Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [85]
Beginning in the 1960s, American liberals were unable to stop flirting with mob violence. Like Dostoyevsky’s unsuccessful author, they embraced sociopathic malcontents because it made them feel hip and young. Today, the angry rabble is simply another faction of the Democratic mainstream. As Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has said, the sixties bequeathed us radicals who are “neither so outrageous nor so violent as at first. The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary.”51
TEN
CIVIL RIGHTS AND
THE MOB:
GEORGE WALLACE, BULL
CONNOR, ORVAL FAUBUS,
AND OTHER DEMOCRATS
It was the Democratic Party that ginned up the racist mob against blacks and it is the Democratic Party ginning every new mob today—ironically, all portraying themselves as the equivalent of the Freedom Riders. With real civil rights secure—try to find a restaurant that won’t serve a black person—modern civil rights laws benefit only the mob, not the victims of the mob, as American blacks had been. Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.
Democrats have gone from demagoguing white (trash) voters with claims that Republicans are the party of blacks, to demagoguing black voters telling them Republicans are the party of racists. Any mob in a storm.
The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything—a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”1
This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.
Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond—the only one who later became a Republican—remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”
Democratic senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin all voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all remained Democrats for the rest of their lives.2 Al Gore’s father, Albert Gore, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; both he and his son remained lifelong Democrats. J. William Fulbright voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a Democrat and became the political mentor to Bill Clinton. Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a senior statesman in the Democratic Party until his dying day.
A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”3
Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example,