EVERY HATE OLD SEEMS NEW AGAIN:
MSNBC and Mike Huckabee bring back the Outsider Myth
by DC Larson

(While only about a month has passed since I wrote the below essay, much has changed in the ongoing presidential nomination campaign. Still, this piece contains much of enduring relevance.)

My 1/18 email to MSNBC was succinct.

Dear MSNBC:

On this morning's Morning Joe program, host Joe Scarborough and political analyst Pat Buchanan cited Mike Huckabee's recent remarks re the Confederate flag.

Both Scarborough and Buchanan cited as if logically legitimate Huckabee's charge that "outsiders," "people from other states," have no moral right to call for the flag of Slavery's removal from government display in South Carolina.

Scarborough and Buchanan's outsiders argument is the same one advanced by those 1960s voices opposing Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights movement and the Freedom Riders. Referencing those 1960s criticisms, King wrote:

"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

Sincerely,

DC Larson
Waterloo, Iowa

I'd recognized that MSNBC's chosen analyst Buchanan was hardly an objective commentator. A 1996 Washington Post piece on his then-bid for the Republican Party's presidential nomination had cited his longtime embrace of the Outsider Myth. "He once called Martin Luther King Jr. 'immoral, evil and a demogogue.' While working in the Nixon White House, Buchanan urged the president to 'hold off' on integration, permitting communities 'freedom of choice.' "("Buchanan's Coded Rhetoric Attracts Level of Name Calling, Criticism Rarely Seen," 2/22/96)

So, I did not expect my cyber-missive to in any way imprint MSNBC's tone. And I was proven correct in that expectation.

The next morning's program featured a cottony interview with candidate Huckabee. Far from pushing him to account for his offensive and opportunistic position (one in earlier years advocated by George Wallace, Richard Nixon, David Duke and Ronald Reagan), co-hosts Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski chummed it up with him, allowing him to "bless" the fleetingly and ineffectually critical Brzezinski.

Huckabee continued to evoke the Outsider Myth on rare occasions when he was called to explain his catering to racist voters. During a 1/18 appearence on the Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes, he refused to claim a definitional stance, saying of the Confederate Flag controversy, "It is not an issue for me because I don't live in South Carolina."

As of this post-Nevada/South Carolina writing, Huckabee's nomination fortunes appear to be on the wane. And that is good. But his resurrection of the Outsider Myth and the favor with which some audiences hailed it illustrate the enduring popularity of racially-divisive, anti-democratic regional religiosity.

And should Huckabee ultimately assume a place on the Republican Party's 2008 ticket or within its national hierarchy, the Outsider Myth will doubtless enjoy new currency.

Of course, there is the possibility that the politicking preacher who wears fundamentalism's old rugged cross on his tailored suit's jacket-sleeve may also be courting an even more discriminating choir.

This was lent additional plausibility by the candidate's insistence to South Carolinians that the Constitution be amended so as to be brought into conformity with his/their conception of "the living God." (All of which, surely, was hoped to result in the candidate's being bouyed office-ward atop the shoulders of Stars and Bars-hefting Dominionists.)

In his recent, "American Facists," author Chris Hedges gives an acidic portrayal of the 'insider/outsider' fantasy encouraged upon pew-crowding fundamentalists: "[T]here are godly men and women who advance Christian values, and there are nonbelievers -- many of them liberal Christians -- who peddle the filth and evil of secular humanism. This dividing line is nothing other than the distinction between human and nonhuman, between the worthy and those unworthy of life, between saved and unsaved, between friend and foe."

One recalls that much of the 1960s opposition to the civil rights movement was stoked by old ways pulpit-pounders, who in their moment (like Huckabee in his, today) testified to the soundness of the Outsider Myth.
A supporter of racial segregation as a 'divine mandate,' Jerry Falwell in a 1958 sermon assured his Thomas Road Baptist Church flock: "If Chief Justice Earl Warren and his associates had known God's word, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision [Brown v Board of Education] would never have been made...The true negro does not want integration. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." ("The Light and Dark of Jerry Falwell," Shanna Flowers/Roanoke.com 5/17/07)

Wikipedia's Falwell entry notes that during his mid-60s Old Time Gospel Hour broadcasts, he regularly featured segrgationist politicians Lester Maddox and George Wallace -- themselves early electoral advocates of the Outsider Myth recently useful for Mike Huckabee.

(And, while the civil rights movement was itself partly based in religious faith, it is of more than passing irony that some persons who once labored to advance the laudable cause of racial civil rights are themselves similarly pro-discrimination and observant of "old ways" in their own contemporary calls that social and legal clampdowns be maintained against women, gays and lesbians.)

Even should Huckabee never again voice the Outsider Myth, it has been reasserted into the national dialogue. His choice to respect and pander to those seeking refuge from the democratic imperative constitutes an assertion that old lines can be officially redrawn -- and deserve freedom from national-scale comment.

Tellingly, none of Huckabee's Republican competitors have taken issue with the Outsider Myth.

The usual reaction to witnessing one major party's offensiveness is knee-jerk support for the "opposing" team's ballot offerings. Except then you consider how truly wretched those also are. And you end up wishing the Elephant and the Donkey were wrestling on a roof top and would both fall over the side.


END