Myths of consensus

Allow me to don my historian's hat, in the service of a point about the media.

I'm an admirer of the important new website OpenLeft and also of Mike Lux, one of the site's three principles. But in this post about building progressive coalitions, he repeats a common historical error about the great Bobby Kennedy. Writes Mike:

RFK's coalition was broader than the poor, the black, and the young. The reason he was such a potent threat to the established order was that his raw emotional honesty, his lack of the careful caution we see in way too many Democrats today, allowed him to reach the white working class (outside of the South). He was not the intellectuals' candidate, that was Gene McCarthy. And the elite N.Y. liberals had hated the idea of him running to be their Senator. His coalition was the poor, the black and the young, but also white working-class folks in the North and West (many of them Catholic) who bonded with him emotionally.

That's not true. This interpretation of RFK was born with the 1968 Indiana primary, which took place shortly after Martin Luther King's assassination and the unbelievably chaotic riots that followed. Prior to King's assassination, the racists' candidate, George Wallace, who was undertaking a third party run, was scoring nine percent in national polls. After the assassination, it was 14 percent.

After Bobby won Indiana, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak—then dyed-in-the-wool moderates—reported a political miracle: "while Negro precincts were delivering around 90 percent for Kennedy, he was running 2 to 1 ahead in some Polish precincts"--the same ones, outside Chicago, where in the 1964 presidential primary George Wallace first scared liberals that he might some day win elections in the North. What black riots had torn asunder--Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal coalition--Bobby was supposed to have repaired: he united "Black Power and Backlash," Joseph Kraft, the dean of the day's columnist community, now proclaimed. There only was one problem: it was a stastical fairy tale. In Gary, Indiana, only 15 percent Kennedy's votes came from whites. In white suburbs he lost decisively. 49 percent of Hoosiers said they didn't like Kennedy.

Here's the lesson for today. Pundits said he was a uniter. The facts showed he was a divider (he didn't intend to be a divider; much of what people hated for was his work fighting for racial equality). But to an Establishment hungry beyond measure for signs of consensus, the myth that he united all opposites answered a psychic need. It proved that consensus was possible, in a time when all other signs suggested it wasn't.

The pundits then who pushed a wishful story about Bobby Kennedy are the same in important respects as pundits now: they dearly wish to believe that America is fundamentally a nation of consensus, that our deep disagreements with one another are really only epiphenomena. And sometimes that distorts their vision. All of us are familiar with the dynamic—though these days it tends to surface when pundits say that there exists a brave body of moderate Republicans interested in compromise, and that they if only we reach out to them, consensus can be achieved.

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