Better in their words…

WSJ editorial.
=======
President Obama headlined Wednesday’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, and much of his speech was devoted to eloquently extolling the marchers and civil-rights advocates of that era. They deserve the celebration and applause. We only wish the President showed more appreciation that their achievement required so much risk and sacrifice because it meant challenging a policy of government-enforced segregation.

We say that because much of the rest of the President’s speech Wednesday was an attempt to link his own political agenda to greatly expand government to the moral rightness of the civil-rights era. Mr. Obama made a point to emphasize that Martin Luther King Jr. had sought not only racial equality but also economic advancement. This is true, and now as then it is a noble ambition that conservatives as much as liberals share.

But then Mr. Obama tried to yoke that King aspiration to our current political debates, and here his rhetoric turned to a too-familiar politics of polarization. He spoke about stagnant wages for “working Americans” of all races, “even as corporate profits soar, even as the pay of a fortunate few explodes.”

And who is to blame? We’ll quote the President at length: “Entrenched interests—those who benefit from an unjust status quo resisted any government efforts to give working families a fair deal, marshaling an army of lobbyists and opinion makers to argue that minimum wage increases or stronger labor laws or taxes on the wealthy who could afford it just to fund crumbling schools—that all these things violated sound economic principles.

“We’d be told that growing inequality was the price for a growing economy, a measure of the free market—that greed was good and compassion ineffective, and those without jobs or health care had only themselves to blame.”

So even on a day that celebrated an historic achievement of racial progress that might have united Americans, Mr. Obama used the moment as a moral bludgeon against those who disagree with his policies. He can’t resist caricaturing his opponents as Gordon Gekko without the social conscience, and asserting that “the free market” will grind Americans into poverty unless government that already commandeers nearly 40% of private American income is granted even more power to redistribute more of it.

This is not the kind of unifying message that has Americans of nearly all races and creeds still recalling King’s words with admiration a half century later. If the President wonders why he hasn’t been able to calm America’s partisan furies, speeches like this are one answer.

Today isn’t the time for an economic rebuttal, but it is worth noting the irony of Mr. Obama using the triumph over segregation to extol the virtues of government. Segregation was a policy imposed by government. Jim Crow was so hard to break for so many decades because it used the police power of the state to enforce racial separation.

Racial hatreds were—and often still are—rooted in historical and individual prejudice. But that prejudice was so destructive before the Civil War because it was harnessed to state-imposed slavery. And it became so pernicious again in the post-Reconstruction South because states enforced it through arrests and prosecution—or, in the case of the KKK, by doing nothing as blacks were harassed, beaten and killed. Bull Connor was not a libertarian.

Federal laws had to be passed, and federal enforcement imposed, precisely because the national government was the only force powerful enough to break state-enforced segregation. It’s a point worth recalling when the President invokes government as a source of unalloyed political virtue.

A version of this article appeared August 29, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Government and Segregation.

Review & Outlook: Government and Segregation – WSJ.com.