THE ISSUE IS not whether Trent Lott should apologize. His words are now worthless. What counts is where Americans stand on Lott and whether he should continue to stand as majority leader of the Senate.

In what has become a monologue from a pinstriped demagogue, Lott once again could not stop himself from dipping into a well of words dripping with blood-curdling echoes of hate. At the 100th birthday of party of Senator Strom Thurmond, Lott recalled the time that Thurmond, a Democrat, ran for president in 1948 as an independent on a Dixiecrat segregationist platform.

In leading the revolt against Harry Truman and his proposals on civil rights, Thurmond said, ''There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.''

In the 1950s, Thurmond said, ''The civil rights program is the most un-American law ever proposed.'' In the early 1960s, he called the passage of the Civil Rights Act ''a tragic day for America.'' In the late 1960s, he switched to the Republican Party and is credited with helping Richard Nixon come up with his Southern strategy of appealing to white conservative voters.

It is the strategy that has been a cornerstone of American politics ever since. An heir of those politics is Lott, the Mississippi senator whose record on civil rights would return us to Dixiecrat days. In the Senate, Lott has voted to end affirmative action in hiring, contracting, and business start-ups despite continuing evidence of discrimination. He voted not to expand hate crimes to gay and lesbian victims. He has likened sexual orientation to alcohol addiction.

In the early 1990s, he spoke three times before the Council of Conservative Citizens, which grew out of the white citizens councils of segregation. Lott told the CCC, ''The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries.''

The CCC's principles were so far to the right that it received praise by white nationalist Web sites. In 1999, one site said, ''You will find the prowhite activities of the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Nationalist Movement encouraging.'' Another site called the CCC a ''semiracist political pressure group.''

No doubt white nationalists found Lott's latest words encouraging. At Thurmond's birthday party, Lott said, ''I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.''

All these problems. And if the rest of the country had followed their lead, one can imagine how many more bodies would have been strung up and how many more Americans because of color, sexual orientation, or being a woman would be on the outside looking in at equal opportunity in schools and in the workplace.

Lott's words mean it is 2002 and the majority leader is romanticizing segregation. As long as the Republican Party is comfortable with that, it accepts a mortal wound to its credibility. The Democratic Party has yet to come out with a strong condemnation. Former Vice President Al Gore, who currently has no power, said Lott should be censured, but the leading Democrat in power, Senator Tom Daschle, has already given Lott a pass. ''There are a lot of times when he and I go to the microphone and would like to say things we mean differently, and I'm sure this was one of those cases for him as well,'' Daschle said.

Lott has gone to the microphone so many times knowing what he means that his leadership should be unacceptable. It would be telling of this nation if it now accepts - again - that its top setter of the political agenda outside the White House thinks anyone who is not white, male, straight, and conservative, is a ''problem.''

In 1941, W.J. Cash wrote of the South in ''The Mind of the South'': ''Intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all, too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism - these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.''

Those remain the characteristic vices of Trent Lott today.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

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