RIP James Jackson Kilpatrick

Famously parodied by Dan Akroyd ("Shana, your ignorant slut!") on SNL, Kilpatrick was a Southern newspaper man, columnist and half of a running argument on 60 Minutes in the '70s. Historian Thomas Sugrue dissects the neo-Confederate Kilpatrick's role in planting the racist roots of a contemporary conservatism steeped in reactionary resentments, HERE.  

Update: Washington Post obit that documents the ugliness that pervaded Kilpatrick's career, here:

 "Before there was a Bill Buckley, before there was a Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh, there was James Jackson Kilpatrick explaining public-policy issues from a conservative perspective," said Richard Viguerie, a conservative youth group leader in the early 1960s who became a direct-mail pioneer for conservative political candidates...

In books, essays and editorials, he was known for clothing segregationist doctrine in the terms of constitutional argument...

One of Mr. Kilpatrick's most strident essays on civil rights, "The Hell He Is Equal," was scheduled for publication in the Saturday Evening Post in late 1963. But editors pulled the essay because of the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that September, which claimed the lives of four black girls during services at the church, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff wrote in "The Race Beat" (2006), their Pulitzer Prize-winning book about journalism in the civil rights era.

"Kilpatrick, by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance -- interposition, nullification, states' rights, state sovereignty -- provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years," Roberts and Klibanoff wrote.

An erudite or "constitutionalist" veneer for tribalist resentments and reaction is, of course,  too familiar, as are the more "populist" expressions. This core of "modern conservatism" apparently gained new life on January 20, 2009.  The Teabaggers are embodiments of "Kilpatrickism" without his extensive vocabulary. (And what the hell was The Saturday Evening Post doing publishing overtly racist screeds - bottom-feeding at the level of the Ku Klux Klan - in 1963, the year of the March on Washington. It's easy to forget how recently the most blatant racism, with no holds barred, was considered rational discourse. Now we get it with packaging.)

Comments

[Kevin]

I had completely forgotten about Kilpatrick. I mostly remember him, years ago, on Agronsky and Company with, uh, Carl Rowan, Elizabeth Drew, and weren't Charles Krauthammer and George Will on that show too?