AMY GOODMAN: The front page of this week’s Legal Times has an article headlined “Pat Buchanan: Rebel with a Cause?” It says Buchanan is a senior adviser to Southern Partisan, a glossy magazine with a circulation of 15,000, that decries the Civil War as “the war of Northern aggression,” flirts with seceding as an option for the modern South, and defends the ethics of slavery.

Joining us to talk about the Southern Partisan is its editor, Oran Smith, speaking to us from South Carolina. We’ll talk with historian Eric Foner, who wrote Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. But first Smith will be joined by Boston University economist Glenn Loury and Legal Times reporter Benjamin Wittes.

Ben, let’s start with you. How did you find Southern Partisan?

BENJAMIN WITTES: Well, I was flipping, going through the magazine rack at Borders, and I ran into a magazine that was provocatively titled Southern Partisan. And I pulled it off the shelf and noticed — this was about six months ago — and I noticed that Pat Buchanan’s name was on the masthead. And that didn’t make a particular impression on me until more recently, when his association with Larry Pratt, the head of Gun Owners of America, became something of an issue in the campaign. And I thought, you know, in the case of Southern Partisan, this isn’t merely a question of whether or not the person might have ties to the Christian Identity movement or a militia movement, but might even — I mean, this is a magazine that, at least on its surface, seems to defend the decision to secede in the South, or very aggressively defends the decision to secede on the part of the South in 1861, and even seems to imply that making that decision again in 1996 wouldn’t be such a crazy idea. And I thought that was a very interesting and somewhat ironic association for a presidential candidate of the United States of America.

AMY GOODMAN: Oran Smith, you are the editor of Southern Partisan. How would you describe your magazine? Would you say Ben Wittes has accurately described it?

ORAN SMITH: Well, I don’t think so. We’ve run articles with those who advocate Southern secession as a way of informing our readers about the wide range of opinion there is out there about various issues that affect the South. Michael Hill, the head of the Southern League, was the source of our — what we call our partisan conversation a few issues back. And he has definitely provoked quite a controversy, a lot of discussion, by heading up this organization called the Southern League. And not to interview him would be a real shame not to present that information to our readers, because he needs to be known, and his ideas need to be debated, we think. But we’ve never taken a position in favor of a 20th century try again at the old Civil War.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it was a good idea at the time?

ORAN SMITH: That the war was a good idea at the time?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

ORAN SMITH: Well, it being our bloodiest war, where we lost more in that war than we have in all the rest of the wars combined, I don’t think it was a very good idea. It should have been prevented and averted. But the Southern side definitely needs to have its day and its say. What we’ve seen in the media, and really since the war ended — and the North has been writing most of our history books and our political science textbooks — we see the North in the white hat and the South in the black hat. It’s just all negativism. And the Ken Burns series on the PBS network was more of that, the war just being over slavery and nothing else, blah, blah, blah. We’re just a little weary of that. And I think Pat Buchanan shares that with us, if nothing else.

AMY GOODMAN: Ben Wittes, your response to the fact that the Southern Partisan represents all different points of view?

BENJAMIN WITTES: Well, I don’t mean to argue about that with the editor of the journal. On the other hand, when you read — I’ve read cover to cover six issues of the Southern Partisan. And when I read it, I don’t — the range of views covered by this magazine range from nationalistic Southerners with very conservative politics to nationalistic Southerners who favor and defend secession. So I think that to say that it covers all views would certainly a mischaracterization of the publication.

GLENN LOURY: May I comment?

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s bring professor Glenn Loury into this discussion, again, professor of economics at Boston University and formerly with the American Enterprise Institute. He left when they published Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism. In protest, he left. Yes, Professor Loury.

GLENN LOURY: Well, really, I left the AEI in a dispute with the president about the quality of that book. But in any case, what I want to say, listening to Mr. Smith, it strikes me there’s something quite interesting here, which is that the identity of the Southerner, of those of us Americans who identify with the South, with the Confederacy, with the culture and history and honor, and that this is — this is analogous to other identifiable groups of Americans, if you will, minority groups, cultural minorities, who are also making the same case that I thought I heard Mr. Smith make. That is a case that we don’t get no respect, you know, that we didn’t — 

ORAN SMITH: Right.

GLENN LOURY: We don’t control who writes the textbooks. We don’t control who writes our history. And there’s just something, in my mind, ironic and interesting about the fact that at that level, when one talks about a kind of cultural assertion, there’s a very close similarity between what some of those who associate themselves with the Confederacy want to do for themselves and their culture and what some racial and ethnic minorities want to do for themselves and their culture. And I just thought that was a point worth making.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Loury, do you take exception to the Southern Partisan’s view of supporting secession, at least in 1861?

GLENN LOURY: Well, you know, I don’t share the view. There’s no doubt the Civil War was a great tragedy. There’s no doubt. On the other hand, slavery was also a great tragedy, in my view. And I can’t say, as a descendant of slaves, that I regret the fact that the war resulted in the emancipation and, really, in a reordering of the American governing institution so as to allow for citizenship and participation in the polity for people who had been held as chattel. On the other hand, I mean, I just know that there are people who have Mr. Smith’s view in our republic. It is a free country. They’re entitled to express their views. But they’re not views that I share. And, you know, to the extent that they are views that would inform a presidential campaign and a presidential administration governing the country today, I would have some pause about that.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of presidential politics, Ben Wittes, you brought to the attention, your article, to the campaign of Patrick Buchanan. Again, he is an adviser to this publication. They have run his column, when he’s not running for president. What was Patrick Buchanan’s campaign’s response?

BENJAMIN WITTES: Well, they issued a statement saying that Mr. Buchanan, who has been a subscriber and reader of the Southern Partisan for a number of years, considers it a high compliment to have been asked to serve as an honorary adviser to the magazine. That was a statement in the name of Terry Jeffrey, who’s one of the senior campaign aides, one of the managers of the campaign. There’s been no — they did not respond to sort of more detailed questions that I posed to them. At the same time, it’s very consistent with Mr. Buchanan’s past pattern in being confronted with associations which the mainstream press sort of regards as unusual. And he has stood by Larry Pratt, and he’s stood by his association with Samuel Francis, despite a long discussion of that matter in the press.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Samuel Francis for a minute, Samuel Francis, who has written pieces that the Southern Partisan runs, a recent subject of a City Paper, here in Washington, story. Who is Samuel Francis? And what ran in Southern Partisan?

BENJAMIN WITTES: Well, Samuel Francis is a very conservative, sort of of the paleoconservative variety, columnist, who used to be an editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Times and was actually fired from The Washington Times for being too right-wing, which is a — The Washington Times is sort of the conservative paper that —

GLENN LOURY: Pretty hard to do.

BENJAMIN WITTES: It’s pretty hard to do. The articles that the Southern Partisan ran by Samuel Francis were actually some of the articles that got him in the most trouble in the context of The Washington Times. And specifically, I think there were two that — or, there are two that really caught my eye. One is a column that he wrote criticizing the Southern Baptist Convention for apologizing for slavery. The argument that he makes is that the apology that they adopted is out of whack with their own history and their own literalist reading of the Bible. I’ll quote two brief segments of it.

“If the sin is hatred or exploitation, they might be on solid ground, but neither 'slavery' nor 'racism' as an institution is a sin. Indeed, there are at least five clear passages in the letters of Paul that explicitly enjoin 'servants' to obey their masters, and the Greek word for 'servants' in the original text are identical to those for 'slaves.' Neither Jesus nor the apostles nor the early church condemned slavery, despite countless opportunities to do so, and there is no indication that slavery is contrary to Christian ethics or that any serious theologian before modern times thought that it was.”

And then, later he writes, “You can dismiss the New Testament passages about slaves obeying their masters as irrelevant today, but they happen to occur in the same places that enjoin other social responsibilities — like children obeying their parents, wives respecting their husbands, and citizens obeying the law. If some passages are irrelevant, why should anyone pay attention to the others, and if you shouldn’t, why not sign up with the feminists, the children’s rights crusaders and — dare I suggest it — the Bolsheviks? So much for 'Christian family values.'”

AMY GOODMAN: Oran Smith, you are editor of the Southern Partisan. Why did you run this piece? Did you agree with it?

ORAN SMITH: Well, Sam Francis is a syndicated columnist. And I don’t know how many newspapers he’s in, but a lot of them. He’s with the Tribune Media Service, which we subscribe to. And when they offered him as a possible columnist for us to run in the back of the magazine to replace Pat Buchanan when he started running for president, we accepted that. And any article that he has that has a Southern twist to it, we’ve generally run to provoke a debate. But like any other columnist in any other newspaper in the country, he’s just a columnist that is syndicated, and we’re not — he’s not one of our editors. We do not adopt his views. If someone signs an article in the Southern Partisan and we have it on page three of our magazine, opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or publisher. Mr. Francis’s views — Sam is probably the definition of a loose cannon in Washington. He makes Pat Buchanan look like a softy. He likes stirring the pot and stirring trouble, I guess we could say. And we thought it might be interesting to present that view to our subscribers and to see what we could get going on it.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you get any African American response?

ORAN SMITH: Well, no, we haven’t so far. I expect we will. But we’ve gotten a lot of response reacting negatively to it, quoting Scripture, stating positions of Christian theologians from Christian seminaries at the time of the war, both North and South, about slavery, that we’ve published and will continue to publish.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get Professor Glenn Loury back in this discussion, professor of economics at Boston University. Your response to Sam Francis?

GLENN LOURY: What’s the meaning of the reconciliation within the Southern Baptists or a comparable kind of reconciliation within the Pentecostal? So, in our contemporary social life, it’s a kind of a statement. And look, we’re one nation here. We’re divided by race, to be sure, Black and white, but we’re one nation. And we should be moving towards some kind of larger reconciliation that allows us to transcend and to move ahead. And what I see as the potential danger of the kind of opinion that Mr. Francis was expressing was to, you know, sort of argue against that, to sort of say, “Look, there’s nothing to be transcended.”

And I would feel the same way if a radical Black who says, “Slavery was evil. These people are evil. They’ll never be able to be dealt with. They are, you know, by virtue of having — or, their ancestors participated in this, beyond the pale. There’s nothing to talk about” — I would reject that, too. And I would reject it on the grounds that if we’re trying to be, you know, one nation in the 21st century, we have to move beyond history and find a way of relating to each other across this racial divide.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask Oran Smith something. It is the question of Arthur Ashe and the controversy in Richmond over putting up his statue. What is the stance of Southern Partisan, putting up his statue in line with the — I guess right now there are a bunch of Confederate leaders there?

ORAN SMITH: Well, I don’t think that we really have an editorial position on the Arthur Ashe statue. Of course, we — again, back to good old Sam. Sam Francis ran an article — or, we ran an article that he wrote about it, where he was trying to say that the whole issue represented a larger issue of whose myths were going to be followed. And that was certainly interesting, and we can always count on him for that. But we really don’t have a position one way or another. A lot of the citizens of Richmond, I’m sure, would like Monument Avenue to be preserved. So, you’ve got a wide range. Some think that Monument Avenue should be preserved and Arthur Ashe should be put there as a good sign of racial unity. Others think that it’s racially divisive, divisive, that maybe Ashe should have a separate park dedicated to him and more of a focus on him. Some didn’t like the statue. So, you’re just — there’s just a lot of different opinions floating around on that one. And we’ve really never taken a stand, one way or another.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say a separate park, sort of like a segregated park?

ORAN SMITH: Well, no, no. I don’t mean having the white Monument Avenue and the Black Monument Avenue. I mean, you know, maybe Arthur Ashe’s descendants, who are still here, family, wouldn’t like to be on Monument Avenue. Maybe that would not be a good association for him, in his opinion, his family’s opinion.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you interviewed his wife?

ORAN SMITH: No, we haven’t. No, we haven’t. But we don’t — we’re not the Richmond Times Examiner. We don’t focus just entirely on some of these narrow issues of certain locales. We only publish four times a year, and we only have about 50 pages per year, so we don’t have as much space as we would like to to devote to these issues. And —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Professor Loury, we only have a minute, and I want to give you the last word here, both on this debate and, since this is an election show and we’re looking at Pat Buchanan as the adviser of Southern Partisan, and the piece that we are looking at today, “Pat Buchanan: Rebel with a Cause?” I wanted to end on the question of Pat Buchanan, his lifelong admiration of the Confederacy. Portraits of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis hang in his study. In the last campaign, he visited the Mississippi gravesite of his slave-owning great-great-grandfather, who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Then, he paid his respects the following day at Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis’s retirement estate. What do you feel the message Pat Buchanan is sending and this magazine is sending?

GLENN LOURY: Yeah, well, I think it’s appropriate in the context of a discussion about myths, because it seems to me what this — the question you asked me really is about is how is it that the way one looks at history should be read as a signal of what one will do with, you know, our contemporary problems. I can see a person who admired the Confederacy, admired the culture and history of the South, notwithstanding the fact of slavery, nevertheless being an admirable, competent political candidate, someone, in principle, whom I might even be able to support. I can imagine that in theory. But the question would come as to whether or not that support of these artifacts of our — of an aspect of our American history was really kind of a signal or, if you will, coded representation of certain harsh views about the place of African Americans within the contemporary American polity. And, you know, there’s a kind of political correctness that you can put on this and what you can say: “Well, no one can admire Robert E. Lee, because if he does, and Robert E. Lee fought for the Confederacy, and the Confederacy defended slavery, then that person is indirectly defending slavery, and therefore unfit to hold office.” That, I think, is wrong. But if someone questions whether or not the dispensation issued in by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments was itself an appropriate move for the federal government to make, or whether or not, you know, Roger Taney in that Dred Scott decision was correct when he said that Jefferson’s, you know, “self-evident truths,” “all men created equal” did not apply to Africans, well, that’s a person who I think is unfit to govern in our contemporary polity. So that’s the way that I would put it.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Glenn Loury is a professor of economics at Boston University; Ben Wittes, a reporter with Legal Times; and Oran Smith, editor of Southern Partisan. I want to thank you all for joining us. We’ll be back with historian Eric Foner.