revisionism, republican style

"There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a Democratic Socialism." - Martin Luther King, Jr, Conservative.

Roosevelt would have supported the privatization of Social Security. So says Fox news. Martin Luther King would have opposed Affirmative Action. So says Ward Connerly. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. Up is down. Like Stalin’s pre-fotoshop graphic artists who airbrushed Trotsky out of pictures, the conservative machine has been hard at work rewriting American history. In their version, nobody, ever, at any time was anything other than a conservative. And if they were, they were either a degenerate or a foreigner.

It never ceases to amaze me how much violence to facts and historical record conservatives will unleash in order to keep their ideological frame intact. Take the struggle over Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s legacy as an example. In his day, King was an unabashed progressive, opposing the war in Vietnam, supporting labor struggles, and linking the fight for African American freedom to the need for a redistribution of wealth and power in general. For this, as well as his overall challenge to white power, he was red-baited, vilified and harassed. However, King spoke to something great and wonderful in the American spirit, and he is rightfully thought of with reverence and admiration. This cannot stand. There cannot be, in the mind of the right, a progressive American hero.

And so, his canonization had to be resisted. Rumors flew across the conservative community that King was a plagiarist, a philanderer, even a Communist. People often forget that it was a struggle to mark King’s birthday as a national holiday. In 1979, it was defeated in the House by five votes, one of them belonging to then Congressman Dick Cheney. It took a national boycott of Arizona to force that great state to honor the holiday. That was as late as 1992. Through it all, however, King has emerged as an all-but-untouchable folk hero, and the right had to change tactics. Instead of refuting his legacy, they began to distort it, twisting his words into conservative gobbledy-gook about self-reliance and individual effort. They embrace King, now, much to the chagrin of some die-hard conservatives who know and hate the real King. What emerges is a King devoid of radical critique or reformist zeal.

So, today they are going after Franklin Roosevelt, the Democrats’ Democrat. Literally rearranging his words so that it seems that even Roosevelt would support Bush’s plan to gut the New Deal. It’s the same old revisionism. Now that we have evidence that Lincoln was gay, expect Rush Limbaugh to argue that he was, in fact, a Democrat.