The takeover of the Republican Party by radical conservatives and the consequent dismantling of FDR’s New Deal hit full stride in 1980 with Ronald Reagan's presidential election victory. But the roots for those tragedies were laid in the 1960s with the events like the passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. That legislation represented the greatest steps in making American citizenship a reality for the descendents of African slaves since the passage of our 13th through 15th Amendments to our Constitution (1865-70), which
forbade slavery and, in theory at least, provided
civil rights and
voting rights for African-Americans.
That landmark legislation was initiated by President Kennedy, and then pushed through Congress by President Johnson following Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy brought the case to the American people in a speech just four months prior to his death:
The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day; one third as much chance of completing college; one third as much chance of becoming a professional man; twice as much chance of becoming unemployed; about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year; a life expectancy which is seven years shorter; and the prospects of earning only half as much.
In his new book, “
The Conscience of a Liberal” Paul Krugman describes:
How “movement conservatism” took over the Republican Party with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980
How that movement has
resulted in the greatest levels of inequality in our country seen since the Gilded Age
Why inequality is bad for our country
Why the GOP has continued to win elections despite an agenda that works against the interests of the vast majority of Americans
What we should do about it
Movement conservatism is basically a movement to dismantle FDR’s New Deal, a large body of legislation that brought our country out of what Krugman refers to as the “
Long Gilded Age”, thereby bringing us a degree of economic and social equality never before seen here, and creating an American middle class.
Krugman notes several factors that contributed to the rise of a Republican Party with an agenda that is harmful to the vast majority of Americans. At the top of that list is racism, especially the racism of Southern White males. That begs the question: Since racism has always existed in our country, why was it not until 1980 that movement conservatism began taking over our country and dismantling the New Deal? The answer to this question may have been provided by Lyndon Johnson himself, as he is
said to have said as he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “We have lost the South for a generation.”
The Losing of the South, 1961-2004For many years prior to and following FDR’s presidency, the Democratic Party was an odd mixture of very strange bedfellows indeed: Liberals who believed strongly in the principles advanced by the New Deal; and conservative racist. Southern whites belonged to the Democratic Party mainly because the Republican Party was the Party of Lincoln, who
decreed an end to slavery, and the Party that passed the 13th through 15th Amendments, which attempted to give the former slaves rights similar to those enjoyed by other Americans. That of course was a long time ago (1865-70). But old habits die hard, and as long as the Democratic Party didn’t go too far towards advancing the rights of African-Americans, the South was content to remain attached to the Democratic Party.
But with the passage of legislation like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, all that changed, as conservative white Southerners began to leave the Democratic Party in droves. The extent of Southern antipathy to the Civil Rights Act can be understood by looking at the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totals">Senate vote totals for the Civil Rights Act. Despite the fact that a Democratic presidential administration sponsored the bill, a much larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for it:
Republicans: 27 aye, 6 no (including the lone Southern Senate Republican)
Democrats: 46 aye, 21 no
Non-Southern Democrats: 45 aye, 1 no
Southern Democrats: 1 aye, 20 no
With that in mind, let’s take a look at what has happened in American politics from 1961 (prior to the Kennedy/Johnson push to increase the rights of African-Americans) to 2004 (the last time that Republicans had control of Congress):
House of RepresentativesFollowing the
1960 election, Democrats held a huge 89 seat lead in the House (263-174).
By 2004, Republicans held a 30 seat lead,
a loss of 119 net seats for the Democrats. Where did all those seats go to? In the South after the 1960 election the Democrats held a 102-9 advantage in the House, an advantage of 93 seats. By 2004 Republicans held the lead in the South by 83-48, a net loss for Democrats of 35 seats. The difference in the South between the Democratic lead in 1960 and their deficit in 2004 was
a loss of 128 net seats – more than their total loss of House seats between those two dates. In the midst of this huge loss of Southern House seats, the Democrats actually picked up seats outside of the South, going from a net deficit of 4 seats after the 1960 election to a lead of 5 seats after the 2004 election.
SenateA similar dynamic is seen in the U.S. Senate: Following the 1960 election, Democrats held a 30 seat lead in the Senate (65-35). By 2004, Republicans held a 10 seat lead,
a loss of 40 net seats for the Democrats. In the South after the 1960 election the Democrats held a 22-0 advantage in the Senate. By 2004 Republicans held the lead in the South by 18-4, a net loss for Democrats of 14 seats. The difference in the South between the Democratic lead in 1960 and their deficit in 2004 was
a loss of 36 net seats – exactly 90% of their total loss. In the midst of this huge loss of Southern Senate seats, the Democrats lost only 4 Senate seats outside of the South, going from a net lead of 8 seats after 1960 to a lead of 4 seats after the 2004 election.
Electoral votes for PresidentIn the
1960 election, Kennedy won the electoral vote count over Richard Nixon by 303-219, a net advantage of 84 electoral votes. In
2004, George Bush won (and stole) a lead in electoral votes of 286 to 251, a deficit of 35 net electoral votes for the Democrat candidate, John Kerry. The difference between the two elections is a net loss of 119 electoral votes for the Democratic Party. But in the South the Democratic candidate won by 48 electoral votes in 1960 (81-33, losing only Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia), while he lost
all of the South’s 153 electoral votes in 2004 (legitimately and
not). The net loss in the South between the two elections was 201 electoral votes, while outside of the South, the Democrats picked up 82 electoral votes.
Thus the South accounted for
more than the total net loss of Congressional seats and loss of presidential electoral votes between 1960 and 2004.
Evidence of Southern racism todaySome might object that the political loss of the South for the Democratic Party isn’t necessarily attributed to racism because it is much less racist today than it was many years ago. That may be partially true, but there is nevertheless a great deal of evidence that racism is alive and flourishing in the South today.
Part of that evidence lies in stone monuments scattered throughout the Southern United States, which seek to justify slavery. James Loewen in “
Lies Across America – What our Historic Sites Get Wrong”, explains that the southern landscape of the United States even today is filled with monuments and historical markers that celebrate and glorify the old Confederacy, with hardly a mention of the Union side of the Civil War, except in a very pejorative context. Worse yet, those monuments and historical markers do much to twist the facts, hide embarrassing events, and justify the “cause” that the Confederacy fought for. Here are three examples:
The Colfax RiotAn historical marker in Colfax Louisiana reads:
On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.
Actually, the “
Colfax Riot” was a massacre, the purpose of which was to overthrow the elected Republican governor of Louisiana and replace him with a Democratic governor (In those days, the Democrats were the racist Party and the Republicans were the anti-racist Party).
And basically, the term “carpetbag misrule” is a euphemism that refers to an electoral system whereby black former slaves were given the right to vote, by virtue of the 15th Amendment to our Constitution. That is what the “Colfax Riot” was all about. By failing to note anything about the reasons for the “Colfax Riot”, the historical marker essentially equates “misrule” with Black voting rights, and it justifies the massacre of 153 people carried out for the sole purpose of disenfranchising African-Americans – and it does all this while imputing a noble cause to the outrage. Loewen describes the significance of the event:
The Colfax massacre was also a turning point because it showed the inability or at least the unwillingness of the United States to enforce Reconstruction laws, including the 14th and 15th amendments…. The Supreme Court… holding that the 14th and 15th amendments only prohibited violations of black persons’ rights by states, not by individuals or organizations. Thus it gave a green light to private terrorism… Colfax thus became not only the spark, but the blueprint for overthrowing Radical (Republican) rule.
The Good DarkyIn Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there stood, in the words of a
Guide to Louisiana, “a bronze figure of an old Negro, hat in hand, smiling with shoulders bent”, long known as “The Good Darky”. At the dedication of the statue in 1927, the following resolution was adopted:
Resolved that the faithful and devoted service rendered by the old Southern slaves, in working and making crops and taking care of the white women and children, while their masters were away fighting to keep them in slavery, has never been equaled… Those who are old enough to remember can tell you how the slaves remained at home and took care of everything…
Needless to say, the purpose of that statue and others like it is two-fold: It provides a model for African-Americans for how they were supposed to comport themselves in the brutal segregation regimes of the old South; and, it perpetuates the totally false myth that the slavery system was beneficial to and eagerly embraced by the slaves of the Ante-bellum South.
PS – In 1968 “The Good Darky” was toppled and thrown into a river, probably by a black person who was unable to appreciate the virtues of slavery. It was rescued from the river, stored for several years, and finally put into a museum, where it apparently remains today and is known as “
Uncle Jack”.
Honoring a vicious racistHistoric markers in Tennessee honor
Nathan Bedford Forrest above any other person in the state, with a statue, an obelisk, and 32 historical markers – more than the three former U.S. Presidents from Tennessee combined, and more than any other person in any state in our country. Yet, as Loewen explains:
In so doing, the landscape honors one of the most vicious racists in U.S. history. Forrest had been a slave trader before the Civil War and sold people brought in illegally from Africa half a century after Congress supposedly ended that trade in 1808. During the war, he presided over massacres of surrendered black troops… After the war he hired black convict labor, the closest thing to slave labor, for his cotton plantation near Memphis.
In choosing to honor such a man above all others, the authorities in Tennessee essentially are honoring and justifying the slave trade, slavery itself, war crimes, and the terror used to subjugate the Black race for several decades following the Civil War.
Evidence of racism from present day Southern voting patternsAdditional evidence of persisting Southern racism comes from current Southern voting patterns. Two crucial Senate votes that I believe are indicative of racism are the votes for the
Iraq War Resolution in 2002 and for the
Military Commissions Act of 2006. The former is suggestive of a willingness to go war against Iraq based on the slimmest of evidence, which suggests a certain amount of callousness towards the lives of Iraqis, who differ from us culturally, ethnically, and in their religion; the latter indicated, among other things, a willingness to indefinitely imprison and torture those who differ from us culturally, ethnically, and in religion, without any of the Constitutional safeguards against false imprisonment enjoyed by American citizens.
Of 23
Senators who voted against the Iraq War Resolution, only one came from one of the eleven states of the old Confederacy (Bob Graham from Florida). The other 21 Southern Senators all voted for the Iraq War Resolution. For the Military Commissions Act, the
Senate vote was 21-1 in favor by Southern Senators, compared to 44-33 in favor outside of the South.
The dynamics of Southern White antipathy to the Democratic PartyIt wasn’t just the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act that turned Southern whites away from the Democratic Party. It also had to do with the general increase in social programs that tended to result in more economic and social equality. Since the South is a relatively poor region, one might expect that Southerners would be interested in more economic and social equality, the hallmark of New Deal Democrats and liberals. But that would mean helping out racial minorities as well, something for which many Southern whites have a great aversion. An
assessment (see 3rd quote) by three Harvard economists describes that dynamic:
Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since minorities are highly over-represented amongst the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute particularly to minorities. The opponents of redistribution have regularly used race based rhetoric to fight left wing policies… America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.
Krugman explains that William Buckley Jr. was an early and influential pioneer in providing the intellectual underpinnings for racism. In 1957 his magazine,
National Review, published
an article that made this point:
The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race… National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct… It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
It remained for a charismatic politician, Ronald Reagan, to pick up this idea and run with it, while being careful to speak in a code that wouldn’t alienate too many non-racist whites. Reagan was a master at doing that, which accounted for much of his political success, which greatly accelerated the hemorrhage of racist Southern whites to the Republican Party. Krugman explains:
The Ronald Reagan who became California’s Governor in 1966 (served as the) vehicle for white voters angry at the bums on welfare… The image is clear: Welfare chiselers were driving up decent peoples’ taxes. Never mind that it wasn’t true… that “welfare” never was a major cost of government, and that cheating never was a significant problem… Reagan didn’t need to point out that a substantial portion of those who entered the welfare roles were black.
Why did this dynamic apply so much more to the old Confederacy than outside of it? It all has to do with their legacy of slavery. The old Confederacy adopted virulently racist attitudes in order to justify an evil system that clearly went against the principles or their religion and the stated principles upon which our country was founded. It was imperative to their self esteem to maintain their racist myths, which rationalized the system upon which their economic well being depended. This attitude was then transmitted down through many generations.
Taking back our countryIn the last parts of his book, Krugman provides an overview of the situation now facing us and comments on where he thinks we need to go from here. In his first paragraph of his last chapter he concisely spells out the difference between us and our political opponents:
One of the seeming paradoxes of America in the early 21st century is that those of us who call ourselves liberal are, in an important sense, conservative, while those who call themselves conservative are for the most part deeply radical. Liberals want to restore the middle-class society I grew up in; those who call themselves conservative want to take us back to the Gilded Age, undoing a century of history. Liberals defend long standing institutions like Social Security and Medicare; those who call themselves conservative want to privatize or undermine those institutions. Liberals want to honor our democratic principles and the rule of law; those who call themselves conservative want the president to have dictatorial powers and have applauded the Bush administration as it imprisons people without charges and subjects them to torture…. with a political strategy that rests, at its core, on exploiting the unwillingness of some Americans to grant equal rights to their fellow citizens – to those who don’t share their skin color, don’t share their faith, don’t share their sexual preferences.
Krugman believes that race as a winning issue for Republicans is in its last throes: Our population is becoming more non-white; the immigration issue is pitting wealthy Republicans who greatly desire a source of cheap labor against those who bitterly oppose immigration because of their racism or the job competition it brings or a combination of those two reasons; and most important, Americans are becoming less racist on average, as exemplified by a
doubling of those who approve of inter-racial marriage from 36% in 1978 to 77% in 2007. Krugman notes:
This may not seem directly relevant to politics… But the ability of the right to exploit racial tension has little to do with actual policies, and a lot to do with tapping into primal emotions. If those primal emotions are losing their intensity – and they are – the strategy loses its forces.
The Virginia Senate seat loss of George Allen in 2006 is an excellent example of how racism can backfire on a political candidate in today’s political environment.
With regard to political strategy, Krugman recommends:
The only way a progressive agenda can be enacted is if Democrats have both the presidency and a large enough majority in Congress to overcome Republican opposition. And achieving that kind of political preponderance will require leadership that makes opponents of the progressive agenda pay a political price for their obstructionism – leadership that, like FDR, welcomes the hatred of the interest groups trying to prevent us from making our society better.
A few comments on the backlash to the Civil Rights movement It has occurred to me that some might think that I am objecting to the Civil Rights movement when I say that it contributed to the radical Republican takeover of Congress with the consequent partial dismantling of the New Deal. That is absolutely NOT my intention.
The Civil Rights movement was absolutely necessary for our country. Without it we could not begin to make good on the promise of the ideals which founded our country. We have a long way to go on that issue, but the Civil Rights movement was a necessary big step in the right direction. And furthermore, I honestly don’t think that we need racists in our Party. They
belong in the Republican Party, and now that they’re there we no longer have to collaborate with them. Yes, I would appreciate their votes. But not if it means having to denounce everything that we stand for.
I feel much the same way about the need to remove from office our current president and vice president. There may be some political risk involved (though I believe that risk is greatly exaggerated), but to allow this presidency to stand without fighting to bring it down says to the American people and the rest of the world that we are a country that has almost completely lost our moral bearings, and that we don’t care enough about that to do
what needs to be done.