The Silence of the Cats

Trent Lott still refuses to speak frankly about racism.

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the March 2006 issue

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To understand what happened to Lott, remember that he is not alone. A great unreported story in American politics is the silencing of overt debate on racial issues. When was the last time a major GOP politician came out squarely against racial preferences? After the Supreme Court upheld discriminatory admissions policies in the 2003 decision Grutter v. Bollinger, few Republicans had anything critical to say.

While Republicans have little chance at the black vote, they do hope for a share of Latinos. Although some surveys suggest otherwise, they think an attack on preferences would scuttle their Latino prospects. They also face pressure from business, which has surrendered on the issue. Discrimination in the name of diversity helps executives avoid protests and boycotts, and they cringe at the idea of revisiting the question.

The most potent cause of the Republicans' silence is fear of the "racist" label. Liberal Democrats have always seized every possible opportunity to link Republicans to bigotry. In most cases, the charge is baseless--but there's a catch. Only a few decades ago, Democratic segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms did indeed move over to the GOP. As long as such people held high positions in the Republican Party, Democrats could use them as rhetorical battering rams. (Yes, there is a double standard. As Republicans like to point out, former Klansman Robert Byrd is the ranking Democratic senator. But he has escaped the wrath of civil rights organizations by moving left over the years.)

Lott is a transitional figure. Although the worst of segregation was over by the time he entered Congress, he did not free himself from the past. For a long time, he had a warm relationship with the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor to the racist Citizens Councils. In 1981 he filed a brief in a Supreme Court case concerning Bob Jones University. The IRS had revoked its tax-exempt status because it forbade interracial dating. Lott argued that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy."

During the Thurmond furor, the liberal blogosphere used those examples to make Lott a symbol of GOP racism. By defending him, Republicans feared, they might expose themselves to the same accusation. With his friends going silent and his enemies getting louder, he knew he had to give up the leadership.

Lott's critics engaged in Pinteresque silence of their own when they omitted a key line of his Bob Jones brief: "Schools are allowed to practice racial discrimination in admissions in the interest of diversity." For backers of affirmative action, that statement remains uncomfortably accurate. In Herding Cats, Lott could have made a strong case for colorblind equality by revising his argument. As long as we allow one form of discrimination, he could have said, we foster other forms. Instead of using the comparison to back up Bob Jones, he could have used it to condemn racial preferences.