The Democratic Hall of Shamelessness

If I weren’t too busy to blog today, I’d probably want to say something about the grim figure of Charles Schumer, whose crass politicization of the death of Rosa Parks is not just an insult to her memory, but offensive to blacks in particular and Americans in general. Amazingly, liberal elites who are outraged by the banal observations of a William Bennett not only let Schumer’s comments slide, but report them without irony as promoting the cause of blacks and civil rights.

I'm too busy at the moment to track down the exact quote, but Schumer used the occasion of Rosa Parks' funeral yesterday to argue that Justice Alito will use his position on the bench to roll back the achievements of Rosa Parks. Unlike Rosa Parks, he will use his "seat" do do evil.

Those words can only be interpreted in one of two ways. Either Joseph Alito and all of the conservatives who support him are vicious racists who wish to turn back the clock and reinstate government-enforced racism, or else Rosa Parks is personally responsible for a plethora of ill-conceived liberal legislation that has had disastrous consequences for generations of black Americans.

If the first is true, then Joseph Alito needs to be run out of Washington on a rail. If the second is true, then Rosa Parks doesn’t deserve a state funeral so much as consignment to an ignominious grave, along with all of the dysfunctional leftist ideas and policies that she supposedly inspired.

Of course, neither of these are true. Democrats don’t really have ideas, but a sort of post-literate iconography, and Parks is one of those icons that substitute for thought. Schumer is simply stealing the quiet symbolism of this dignified woman’s actions in order to cynically exploit them for political gain. More importantly, he is actually undoing Ms. Park's legacy and shoving her again to the back of the bus, declaring to the world that blacks are like helpless children who can get nowhere in life without white liberals like Schumer driving the bus for them.

In the bizarro world of the left, those who believe that blacks are no different than any other race and are fully capable of rising to the level of their merits, are the racists. This makes no sense, for in the Republican party, blacks such as Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas actually get to drive the bus. Liberals despise them for that, for it is a reminder that it is possible to learn how to drive without their help. But who in their right mind would get onto a bus with Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney or Maxine Waters behind the wheel, anyway? If Rosa Parks is responsible for Al Sharpton, she has a lot to atone for.

Ironically, Ms. Parks’ right to sit anywhere she pleased on that bus was not granted or invented by a liberal judge, but was self-evidently present in any strict constructionist view of the constitution. And of course, it was overwhelmingly activist Democrats who presided over Jim Crow, and found abundant justification of their racist views in the constitution. The illiberal interpreters of the constitution had to be defeated then, just as they must be defeated now.

The Schumers of the world also forget that Ms. Parks simple action of saying “no,” of staying put, was an implicit tribute to America, just as Mahatma Gandhi’s success in liberating India was a tribute to the British. For if Rosa Parks had tried the same thing in the Soviet Union or Castro’s Cuba (revered by Al Sharpton and so many others on the left), she would have simply disappeared, both literally and figuratively. That is, she would have vanished from the earth before she could have ever entered the pages of history, just as Gandhi would have been an anonymous statistic had he attempted the tactic of passive resistance against nazi Germany or fascist Japan (not to mention the Islamists who terrorize India today). Gandhi mistakenly thought that he had discovered a universal spiritual principle called “ahimsa,” when what he had actually discovered was the decency of the British. Specifically, he had discovered their capacity for shame. Against a people without such a capacity, this type of spiritual resistance is impotent.

Which brings us back to the shameless figure of Charles Schumer, who obviously does not possess a better side to which we may appeal. Ironically, the tactics of a Rosa Parks, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, presume that the adversary can be shamed. Not so Charles Schumer, whose shamelessness doesn’t even stand out in a party leadership containing the likes of Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, Jesse Jackson, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin, Barbara Boxer, et al. Truly, an all-star hall of shamelessness.