Cullen, “The Wright Stuff”
The Wright Stuff
Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, and the blackened reputation of Abraham Lincolnby Jim Cullen
It has become a commonplace of modern politics to bemoan the presumably sorry state of our election campaigns by comparing them with the 1858 U.S. Senate debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The seven encounters around the state of Illinois exactly 150 years ago are often collectively regarded as the apogee of high-minded democratic discourse. “Lincoln-Douglas It Wasn’t,” reads the title of a blog entry on a George Bush-John Kerry debate in 2004. A suburban New York newspaper Website summed up its coverage of a 2006 debate for state senate with the headline, “It Wasn’t Exactly Lincoln-Douglas.” U.S. News and World Report described former presidential candidate John Edwards’s response to a 2007 video portraying him fussing with his hair by saying “it wasn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates, exactly.” At one point in the presidential primary campaigns this spring, Hillary Clinton repeatedly called for Lincoln-Douglas styled debates with Barack Obama. “I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion,” she said. The Obama campaign made a similar pitch to John McCain in response to the McCain campaign’s call for town meetings.
Of course, as anyone who has actually read the transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates knows, they were characterized by often numbing repetition, mudslinging, and innuendo. The racial dimension of the innuendo was especially important. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, then racism—cloaked in the garb of anti-extremism—may well be the first.
[This is just a snippet. Read the whole article at Common-Place, then come back here to comment below.]
i throughly enjoyed this article not because I agreed with all of the author’s points but because it made me think about issues that i had never considered. I never would have considered a comparison between Frederick Douglass and Rev. Wright not even to confirm or dispute the comparison but the two quotes at the beginning of the article grabbed my attention and made me ponder the issue. In my opinion the line between Douglass and Wright, which Prof. Cullen admits is not straight, is not solid. The type of oppression that both individuals rally against is different. Douglass condemned the United States for holding African-Americans in chains while Wright is concerned with the lack of progress in post Civil-Rights America but this is only my opinion and the difference between the two can definetly be debated. Also, I believe that a stronger connection can be made between members of the Republican party, as well as conservative talk show hosts such Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reily, and Stephen Douglas than a connection between Douglas and McCain because he has largely avoided making Wright and Obama a campaign issue while the others have kept the issue alive. Prof. Cullen has successfully merged history and current events and provided a forum for debate.
Comment by wgl — October 23, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
The issues of race in the 2008 Presidential campaign have been consistently and intentionally distorted and this article does not represent an exception. Rev. Wright is a race-baiting opportunist whose primary motivation seems to be increasing his own wealth by fanning the flames of racial hatred. Comparing Rev. Wright to Frederick Douglass is an insult to Mr. Douglass and every other American who has sincerely attempted to improve the racial situation in this country. Only in the world of liberal academia would such a comparison not strike a person as laughable on its face.
Also embarrassing is Prof. Cullen’s attempt to defend Bob Herbert’s tedious and predictable accusations of racial bigotry by the McCain camp. Prof. Cullen applauds Mr. Herbert for uncovering the insidious racial subtext of a McCain campaign ad. Pathetic. To Mr. Herbert and the left-wing loons that populate the Times Op-Ed page, a racist can be defined as anyone who fails to wholeheartedly support the magical and planet-saving candidacy of Sen. Obama. By embracing this transparent left-wing hackery, Prof. Cullen robs himself of even the illusion of measured impartiality and exposes himself as nothing more than another leftist academic with an ax to grind.
Academia is totally dominated by lock-step leftist ideology. This is painfully obvious to everyone yet many academics make a pitiful attempt to either deny it outright or justify it by indulging in orgies of smug self-satisfaction. It doesn’t really matter; the liberal domination of academia is a fact of life. Judging by Prof. Cullen’s article, he certainly has no intention of altering the status quo.
Comment by Burt Lancaster — October 26, 2008 @ 1:08 am
I believe that a comparison between Jeremiah Wright and Frederick Douglass is debatable — precisely the point of the article, and I’m glad to see that it was a comparison sufficiently provocative to evoke responses on the part of those who at least partially disagree with me, whether in terms of premise or conclusion. I would point out to wgl that the chains Frederick Douglass sought to break were literal as well as figurative, and that he continued this project for decades after the formal end of slavery. I agree with both him and Mr. Lancaster that Wright is not as persuasive a figure as Douglass, though I will add that the point of view of Douglass, once considered every bit as incendiary as Wright is now, is widely regarded as common sense by a great many conservatives, among others. That Wright would suggest that the United States has acted in ways that God would condemn, and that the tragedy of September 11 is a terrible price the few have paid for the sins of many, does not strike me as a patently false, treacherous statement. Whether or not we agree, I believe, as I think Douglass did, that an honest patriotism requires grappling with difficult questions rather than turning on the people who raise them, exploiting them to stoke resentment, or dismissing, with lots of assertions and not much in the way of substantial evidence, those who do as mindless hacks.
Comment by Jim Cullen — October 26, 2008 @ 5:09 pm