In the 1960s, Greenville editor Hodding Carter wrote that the South was “the only place in the western world where a man could become a liberal simply by urging obedience to the law.” He had in mind the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, Mississippi Senator James Eastland’s false claim that people were “obliged to defy it,” and the virtual tarring and feathering of those who refused to join the massive resistance that followed.
Today appears to be another such moment, but this time it is not just the South that espouses disobedience. It is the substantial portion of the national electorate who support Donald Trump.
Consider some parallels. In 1962, the federal courts ordered the segregated University of Mississippi to admit an African-American student, James Meredith. Mississippi’s Governor, Ross Barnett, refused to obey the court decisions. He led a packed Memorial Stadium crowd in Jackson in the song “Go Mississippi,” a tune which included the line “you cannot go wrong.”
On the following day, Meredith came to the campus and things went very wrong. A mob inspired by Barnett’s speech attacked the federal marshals assigned to protect Meredith. In the ensuing riot, two people were killed. Barnett did nothing to stop the attack even though state highway patrolmen were present in Oxford. Federal troops occupied the campus. Barnett barely escaped federal contempt charges. In due course, Meredith graduated from the university and today there is a statue there in his honor.
In 2020, Donald Trump claimed that he had won the presidential election and Joe Biden had stolen it. The lawful way to assert that claim was to go to court and prove the theft. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 cases in courts all over the country. The cases were heard by judges with many different philosophies. No court found any reason to question the election results. The evidence just was not there.
But Trump, like Barnett, refused to obey the courts’ judgments. He repeated his false claim that the election had been stolen. He held a “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on January 6, the day the electoral votes were to be counted. His rally inspired a mob, which he knew carried weapons, to go to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal.” He did nothing to discourage the attack. The rioters physically desecrated the Capitol. Five people died. In due course, Joe Biden became president.
In the 1960s, much of the South thought those who believed that federal court orders should be obeyed were dangerous “liberals” and a threat to the southern way or life. Today, a significant portion of the national electorate would wrongly apply the same label to those who simply assert that Trump had a duty to obey the rulings of the courts who ruled against him.
But the parallels only go so far. Barnett was discredited when tapes of his secret negotiations with the Kennedy administration showed he was willing to admit Meredith if the marshals would just point their guns at him to make him look like a hero. On the other hand, Trump followers have sent him hundreds of millions of dollars because they still believe his election lie. He now seeks another presidential term. According to a recent CNN poll, even today something like 69% of the Republican electorate shares his contempt for the court rulings and refuses to honor their legal rulings.
Our system of government rests on obedience to the law. The song “America the Beautiful” prays to God to preserve our nation’s “soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” Obedience to the law lies at the heart of the system true conservatives wish to conserve. Without obedience to the law, there is no “liberal” or “conservative” point of view, there is anarchy, or something just as bad, totalitarian dictatorship. The origin of totalitarian rule, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, is not the convinced Nazi, but the people for whom the “distinction between fact and fiction no longer exist.” It is difficult to imagine any greater fiction than the assertion that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.
The question now is whether the fever of that fiction will, like the fever that infected the South in the 1960s, eventually pass away. It seems unlikely that there is somewhere somehow a tape of conversation in which Donald Trump admits that the purpose of his election lie was to get gullible people to send him money. And because he has not attacked any individual court, no judge has had a basis for holding him in contempt. No one has sued him to recover the money he has gained from his blatant fraud. It is, however, possible that the criminal charges he now faces may turn up something.
Those who are old enough to remember the events of 1962 have reason to hope.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
