective rhetorical trope for the right goes beyond the primary effect of delegitimizing Roe. The other reason to propagate this nonsense is to just retrospectively wish away the fact that the conservative attack on the courts was catalyzed by Brown and Engle and Miranda. This is a useful lie for conservatives for the same reason that Sean Hannity likes to bring up the fact that some Rockefeller Republicans that movement conservatives despised then and now voted for the Civil Rights Act. They want to wish away the massive hostility to Brown that existed not only in the South but in the National Review and pretend that conservatives have really always been liberals. They want to pretend that opposition to Roe has something to do with the inadequacies of Blackmun’s opinions, as opposed to being a perfectly consistent reaction to any act of the Supreme Court (no matter how good or bad the reasoning) that challenges reactionary policies of social control or existing racial, gender, and/or religious hierarchies. And if this revisionist history were confined to the conservative media it wouldn’t be a big deal, but the extent to which it has penetrated not only the mainstream media but even the arguments of many liberals is dismaying.

So it’s easy to understand why conservatives want to pretend that full-bore reactionary attacks on the Court started with Roe, not Brown. But given that the argument is plainly, transparently false, why on earth do so many liberals go along? If you can answer this question–and God knows I can’t–you’ll unlock many mysteries about the ability of conservatives to dominate American political discourse in this country.