Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

The Challenge Ahead
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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established by Congress in such areas as civil rights of institutionalized
persons, voting rights, fair housing, and sex discrimination. The
American Civil Liberties Union reports that as a result of the
Administration’s refusal to adhere to “the constitutional requirement to
enforce civil rights laws,” the ACLU has been forced to handle about
80% of all voting rights cases in the deep South,” acting in effect as a
“private attorney general,” an impossible burden. This “conservative”
Administration posture guarantees, as intended, that the laws will not be
enforced.” 14 “Conservative” lawlessness is not limited to international
affairs.
The Administration is, however, not entirely inactive in the matter of
voting rights. It is conducting extensive investigations of voting fraud in
Alabama, all in the “Black Belt” where blacks have recently gained local
political power as a result of their enfranchisement a mere two centuries
after the American revolution. These actions are placing the area in “a
state of political siege and almost legal tyranny,” in the words of
Lawrence Wofford of the Campaign for a New South, an organization
devoted to promoting black voting strength. The government had at this
point lost all its cases, 15 but this hardly matters, since the assault on
black politics will serve its purpose of discouraging black voters and
undermining activists. Democratic Representative Don Edwards of
California suggested that government officials “have been misused by
whites attempting to thwart black political advances”—a far too
charitable interpretation. One can imagine what the Justice Department
would find if it were to carry out comparable investigations of white-run
counties in that region or elsewhere. 16
The attack on civil liberties is one facet of a broad campaign to
restore inequity and discrimination overcome to a degree in the past
generation. The attack on labor also renews major themes of US history,