{"id":939,"date":"2013-08-29T14:23:47","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T18:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=939"},"modified":"2013-08-29T14:23:47","modified_gmt":"2013-08-29T18:23:47","slug":"martin-luther-king-jr-and-the-fundamental-transformation-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/08\/martin-luther-king-jr-and-the-fundamental-transformation-of-america.html","title":{"rendered":"Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Fundamental Transformation of America"},"content":{"rendered":"

On this 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, even the self-avowed apostles of \u201cindividualism,\u201d \u201cliberty,\u201d and \u201climited government\u201d\u2014i.e. \u201cconservatives\u201d\u2014can\u2019t resist lavishing endless praise upon its author, Martin Luther King, Jr.<\/p>\n

As uncomfortable as it makes these declared enemies of Big Government to think it, to say nothing of openly admitting it, the stone-cold truth of the matter is that King was nothing if not a man of the hard left.<\/p>\n

Michael Eric Dyson, a King admirer and hard leftist himself, makes this point unmistakably clear in his, I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n

Blasting away at the \u201cthe conservative misappropriation\u201d of King, Dyson shows, not that King would have <\/i>supported much of the left\u2019s agenda, but that he in fact did <\/i>do so.\u00a0 For starters, King resoundingly endorsed what is today called \u201caffirmative action.\u201d\u00a0 King insisted that \u201cthe nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro in the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory compensation from the handicaps he inherited from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, King envisioned a redistributive scheme that he <\/i>characterized as \u201cmassive.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI am proposing,\u201d King remarked, \u201cthat, just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, King eventually came to think that his earlier belief that American institutions could be \u201creformed\u201d was a mistake.\u00a0 Rather, because America was \u201cborn in genocide,\u201d \u201cracial hatred,\u201d and \u201cracial supremacy,\u201d nothing less than \u201ca reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values\u201d was demanded.\u00a0 After all, \u201ca nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as\u201d America did during World War II will think nothing of putting \u201cblack people in a concentration camp\u201d as well.<\/p>\n

This \u201crevolution of values\u201d that he desired King called \u201cdemocratic socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, \u201cthe plight of the Negro poor\u201d had actually worsened.\u00a0 What many view as his two signature achievements King viewed as \u201cat best surface changes.\u201d\u00a0 Only a \u201credistribution of economic power\u201d could rectify the injustices that King believed were rooted in \u201cthe system\u201d of \u201ccapitalism\u201d itself.<\/p>\n

Today, many Americans still resent Jane Fonda for her activism during the Vietnam War.\u00a0 But King was as vocal a critic of America\u2019s presence in Southeast Asia as Fonda ever was. The war was \u201csenseless,\u201d \u201cunjust,\u201d and \u201cracist,\u201d he insisted.\u00a0 Moreover, King, whose voice even at this time was no less influential than that of Fonda\u2019s, described America as \u201cthe greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

There is one final detail concerning this icon that enriches the irony of \u201cReagan conservatives\u201d doing their best to transform King into a one of their own: King despised<\/i> Ronald Wilson Reagan.<\/p>\n

Rarely did he publicly criticize his opponents\u2014or anyone\u2014by name, but, such was his contempt for Reagan that King made an exception in his case.\u00a0 \u201cWhen a Hollywood performer,\u201d King stated, \u201clacking distinction even as an actor, can become a leading war hawk candidate for the presidency only the irrationalities induced by a war psychosis can explain such a melancholy turn of events [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

King deserves to be credited for both combating state-ordered segregation as well as his impassioned defense of non-violence.\u00a0 Yet if conservatives and libertarians are to maintain their credibility, they must resist the temptation to turn King into one of their own.\u00a0 He was a man of the hard left who called for the fundamental transformation of the United States long before Barack Obama called for the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this 50th anniversary of the \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech, even the self-avowed apostles of \u201cindividualism,\u201d \u201cliberty,\u201d and \u201climited government\u201d\u2014i.e. \u201cconservatives\u201d\u2014can\u2019t resist lavishing endless praise upon its author, Martin Luther King, Jr. As uncomfortable as it makes these declared enemies of Big Government to think it, to say nothing of openly admitting it, the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMartin Luther King, Jr. and the Fundamental Transformation of America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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