Conservatives sure love progressives and radicals -- at least after they're dead
The right loves to lay claim to legends like Martin Luther King and Susan B. Anthony. Historians beg to differ
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Sen. Mitch McConnell’s ill-advised silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren during the debate over confirming Jeff Sessions as attorney general read as a blatant act of sexism from a man who can’t handle backtalk from a woman. While that was no doubt an important element of it, it’s also important to remember that Warren was trying to read a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King, in which King described Sessions’ lengthy history of undermining the civil rights movement in Alabama.
That letter angers Republicans, because in the years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, there’s been a conservative effort to remake King in their own image. Warren’s attempt to read the letter by King’s widow into the record served as an embarrassing reminder that King’s politics had nothing in common with modern conservatism.
Call it the “dead progressive” problem. Conservatives love a dead progressive hero, because they can claim that person as one of their own without any bother about the person fighting back. In some cases, the right has tried to weaponize these dead progressives, claiming that they would simply be appalled at how far the still-breathing have supposedly gone off the rails and become too radical. The Kings are just two prominent victims of this rhetorical gambit.
“Despite decades of its appropriation by liberals, King’s message was fundamentally conservative,” wrote Carolyn Garris of the Heritage Foundation a mere two weeks before Coretta Scott King’s death in 2006.
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http://www.salon.com/2017/02/13/conservatives-sure-love-progressives-and-radicals-at-least-after-theyre-dead/
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