Historical Revisionism Big Time
Here’s a gem in a Washington Post article about the resolution that apologized for slavery that the US Senate just passed:
“Even among proponents of a congressional apology, reaction to yesterday’s vote was mixed. Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who had pushed for the Bush administration to issue an apology, called the Democratic-controlled Senate’s resolution “meaningless” since the party and federal government are led by a black president and black voters are closely aligned with the Democratic party.
‘The Republican Party needed to do it,’ Swain said. ‘It would have shed that racist scab on the party.’”
What?! Need Professor Swain be reminded that is was Abraham Lincoln (ehem, the first Republican president) that promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation which paved the way for the 13th Amendment? Should we remind her that it was the Congressional Republicans that wanted to pass “40 Acres and a Mule,” only to be thwarted by President Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat?
Also, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed with 80% of Republicans voting “aye” in both houses of Congress compared to 69% and 63% for Democratic Senators and Representatives, respectively? That the Voting Rights Act of 1964 similarly passed with Senate Republicans voting 97% in favor and House Republicans 85%, with Democrats in favor 74% and 80%?
That President Bush appointed the first black Secretary of State, the first black, female Secretary of State, and the first Hispanic Attorney General? That homeownership rose by 3 to 5 percentage points for minorities under the Bush Administration?
And need we remind Professor Swain that it is the Democratic Party that contains such luminaries as Harry Truman and “Exalted Cyclops” Robert Byrd who were in the KKK? That Byrd filibustered and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is the only senator to have voted against both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, the only two black nominees to the Supreme Court?
And, the icing on the cake, that all Senate Republicans supported the resolution apologizing for slavery?
So, that makes me wonder, what is this “racist scab” on the Republican Party Professor Swain refers to? Maybe Michael Steele (the black Chairman of the RNC) could answer that question for me…
Do the words “southern strategy” mean anything to you?
Brilliant piece, Mr. Dent. Furthermore, as pointed out by Jonah Goldberg in his recent best-seller Liberal Fascism, the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, a progressive bill which established prevailing wage laws, was intended to keep blacks from getting good “white” jobs.
And another thing– why should Republicans be afraid of being called racist? It couldn’t possibly hurt us with the black vote (well, I guess we could lose that .001% who didn’t vote for Obama). Most people actually agree with us on affirmative action, even many minorities. Why should we be ashamed to be against racial preferences? I mean, really– who is treating black people like they’re stupid, conservatives or liberals? For one, I don’t think they’re inherently inferior and deserving of special treatment. If we press hard on this issue, I think it’s potentially a big winner for the right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html?_r=1
“In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. (This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.)”
So, you googled “southern strategy” and that was the 2nd link, an article titled “The Myth of the Southern Strategy” — but I don’t think you bothered to actually read the article. The myth referred to in the title is not the existence of the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, but the idea that the Southern Strategy was itself the engine of the Republican’s success in the South. Whether or not that is true is up for debate. Reagan certainly believed in the power of the Southern Strategy, kicking off his campaign for President in 1980 with a clear signal to white supremacists that he was on their side: a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In 2005, RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy, saying that the Republican Party was wrong for “trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.”
The Neshoba County Fair, at which Reagan spoke, was a must for anyone wanting to win Mississippi. The county GOP chairman set up a spot for Reagan at the Fair on very short notice. The idea that this was part of some grand strategy to steal all the Democrats’ racists is just utterly absurd.
In that 1980 election, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy (who succeeded MLK Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) endorsed Reagan.
The Democrats had a “Southern Strategy” for a hundred years. And let us not overlook Jimmy Carter’s “ethnic purity” remarks just four years earlier.
Re: *
Think raises good points, but in addition, please don’t equate states’ rights with racism.
States’ rights is certainly not equivalent to racism, but the idea has been closely associated with racists since the 1830s when John Calhoun used it to defend slavery. In the civil rights era, states’ rights were championed as a means of supporting continued segregation and attempting to prevent blacks from voting. The Democratic Party certainly has some dark history with regards to race in this country, but since the late 60s and the success of the long campaign for civil rights, Democrats have moved past that past association with white supremacy and successfully wooed minority voters, while Republicans have never been able to successfully shed the baggage of the Southern Strategy. I’m curious, why do you think there is so little black support (and now latino support as well) for the Republican Party?
That has less to do with your exaggerated and largely imaginary “Southern strategy” than it does race-baiting. If the Democrats can shed the “baggage,” if you want to trivialize it that way, of the KKK and slavery, Republicans can certainly shed whatever “baggage” they have.
“I’m curious, why do you think there is so little black support (and now latino support as well) for the Republican Party?”
- Misdirection from minority leaders, many of whom promote the idea that minorities who vote for anyone other than the Democrats are “traitors” to their race
- Use of the class warfare strategy by a long line of Democratic candidates and presidents for various offices. Very effective strategy.
- A biased public school curriculum, taught extensively to poor minority children who the Democrats will not let escape the government education plantation, that praises Democratic leaders as heroes and wildly exaggerates the success of their policies
If the Southern Strategy was “largely imaginary,” what was Ken Mehlman apologizing for in 2005, and why have Republicans failed to shed that baggage? I recommend reading a little history of the era, Taylor Branch’s books are a good place to start, as is Speak Now Against the Day, which covers some of the pre-60s history of civil rights. Nixonland gets a little more into the ugly details of the Southern Strategy. You can even read the Southern Strategy Wikipedia page, it’s not a bad summary.
Also, take a second and read what you just wrote about why there’s scant minority support for the Republican Party. Your reasons sound rather patronizing and paranoid — you’re suggesting that minorities aren’t smart enough to support Republicans. Perhaps your attitude is part of the problem? Think about it.
“you’re suggesting that minorities aren’t smart enough to support Republicans.”
Didn’t say that…
On the contrary. Democrats believe that their party must create policy that gives minorities an inherently privileged status rather than treating them as true equals. If government and minority leaders were to treat minorities as true equals, not only would we see drastic improvement in minority standing in business and in government; we would also see the calming of racial tensions.
Democrats pandered to race in the last election, making it a big issue. The likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright help hold minorities down by treating them as less-than-equals and inflaming racial tensions. Those “leaders” do not want true justice. They want to hold on to their followers.
While we are recommending books to one another, I recommend Shelby Steele’s Content of Our Character.
I am not categorically denying that Republicans tried to steal some of the Democrats’ racists, but I am denying that Reagan played any role. As for Nixon – that is certainly up for debate. Truman, Nixon, Carter… all of them had race-oriented problems.
Remember, too, Hillary Clinton’s Southern Strategy during her 2008 campaign. She counted on Latino opposition to a black candidate, and tried to exploit that opposition for her political benefit. Will you profess her wrongdoings once 40 years have passed?
“I’m curious, why do you think there is so little black support (and now latino support as well) for the Republican Party?”
Interestingly enough, I saw a poll a while back that said that while 25% of African-Americans identify themselves as conservatives, only 11% identified themselves as Republicans.
Re: Clinton — Why wait 40 years? Perhaps you mistake me for a partisan Democrat? Exploiting racial divisions for political gain is always wrong. I’m no fan of Sharpton, Jackson, or Wright either, but their problems are beside the point.
The point is that the original post is disingenuous; there is ample evidence of Republicans’ race problems over the past 40+ years, right up to the incidents in the last few weeks with some SC & TN GOP morons sharing their racist humor on the internet. To say that Republicans don’t (still) have a race problem is only possible if you choose to ignore what has actually happened in this country in the 45 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Blaming this on the Democrats, on “biased school curriculum” and on corrupt minority leadership isn’t going to help much, either.
Even today, you can find ample amounts of racism coming from members of both parties.
The blanket statement, “Republicans have a race problem” isn’t true at all. What does that mean? Do Democrats have a “race problem” ? Carter made racially charged comments in order to attract disgruntled white voters. Robert Byrd said the “n” word on TV in 2004 and drew little flak. Hillary Clinton tried to exploit the racial fears of certain groups of voters in 2008. And the Republican you noted made an unfunny, Letterman-style reference to Michelle’s reference to evolution, and had his remark interpreted as racist.
And Bush won 46 percent of Hispanics in 2004. Does that count for anything in your world?
Worst of all are the Democrats’ policies. Keeping kids in low-performing schools, and refusing to inject market forces into education because of a strange bias towards a government-run education plantation, is one of the worst kinds of racial exploitation. This exploitation keeps generation after generation of poor minority families under.
Some individual Republicans do seem compelled to broadcast their bigotry — but what I’m getting at here is that the Republican Party as a whole has a race problem. Even if Bush did take more than 40% of the Hispanic vote in 2004 (debatable, see Businessweek 11/29/04: “Bush advisers say privately they don’t believe the President reached 44% of the Latino vote”), current numbers have fallen off a cliff: in May of this year only 11% viewed the GOP favorably (Research 2000 poll). The absurd spectacle of the noxious Rush Limbaugh and other old white men attacking Sotomayor as a racist probably didn’t help much. I’m sure the GOP has known for decades that they’re going to have to do much more to reach out to non-white voters, but they seem pathologically incapable of doing so. “Injecting market forces into education” and comparing minority children in public schools to plantation-dwelling slaves is hardly going to win you any minority votes.
If by reaching out to non-white voters, you mean agree to affirmative action, bow to demands for further expansion of the welfare state, or refuse to see men as who they are, their words and deeds, not the color of their skin, then yes, Republicans are “pathologically incapable” of doing so. Rightfully so. Republicans pursue policies that benefit people no matter their race, creed, or conviction. Policies that promote economic growth benefit whites, blacks, Indians and Hispanics. Policies that promote traditional morality do the same. True, work needs to be done. But it does not require changing our beliefs. It requires talking to others and making them see that our beliefs are one and the same because they are. Anyone who seeks the betterment of the world is in accord with the Republican Party. Anyone who seeks stultification and statism can feel at home with the Democratic Party. It just requires time for people to see that. Eventually they will.
Republicans have long promoted policies that favor rich over poor, white over non-white, Christian over non-Christian, employers over employees, big business over small business, military spending over social spending, national security over civil rights, state over citizens. Democrats are guilty of many of the same sins, of course, and for many people it’s just a case of voting for the lesser of two evils — but when GOP elected officials are constantly genuflecting to obnoxious bigots like Rush Limbaugh, of course it’s going to turn off voters who are not already angry & conservative white men. And, perhaps it’s not just a PR problem, but a problem with the policies themselves? Republican notions of small government, tax cuts as universal panacea, ever-rising military spending, etc. have dominated the media and Washington discourse for decades now, to what end? Poverty has risen, the income gap has widened, more people don’t have health insurance, physical and regulatory infrastructure is crumbling… but all the GOP seems to care about is cutting taxes and stoking the fires of their precious culture wars.
No… Republicans stand for economic liberalism. Those who depart from economic liberalism are the ones who cause poverty to rise, health care quality and insurance availability to decline, etc. The record of history is clear on that. If you do not accept this, I challenge you to provide a single example of lasting economic harm caused by economic liberalism. The only system under which a society has ever arisen from poverty, caused a net improvement in health care quality and availability, or generally improved the human condition is the liberal economic system – the free market system.
Now, some Republicans (i.e. Bush) partially departed from economic liberalism. And Obama has rejected liberalism altogether in favor of state micromanagement. Now, we can forget about what happens when the government protects free human action and start lobbying our elected officials to tend to our every concern. Now, poverty will continue to rise. Now, health care quality will decline. In the long term, health insurance availability will decline. Does this change satisfy your economic desires?
The party-line rant you delivered is not grounded in history, and blaming the GOP for culture wars erroneously absolves the Democrats of their half of the blame for the culture wars.
You: “The free market cannot fail, it can only be failed.”
Health care quality and health insurance availability are already much lower in the US than in countries with national health care systems. The free market is largely imaginary — a simplistic concept and a rhetorical device with which free market ideologues attempt to batter their opponents. There is no market which is free from the direct or indirect effects of government regulation, or unaffected by the presence of extremely large actors, whether they be wealthy individuals, governments, corporations, or other institutions.
We’re getting well away from the point, though, which is that the GOP’s Southern Strategy was a deliberate strategy to court white southern racists while writing off the minority vote. Read Kevin Phillips or Lee Atwater’s comments on it, here’s one from Atwater that’s widely quoted:
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”
I also recommend the article “Nixon’s Southern strategy ‘It’s All In the Charts’” by James Boyd in the May 17, 1970 NYT.
No, the free market is not imaginary. “Free” doesn’t mean ‘not influenced by price makers.’ I think you can figure out what “free” means. And, as you know, I didn’t say it could not fail.
On claim that U.S. healthcare is very bad: you are unable to show a causal relationship between the quality of U.S. healthcare and any of the typical party-line statistics that the left uses to claim that our system is failing.
You can find racists in both parties.
I suggest that you read the context of Lamis’s interview in order to understand what he was saying. He was not exactly describing a GOP strategy.
Reagan’s policies were not determined by a desire to appeal to racist Democrats.
No one is suggesting that there are not racists in both parties; you are quite handy at knocking down these straw men. My point, again, is that the original post is plainly incorrect; there is no revisionism in acknowledging that the GOP has, in recent history, embraced racism as a means to accrue political power. This is hardly a controversial position among political scientists or historians of the 20th century.
Re: health care — I am simply stating that the quality of health care in the US falls far short of that offered in other industrialized countries with national health care systems. I am not saying it is failing — it has already failed, in that tens of millions of US citizens lack health insurance or are underinsured and cannot afford basic or preventive care. You wanted an example of of lasting economic harm caused by economic liberalism; I think that’s a pretty good one. Perhaps in a separate post you could explain how the “free market” can provide health care for everyone, if only Medicare, Medicaid and the VHA were abolished?
Well, so have the Democrats. And as for the party that has done it most recently: the Democrats (Hillary), unfortunately, in 2008.
It’s not the concepts of Medicare and Medicaid as much as their distortions to the market incentive structure. And in fact, many US citizens who are uninsured do not need insurance. But with the recession, many more surely need insurance. That doesn’t mean that the federal government should try its hand at what is fundamentally a business operation (they don’t run any large, profitable businesses).
Our health system is illiberal at its core, and that is the primary reason that costs are so high. Governments already control a number rapidly approaching 50% of healthcare spending in the United States.
We will cover healthcare extensively in the fall both on this blog and in the print publication. Economically liberal components of our healthcare industry have made U.S. care for diseases and injuries the best in the world. Our survival rates, where those rates depend on quality of care, for many serious health problems are higher than in countries with socialized medicine. Of course, this is a general claim and we will go into serious detail in our upcoming health care features. Look for those in the fall; the timing will most likely correspond with Obama’s push.
Are any documents available to support the claim that the Republicans deliberately attempted to bring ex-Democrat racists into the fold? Anything such as minutes of meetings, official strategy papers or the like?
cwjones, I don’t have any primary documents at hand here in my underground bunker, but it’s a topic that has been widely studied, and there are numerous books, articles and dissertations that address it directly and indirectly. UNC has an excellent library…
zdexter, I’m curious about what it is about the context of the Lamis interview with Atwater that makes you think he was not talking about GOP electoral strategy?
Ok, so maybe you don’t have them on hand, but have you read any of them? Have you read any book that cites them?
He just quoted a Bob Herbert column. Mr. Herbert’s opinion columns do not constitute an objective academic source.
I’m not quoting a Bob Herbert column, perhaps BH was quoting the same thing I was? Either way, being your research assistant isn’t really a big priority for me here. You are the ones making the controversial assertion that the Southern Strategy didn’t exist, or that it had nothing to do with race, or something, I’m not really sure what you are claiming. I’ve suggested a few readings above, here are a few more: The origins of the southern strategy by Bruce H. Kalk; The southern strategy revisited by Joseph A. Aistrup; The southern strategy by Reginald Murphy and Hal Gulliver; and, for a primary source, the Harry S. Dent papers at Clemson.
For what we are arguing, read above. As for the quote – the origin of that particular block of text (that is, the point and period in time when it started to be quoted) is a Bob Herbert column from a while back. He quoted exactly those words from Lamar’s interview and made no attempt to even analyze the context.
So the fact that Herbert quoted Atwater without analyzing the context makes the content of the quote somehow less relevant? I’m just not following you. You haven’t explained what context makes it any less damning, either.