No labels, no guru, no method, no teacher, no shame

We are all familiar Republican Martin Luther King, the beloved activist whose career consists of one speech that contained one sentence. Now meet No Labels Martin Luther King, whose career consists of one speech that contained one sentence, and that sentence is “Both Sides Do It, but the Democrat Party is worse, because they will not rein in your out-of-control entitlement programs:”

As heads adorned with “common sense” baseball caps bobbed in the evening light, colored blood red from Canadian wildfire smoke, I caught No Labels board member Benjamin Chavis heading out the door. A former assistant to Martin Luther King Jr., I pressed Chavis on how the legacy of King — which included broadening social spending, taxing the wealthy, and opposing endless war in Vietnam — could possibly track with the platform presented by the event’s speakers, two millionaire moderates. 

“Dr. King was a centrist,” Chavis told me. “If he were alive today, he would be a member of the No Labels party.” I moved to remind Chavis of King’s words in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he decried the white moderate as one of the main roadblocks to justice. (“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ ‘Councilor’ or the Ku Klux Klanner,” King wrote, “but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”) But before I could get an answer, Chavis was whisked away. 

“MLK was in Memphis to say that the sanitation workers should get off the top of the mountain and get back to work,” Chavis added.