I very much enjoyed this bloggingheads with Michael C. Moynihan of Reason:
I meant to put this up last week, but I had a couple of thoughts about what we discussed that I hadn't quite figured out how to put into words, particularly about communism and the civil-rights movement, which occupied the latter half of the conversation.
W.E.B. DuBois in particular is a complicated figure. Despite his brilliance, there's a lot about him that reflects the ugliness of some of the intellectual strains of thought in his time, particularly his elitism. I think it's really easy in 2010, with all of the atrocities of Soviet communism laid bare, to look back at his descent into Stalinism and condemn him for it. For people today, though, I think it's far more difficult to remember the world in which he lived, one in which the United States twice fought for democracy while allowing unfettered violence and oppression against its black citizens, including those who wore uniforms in its defense. It's obvious now that communism was a disaster, it must have been less obvious to DuBois, at the age of 95, after a lifetime of what must have seemed like a futile fight against racism, that democracy had succeeded in delivering on its promise, or that in a few short years it would take a giant step in that direction.
One more thing about American communists and the civil-rights movement: It's a bit glib to say they were on the right side of history for the wrong reasons. If miscegenation had ultimately been a communist plot, that would not have strengthened the case for bans on interracial marriage. I'm not sure it ultimately matters what their reasons were, and given that the conservative movement was on the wrong side for the wrong reasons, it's not like the right answer was obvious to everyone at the time -- much as we'd like to pretend otherwise. I think Michael's statement to that reflects an essential discomfort the right has with the fact that American communists could have been right about race and wrong about communism, or really that they might have been right about anything at all.
