Martin Luther King, Jr., Centrist

The always-must-read Carpetbagger has a nice post up about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the right’s new-found meme that “he’s really one of us.” The piece speaks for itself, and eloquently, but let me add a thought: actually, they are right, the right—he is “one of us,” albeit perhaps not in quite the way intend, but he is one anyway.

Point is that at the end of the way, King was a centrist, a moderate, a work-within-the-system kind of guy. Doubt it and just look around at the loonies that he shunted off the stage—or, in some cases, who succeeded him. In this respect, he is another Franklin Roosevelt—another whose role was to save the system. About Roosevelt, the right has had, oh, 70-odd years to learn the lesson and they don’t get it yet. No risk that they’ll get it soon about King.