THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

There are lots of pictures on television about refugees crying in the Balkans. It reminds me of the 1970s when I was doing press conferences for the antibusing movement.

In Louisville, thousands of AMERICAN children were forced to wait in the dark and cold at dawn so they could spend HOURS on the bus so they could end up in dangerous ghetto schools as an outnumbered white minority.

There were LOTS of tears there. Lots of children were crying. But, despite everything we could do, not a single newsman was there to report it, much less to PHOTOGRAPH it. It wasn't their issue, you understand. When a single black man is brutally murdered by a racist in Texas, the entire national press is there with the FBI. Every night, black criminals brutalize hundreds of whites, but no one even mentions that.

It isn't THEIR issue.

As I said before, the Communist Pol Pot ruled a country about the size of the one Milosevic rules. He murdered over a million people in that country during the 1970s, but the anti-Vietnam Love Generation didn't say a word. Why was that? Well, Pol Pot was a Communist, and mass murder in the name of Communism is NEVER the stuff of which War Crimes are made. Communists have killed far, far more people in this century than everybody else put together, but no one has ever suggested that any Communist be tried for War Crimes.

After all, the media says, that's not THEIR issue.

But the Serbian War IS their issue.

So I would like an answer to a very simple question: Why am I supposed to blindly support a war that is being fought because it IS their issue?

The answer is that if the United States does it, conservatives will back it, no matter what it is.

This is the history of the American right, and how it has ruined America. Conservatives are always blindly loyal to the institutions liberals have taken over.

Leftists took over the Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church and all the mainline churches, and conservatives kept giving their money to those churches. Conservatives kept leaving money in their wills to those churches. Leftist professors rule on campus, and conservatives give more money to them. For every dollar donated to any conservative cause, conservatives give a hundred dollars to institutions liberals rule. In the case of blind loyalty to institutions, liberals have the superior MORALITY!

The minute any institution stops serving their principles, liberals dump it.

When the Boy Scouts opposed homosexuality, liberals stopped giving them money. If a church starts performing homosexual marriages, it might lose one percent of conservative donations, and that will be TEMPORARY.

My first experience with this immoral conservative loyalty was when I got into politics in the middle 1950s. I immediately saw why conservative voters had lost all influence over presidential policy. Conservative Midwesterners blindly voted for anything that had the Republican label on it.

In the Solid South, conservative Southerners always voted for anything that had the Democratic label on it, no matter what they did to us.

Conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans did not have the slightest loyalty to their principles. The institution, the political party, was everything to them.

Not liberals. Liberals voted for the party that did the most for liberalism. They backed liberal Democrats, but they also voted for Republican liberals like Jacob Javits in New York and Earl Warren in California. It paid off, big time.

Meanwhile, conservatives voted for anything with the right party label on it, including Warren and Javits and all the Republican liberals like them.

Because of this blind and immoral loyalty to their parties, conservatives lost all power over party policy. Each party ignored conservatives when they nominated a presidential candidate and wrote a platform. The Democrats nominated liberals and wrote a hard civil rights platform. All but a handful of TEMPORARY Dixiecrats remained blindly loyal.

Republicans repeatedly nominated Dewey over the conservative Taft. It was clear to everybody that a majority of Republicans wanted the conservative Midwesterner Robert Taft. But the Party nominated Dewey. Party leaders said that conservatives would vote for the Party candidate no matter what. They needed to nominate the more liberal Dewey, who was from New York, in order to get more liberal votes.

In other words, everybody knew liberals were not blindly loyal to anybody, so the parties had to be loyal to them.

In 1960, conservatives wrote Nixon's Republican platform.

But Governor Rockefeller of New York was a liberal, and he wouldn't stand for it. He was for his principles, so he had no blind loyalty to the Republican Party.

So Governor Rockefeller of New York called Nixon and said he wouldn't support Nixon unless Nixon rewrote that platform to suit the liberals. They spent hours on the phone, and Nixon presented the Republican Convention with the platform Rockefeller wanted for his support. According to Theodore White's, "Making of the President, 1960," that cost Nixon the election. He lost by only a few electoral votes, and he got 49% of the vote in South Carolina and Texas, and he got 49.9% in Missouri. Just a few more conservative Democrats would have won for him.

In 1964, all the liberal Republicans refused to support Goldwater when he won the nomination. As soon as Goldwater was defeated, he turned the party back over to the moderates.

And what if Rockefeller won the nomination in 1964? Every conservative Republican would have CRAWLED to him, begging for the privilege of supporting him.

Droolingly loyal people get exactly what they deserve. They get ignored. Their cause gets ignored. But all liberals have to do to get conservatives to do what they want is to wave the right flag. Liberals want a war in Serbia? They just have to point to the uniforms Americans soldiers are wearing, and most conservatives will drop to their knees and BEG for the privilege of supporting the liberals.

When did conservatives finally begin to get some control over national policy? It was when they stopped being blindly loyal. In 1964, conservative Democrats in the South started leaving the Democratic Party -- At last! -- and the Republican Southern Strategy was born!

In 1968, George Wallace ran on a ticket that pulled a major portion of the Democratic base out of the party. Wallace said, "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the two parties." The road to Reagan began, because there was a real hope of Republicans getting conservative votes by going conservative.

Meanwhile, Republican conservatives remained loyal to Nixon, and we all know the result of that.

When Nixon took over in 1969, he went out of his way to kick conservatives in the teeth, as they deserved. He appointed a pro-busing Commissioner of Education. He demanded a national welfare program with a minimum guaranteed income, and took other steps even the DEMOCRATS were afraid to propose. When Nixon got kicked out of office, he appointed Ford as his successor. Ford appointed ROCKEFELLER as his vice president!

And year after weary year, throughout the '50s, the '60s,and the '70s, I kept asking, "Is anybody tired of this yet?" Conservatives would say they were tired of it, and then they would go back and support anything with a Republican label on it. Lake High quoted a line from Kipling which might have been the conservatives' motto

"And the burnt fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire."

Or, as another friend of mine put it, "Every four years, conservatives go to the Republican Convention, get kicked in the teeth, and come up smiling." So when someone tells me I am not being "loyal" to the United States because I am a Southern Nationalist, or I am not being "loyal" because I am not supporting the Republican Party or some other institution, I tell them this

Blind loyalty to any institution is treason to one's principles.