Daniel Finkelstein tells Bright Blue why Martin Luther King is a model for modernising Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic
The crowd was tired, a little restless, maybe even a tiny bit bored and Martin Luther King Jr did something he hadn’t planned to. He used his familiar riff about having a dream. His aides sighed, fed up to hear all that old stuff again, unaware until later that they were hearing one of the greatest political speeches of the last century.
They were also present at a seminal moment in American politics. Fifty years ago in Britain, Harold Wilson delivered his famous speech about forging a new Britain in the white heat of technology. Modernity in this country meant an assault on class privilege, and an emphasis on opportunity. In America it meant an assault on racial prejudice. This difference still distinguishes British and American debates.
When – after the water cannons in Birmingham Alabama, after King’s speech, after the murder of John Kennedy – Lyndon Johnson passed and signed the civil rights act, the new President remarked as he put pen to paper that he was signing over the South to the Republicans for a generation. And he was right. Indeed it was more than a generation before a Northern liberal Democrat regained the White House.
Race didn’t only change the terms of party politics, it is part of the context of all American social policy discussions. Welfare reform, crime policy, urban flight, all these US debates are shot through with racial politics. It is easy for a British observer to miss the nuances. What happened in the New Orleans floods was about race as much as water damage. What is happening in Detroit is about race as much as the declining car industry.
So is there anything that can be learnt from Martin Luther King? Besides the obvious stuff, I mean. It’s in English and iconic but, in truth, is it all too American to be relevant?
Well, first, let’s not dismiss the obvious stuff too quickly. The great liberal case for racial equality is clearly relevant here, even if the situation is different and the politics less fraught. King still inspires. And then there is his courage. Watch the footage. See how young he is. When he made his speech King was only 34 years old and he must have known he would never see 40. Which he did not. King is a man for the ages, and for the world, because of his moral and physical courage above all other things.
So there’s the obvious stuff. But hidden in his story I think there are less obvious things to learn from, other things that educate. The first is about the nature of non-violence. The discipline of the civil rights movement was really quite extraordinary. The training that went in to being a successful activist was impressive. It was forbidden even to bring a pencil on a march, lest it be viewed as a possible weapon.
Yet in the end, non-violence was only able to prevail because the federal state protected it, at least to some extent. Left entirely defenceless against violent authorities, King’s strategy would surely have failed. Non-violence was uplifiting but only a partial strategy. Nelson Mandela reached the same conclusion, as he lucidly explains in his memoirs.
I have also always been fascinated by the contrast between King and Malcolm X. The rage of Malcolm X against American racial injustice was understandable, so too his rejection of integration. Yet understandable though it was, it was also wrong and a failure. Despite his status, Malcolm X contributed little that endured to the civil rights struggle. He didn’t die King’s martyr’s death. He died as part of a sordid internal row with his former allies.
King, by contrast, showed the power of moderation. He worked patiently to achieve change, keeping the federal authorites with him, showing restraint, breaking state laws only when they were at variance with the most basic human rights. He achieved solid, real, enduring change. He wasn’t a saint. Very far from it. He was very human. He was a politician in the end. But a very great one who showed what politicians can achieve.
And then there is religion. The civil rights movement arose out of the church. It is notable that great Conservative reformers in this country – those who ended the slave trade, those who supported the factory acts – came from the evangelical tradition too. It shows the power of the moral teaching of the church and is to its great credit. As well as being a constant reminder of what moral teaching should be about.
More broadly, King’s religious affiliation confirms the conservative instinct about there being a link between moral thought, great deeds and the institutions that sustain them. But I am afraid there is one other thing to learn. It is about all the intelligent American Southerners who persuaded themselves that there was an intellectual justification for their oppression. It is impossible to read about King’s life and his death without being inspired. But equally impossible to do so without realising that people can persuade themselves of anything. And that while they can, the battle for human dignity and civil rights will never be over.
