Howard Dean wants to represent angry white Confederate flag-wavers. He even quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in doing so. And in a televised debate Tuesday he refused to say he was sorry for starting this tempest.
Well, Dr. Dean, you may have clumsily launched this issue, but keep at it and keep quoting, because you're right.
No, this is not a missive from a Southern rebel driving a Confederate flag-festooned F-150 half-ton to a Civil War reenactment. It's from the great-granddaughter of slaves - and slave owners. A civil rights lawyer, no less, who knows full well the toxic pain and pride tangled in all symbols of the slavocracy known as Dixie.
Dean is right for three reasons.
First, he's right politically. Without a vision big enough to embrace Southern white men - angry or not - this country cannot be diverted from its current path toward corporation-focused, downwardly mobile plutocracy and turned back toward people-focused, upwardly mobile democracy.
Second, one of Martin Luther King's most profound insights came in his warning that to avoid elimination as the irrelevant unskilled, poor whites and poor blacks had to band together in a "grand alliance" and demand from politicians jobs, justice and opportunity for everyone.
King realized that the grand old bargain this country had always offered to poor whites - namely, accept your poverty and we will ensure your racial caste superiority over blacks - must be destroyed before universal opportunity could be realized.
King clearly knew that the very whites he was appealing to clung to both the Confederate flag and empty white supremacy. Yet he still proposed this alliance for the greater prosperity of all: "Together [poor whites and poor blacks] could form a grand alliance. Together, they could merge all people for the good of all."
