Withdrawn Lott

The working-class guy who wins the lottery, loses all his old friends and then blows his head off in despair at the hollowness of his success is a staple of the tabloids. A similar process has been at work with the Republican Senate that hit the jackpot and regained its majority on Election Day. In the two weeks after Lott waxed unambiguously nostalgic about Strom Thurmond's defense of segregation in 1948, Lott's Republican colleagues sought a way to defuse the scandal without hurting the Poor Ol' Senate Majority Leader's Feelings. That is to say, two weeks passed in which Republicans tried to work up the nerve to commit collective suicide. Although Lott's decision last Friday to resign as majority leader took the party out of mortal danger, the damage has been deep, and it has established the GOP as a party that ought to be kept under observation.

But not, it bears saying, for racism. There are two diametrically opposite ways of looking at the damage done by the Lott mess. It was an embarrassment for Republicans either because (a) it revealed the way the party really thinks; or (b) it misrepresented the way the party really thinks. Democrats voiced the former view from the moment Lott opened his mouth, culminating in ex-President Clinton's statement last Thursday that Lott "just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what they do on the backroads every day."

This is incorrect. While there may be individual Republicans today who are that way inclined, they don't represent even the merest "tendency" within the GOP?let alone a center of gravity. The proof is that nobody in the Republican party?not a single Republican senator, staffer or consultant?worried that disciplining Lott would have any negative consequences for any Republican. Nobody raised the specter that if the Republicans were insufficiently stern in their defense of Lott, then the secret segregationists would rebel, launching a wave of right-wing primary challenges or rallying to David Duke.

But racism is not the only sin in the world, and the GOP's handling of the Lott remarks was shameful. Personally pardonable but politically disqualifying, these remarks were an act of lèse-république?and nobody in the Republican Party rose to the republic's defense. On the contrary, Republicans sought to focus attention on the petty personal matter of whether Trent Lott was or was not a racist. Once it could be established that Trent was a "real nice guy," we could just let the Fourteenth Amendment, along with the segregationist South's crimes against it, go on its merry way.

So the legalistic windbag Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania huffed, "I'm very much offended by what's happened to a very decent guy." And Pat Roberts of Kansas said, "personal mistakes and ill-advised remarks frequently cause pain and suffering when they were not intended." And Utah's ubiquitous Orrin Hatch chimed in: "He's apologized five or six times now. We're a forgiving nation." Of course we're a "forgiving nation," whatever that means. Trent Lott is welcome for dinner at my house any time. But his remarks show him to be an unfit custodian of our republican rights.

This tendency to gloss over the deeper issues extended to all parties. If a Howling Moron Award is ever bestowed for opinions expressed during the Lott Fortnight, former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura will receive it. "It seems public officials are no longer granted the First Amendment," Ventura said. "The First Amendment, let's remember, is there to protect unpopular speech." Sorry?but who ever suggested the slightest curtailment of Lott's right, as an individual, to express any opinion he wished? The "right" that Ventura is claiming is a product not of constitutional reasoning but of postmodern touchy-feeliness. It's the right of politicians, no matter what they say or do, to receive both the love of the citizenry and the perks of office.

Democrats were no more understanding: Explaining why he defended Lott early on, his Democratic homologue Tom Daschle said, "I had just spoken to Senator Lott and he had apologized to me profusely and asked me to extend the apology to anyone that might have been offended." Again, sorry?this is like having your way with the milkmaid and then apologizing to the castellan. It's to us?the citizenry?that Lott owes his apology. Not to his pals in the Senate. And not, by the way, to a bunch of handpicked civil-rights celebrities.

Lott's five abject "apologies" were not apologies at all. They were an attempt to barter away his party's agenda in exchange for his personal atonement?that is, to enrich himself by misappropriating something that did not belong to him. These "apologies" were the postmodern, politically correct equivalent of graft, a backroom deal done in the light of the television cameras: You give me my Majority Leader's office and my limo, I'll give you your affirmative action.

Democrats grabbed at this bargain with both hands?not least because simply keeping Lott in his post was a prize to be sought at all costs, a guaranteed electoral bonanza for Democrats two years from now. John Lewis, whose heroism as a civil rights leader four decades ago has been matched only by his opportunism as a legislator, the very same John Lewis who invoked the Third Reich when casting about for metaphors to describe Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, simply laid out his demands. "His voting record is not anything to be proud of," said Lewis of Lott, "when it comes to affirmative action, comes to voting for Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday, voting to extend the Voting Rights Act."

Talk of "pride" and "shame" in such matters is just a means of bullying people out of thinking and debating. We should not underestimate the electoral and p.r. difficulties Republicans face in putting forward policies on race that the vast majority of American blacks reject. But that rejection does not ipso facto mean that Republicans are arguing insincerely or even that their policies are the wrong ones. A non-racist can (and should) take Lott's side on all three of the matters Lewis raised. To take the issues in turn:

? The big problem with affirmative action is not "that it was always connected with quotas and timetables," as Lott said (but did not believe) on Black Entertainment Television. Quota-free affirmative action is meaningless: if you favor affirmative action, you favor quotas. The problem with affirmative action?as Jews and Asians who apply to college learn?is that it fosters racial paranoia, ascribing any differential between ethnic groups' achievements to some kind of intra-ethnic conspiracy.

? The big problem with the Martin Luther King holiday is not, as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe said, that it is "expensive." The problem with MLK Day is that by making King the only American individual honored with a holiday, the government elevates racial strife, which is a defining experience of American history, to a status as the defining experience of American history. It thus demeans such other themes as religious freedom, immigration, constitutional rights and resistance to tyranny, and elevates the Confederate and Jim Crow South to a privileged position as the cradle of American values.

? The problem with the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act is not that they empower blacks but that they disempower blacks. They help the black political class at the expense of black voters. By herding virtually all the minorities in the country into anemone-shaped and Z-shaped districts that guarantee the election of minority congressmen, the 1982 amendments merely guarantee that no politician of any party outside of those districts ever has to worry about voters?or minority concerns?at all.

So, after stupidly opening debate on an issue that should remain closed, Lott felt obliged to close debate on issues that should remain open. And in mid-scandal, most of his fellow Republicans were complaisant enough to swallow the equation of their party with racism, and, having done so, to lie about the real rationale behind their votes. They thus reinforced the notion that Lott's remarks at the Thurmond dinner had expressed the true hidden agenda of the party. The implication was that everything Republicans had said on race up till now?up till they'd been "caught"?had been bullshit. By apologizing for such positions Lott showed himself willing to barter away the good name of his party and its voters for personal gain. The damage to Republicans could have been worse, but it is not slight.

The Lott affair also reveals a disturbing thing about the structure of our politics. We have Republicans and Democrats but no republicans and democrats. The Democrats have turned into the Oh-Golly-Aren't-I-Big-Hearted-and-Noble Party; the Republicans are the Well-Let's-Be-Reasonable-Here-and-Not-Waste-All-Our-Money Party. It's unsurprising that neither party was prepared for the Lott remarks. The Democrats sought to damage the GOP with the Lott story; Republicans sought to stave off the damage. But it never occurred to either of them that what they had just witnessed was a straightforward insult to our Constitution and our republic.