On September 16, 1964, in the city of Greenville in South Carolina, the American political status quo that had held since Appomattox ended with a crash the echoes of which, like the residual noise of the Big Bang that created the universe, are still detectable, if you know where to look for them. On that day, Strom Thurmond, a powerful United States senator representing the Home Office of American Sedition, and representing it in the fullest sense of the word, up to and including an unacknowledged act of what his most fervent constituents would call miscegenation that produced a daughter, announced that he was leaving the Democratic party, becoming a Republican, and supporting the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.

Thurmond's statement was thickly coded, but its message was unmistakable. Because, by fits and starts, the Democratic party had aligned itself with the Civil Rights Movement, and because the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson showed every intention of codifying that alignment into federal law, the South saw itself as besieged by what amounted to a second Reconstruction. Among the elements of the bill of particulars cited that day by Thurmond, who'd long before presaged his political apostasy by walking out of the 1948 Democratic national convention when the party adopted a water-logged plank supporting civil rights, and by his authorship of the "Southern Manifesto" opposing the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, was this charge, for which you didn't need Alan Turing to decode.

The Democratic party has encouraged, supported, and ptotected the Supreme Court in a reign of judicial tyranny, and in the Court's effort to wipe out local self-government, effect law enforcement, internal security, the rights of the people and the states, and even the structure of state government.

This was the final act in a conservative miracle play concocted by two brilliant—if stunningly amoral—political strategists named Harry Dent and J. Fred Buzhardt, who saw a golden opportunity for the Republican party to capitalize on the backlash among Southern white people against the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement, thereby breaking the "Solid South" that had been the Democratic party's national bulwark ever since the days in which Abraham Lincoln put the newly formed Republican party behind emancipation.Later, the heirs to Dent and Buzhardt—most notably Patrick Buchanan and the late Lee Atwater—noticed that white backlash was far from a regional phenomenon. Thus was born the triumph of the modern conservatism, sprung full-grown from the pale, pasty brow of Strom Thurmond and hundreds of others like him, shot through with neo-Confederate ideas, and with some Confederate ideas that were far from neo-, and every Republican who wanted to succeed acknowledged this fact iin one way or another.

(Even that Machiavellian yard waste Richard Nixon, who occasionally is cited by the sadly misinformed as having been some kind of Establishment antidote to the poison that Goldwater unleashed into the Republican party, realized where the power had come to reside. When it all hit the fan in 1973, on his way to impeachment, and with vice-president Spiro Agnew caught taking home-state bribes in his office, Nixon hired none other than J. Fred Buzhardt to come in and troubleshoot the whole rat's nest. Buzhardt conducted his own investigation of John Dean, the former White House counsel who'd turned whistleblower, and it was Buzhardt who inadvertently revealed the White House taping system to the staff of the Senate committee investigating Watergate, which was chaired, in a nice irony, by Thurmond's old running buddy from the other Carolina, Sam Ervin.)

This is the plain history that modern conservatism not only fails to acknowledge, but actively tries to erase from the common memory. You see this every time we are reminded that Robert Byrd once belonged to the KKK, or every time a conservative pundit reminds us how vital Republican votes were to the passage of landmark civil-rights legislation. But, as I said, the echoes are as clear as the faint, residual clamor of the Big Bang, if you know where to look for them. Which brings us to the curious case of Congressman Steve Scalise, the third-ranking member of the Republican leadership in the House Of Representatives, and a man with his ass caught in a considerable crack at the moment because he made the mistake of acknowledging this history in public, following the trail blazed by ol' Strom Thurmond, one too many times.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said late Monday that his

longtime political adviser, Kenny Knight, was "friendly" with House

Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) in 2002, and cited that relationship

as the reason Scalise accepted an invitation that year to speak at a

gathering of white supremacists. "Scalise would communicate a lot

with my campaign manager, Kenny Knight," Duke said in a phone

interview. "That is why he was invited and why he would come. Kenny knew

Scalise, Scalise knew Kenny. They were friendly." Scalise, then a state lawmaker, spoke in May 2002 at a convention of the European-American Unity and Rights

Organization, or EURO, at a hotel in a New Orleans suburb.

We can dismiss Scalise's primary alibiout of hand, because we are not required to be the idiots he and his staff believe us to be.

"I detest any kind of hate group," Scalise said. "I don't support any

of the things I have read about this group, but I spoke to a lot of

groups during that period. I went all throughout south Louisiana. I

spoke to the League of Women Voters, a pretty liberal group... I still

went and spoke to them. I spoke to any group that called, and there were

a lot of groups calling." Scalise's press secretary reinforced that line of logic in a

statement, saying: "Throughout his career in public service, Mr. Scalise

has spoken to hundreds of different groups with a broad range of

viewpoints. In every case, he was building support for his policies, not

the other way around... He has never been affiliated with the abhorrent

group in question. The hate-fueled ignorance and intolerance that group

projects is in stark contradiction to what Mr. Scalise believes and

practices as a father, a husband, and a devoted Catholic."

It is impossible to believe that, in 2002, a career politician from Louisiana did not know who David Duke was, or what David Duke represented. David Duke was the most nationally famous white-supremacist since the death of George Lincoln Rockwell, and Louisiana spared itself his presence in the governor's office only by electing the opulently corrupt Edwin Edwards. ("Vote For The Crook," said the bumper stickers. "It's Important.") So, no, there's no reason to get lost in the ink cloud with which Scalise's office is attempting to cover his flight from accountability. In 2002, the same year that Scalise was slow-dancing with the white pride crowd, Trent Lott was being stripped of his Senate leadership position for having appeared before another white-supremacist outfit and having praised in his remarks the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential campaign of...wait for it...Strom Thurmond. Are you sensing a theme here?

I don't know what the pushback will be—although I'm betting that we will be hearing a lot about Al Sharpton's visits to the White House. John Boehner is not having the transition of his dreams at the moment, what with this, and with Congressman Michael Grimm's resigning his seat, perhaps in anticipation of a stretch in the federal sneezer. Even Erick Erickson—who is currently the subject of a strangely hagiographic account in The Atlantic by the talented, and usually reliable, Molly Ball, even though Erickson is a creature of Thurmondized Republicanism, no better than the rest of them—has gone up the wall. I suspect Scalise may not be doing much Minority Whipping when the new Congress begins next week.

But the Republican party—and the Movement conservatism that is its only life force—once again faces the same choice it has faced since that day in 1964, when Strom Thurmond blew the trumpet and led his supporters out of the bondage of the party of equal rights. It can look at Steve Scalise and see that its success is that of the Political Party Of Dorian Grey. Steve Scalise is the public face. But, up in the corner of the attic, there's a portrait of the rotting, decomposing corpse of Strom Thurmond, the decay deepening with every election won by the tactics he so completely pioneered. The Republican party can admit the truth of its history, and it can begin to reconcile itself with the sins that made it successful. Or, it can throw Steve Scalise overboard and wait for the next Steve Scalise to reappear. In either case, yes, I despair of the rebranding.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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