In a display of the arrogance of the Left, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell recently interrogated presidential candidate Herman Cain, demanding, “Mr. Cain, what are you grateful to this nation for?”

O’Donnell then lectured him on what he should be grateful for: “You served in the Navy. They paid for you to go get a graduate degree while you were in the Navy. Are you grateful to the government for doing that? Are you grateful to this government for passing the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act?”

O’Donnell rebuked Cain for not “marching” in the civil rights movement while a student at Morehouse College, accusing him of standing idly by: “You watched black college students from around the country and white college students from around the country come south and be murdered, fighting for the rights of African Americans.”

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Conor Friedersdorf of Atlantic Magazine felt that O’Donnell went too far, but he blamed the ineptness in part on “the folly of trying to mimic Fox News.”  Although Friedersdorf concluded, “Kudos to Cain for keeping impressively composed and responsive during an ordeal where Vietnam veterans and dead civil rights marchers were shamelessly invoked to bait him,” other liberal media spokesmen sprang to the defense of O’Donnell.

Cain, who rose from a working class background in segregated Atlanta to become CEO of Godfather’s Pizza and a chairman of the Federal Reserve, connects with the middle class and those who hold traditional values.  Tickets to an October 2nd DeKalb County Republicans fundraiser sold out in record time after he agreed to speak.  As I witnessed on this and other occasions, he has an amazing ability to connect with good humor and shared values.  At the 57^th Fighter Group Restaurant, next to the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport in Atlanta he talked to 562 mostly local, middle class supporters, treating the plane take-off with quips about the pilots being liberals, while outlining his program for fixing an economy on “life support” and dealing with the “pipsqueak potentates” leading Iran and North Korea.

This is what enrages socialist O’Donnell.  Despite their rhetoric, the Left despises the middle class, or the bourgeoisie, as they say amongst themselves.  (They want us to think their ideas are new.)

The intelligentsia like O’Donnell have nothing but contempt for those who value economic and intellectual independence.  They envy those who rise up through their own efforts.  For white, upper-class Baby Boomers like O’Donnell (born 1951) the most valuable activity is “marching”—with themselves in the lead of the unwashed masses.

The working stiffs trying to fit in community college classes between jobs, however, did not have the leisure to “march” and do “community organizing.”  And first-generation students, like Cain, do not take higher education for granted or have much leisure time or luxuries.  Cain’s father forbade him from skipping high school classes to take part in protests.

In this he was not unusual.  Contrary to O’Donnell’s assumptions, not every black person was on the streets protesting.  Many, like Cain’s father, saw advancement as coming through traditional means, like education, hard work, and the political and legal process.

So did the father of former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.  In her memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, she writes, “Today there is a narrative that the middle classes who would eventually benefit disproportionately from desegregation did little to actually bring it about.”  Few people in her black middle class community marched with Martin Luther King, she writes, “But the story of the choices that people made is far more complex than the caricature that neatly separates those who marched from those who didn’t.”

Rice describes a girlhood experience of coming back home with her parents to their house in Birmingham in 1963 and hearing a bomb going off down the street.  Her father drove the family to Hooper City on the outskirts to be with relatives.  A second bomb went off and Rice explains, “As terrorists still do today, bombers exploded the first device in hopes that a crowd would gather.”  The residents knew better.  Her father went out on the porch and sat with his gun “looking for white night riders.”

He and the men of the neighborhood then armed themselves and formed a watch at the two entrances to the neighborhood.  “Because of this experience,” she explains, “I’m a fierce defender of the Second Amendment.”

Rice’s father disagreed with his friend, the recently deceased civil rights leader, Fred Shuttlesworth, regarding Martin Luther King’s approach of “nonviolent direct action.”  Many shared Reverend Rice’s views.  A 1967 Harris poll showed that nearly half (48 %) of blacks disapproved of King, in fact.

Rice cites her father’s reasons for refusing to join, recalling her father telling her mother, “’I’m not going out there because if some redneck comes after me with a billy club or a dog, I’m going to try to kill him.  Then they’ll kill me, and my daughter will be an orphan.’”

Her father also disapproved of using children and teenagers in marches.

Many white radicals, like Bill Ayers, Howard Zinn, and Tom Hayden, though, saw the civil rights movement as an opportunity for advancing a larger, revolutionary agenda and coordinated efforts with Northern young people.

Lawrence O’Donnell hailed Northern civil rights activists as some kind of saints, though.  That, however, was not the universal opinion of those they were presumably helping.  Robert Coles in Flannery O’Connor’s South quotes interviews of many black Southerners.  One woman interviewed in 1962 in Albany, Georgia, complained about the civil rights activists “talk[ing] down to us.  They make us out to be slow moving and with not the brains we should have. . . . They come down here, and they want to lift us up to their level. . . .”  Most of the interviews include complaints about civil rights’ workers contempt for the religious beliefs and traditional social values of those they were trying to “help.”

O’Donnell provided all of America a graphic display of such contempt.

Herman Cain (and millions of others) did not “march” according to the way O’Donnell and his like-minded progressives felt they should.

What really threatens the egos of such boors with Ivy League diplomas?  Think about it: an armed black man on the front porch of his own house protecting wife and child, and a successful businessman running for president.

        Mary Grabar teaches English at a university in Atlanta and writes about education, culture, and politics, www.marygrabar.com.

 

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

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