The conservative National Review, which has had a longstanding attachment to racism (FAIR Blog, 4/11/12) which it has lately shown signs of regretting, now has a cover story (5/28/12) by Kevin Williamson that argues that the Democratic Party is now and always has been the party of racism, while the GOP has always been the party of civil rights.
Sample:
That is because those Southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
I’d always wondered why Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms left the Democrats for the GOP. Now we know.
Jonathan Chait has a rebuttal of the National Review piece in New York (5/22/12). One key point to add to his response explaining why many Democrats did not immediately jump to the GOP over 1960s civil rights legislation: congressional seniority.
Many Southern Democratic legislators, by virtue of being from the South where only one party mattered, had been in office forever, and thus, through seniority, had high-ranking committee positions. If they switched parties, they would lose the seniority and power. So old racists like senators James Eastland and John Stennis remained Democrats their entire careers, leaving the Senate in 1978 and 1989 respectively.
The history of Stennis’ seat in the Senate pretty much tells the entire story. Stennis was preceded by the monumentally racist KKK member and Democratic Sen. Theodore Bilbo, and succeeded by the racist, Thurmond-revering Republican Trent Lott.
And speaking of Trent Lott, the interview he did with the magazine Southern Partisan in 1984 is worth noting. There he spoke of the Civil War as the North’s “War of Aggression” and attempted to convince the magazine’s neo-Confederate readers that the GOP was no longer the party of Lincoln, but the party of “the South’s sons” and “Jefferson Davis’ descendents.” As Lott told a gathering of the Sons of Confederate Veterans the same year, “The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform.”
The history is a shameful one for both parties. Both have played the race card when it was to their advantage (ask a deportee about Democratic enlightenment), and both have viciously violated our civil rights in the service of their masters.
We can argue about lesser evilism, but it is just that – evil of a comparatively lesser nature.
I grew up in the Mississippi of Eastland, Stennis and Ross Barnett. That these perverted purveyors of apartheid weren’t expelled from the party, and that desegregation was a farce until the end of the ’60s, tells me all I need to know about the Democratic commitment to combatting racism.
They’ve sold out more times than a performance of “CATS”.
Nothing need be said about what Republicans have done in that area, but I’ll offer a telling term.
“Southern strategy”.
How the blatant racism of the National Review and its ever-venerated founder, William F. Buckley, Jr., has escaped the wrath of decent journalists all these years remains a mystery. As FAIR has noted, Buckley cited the “cultural superiority of white over Negro,” explaining why whites were “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally” in a 1957 National Review article and defended it in a 1989 appearance on National Petroleum Broadcasting.
NPR rebroadcast the interview when Buckley died in February, 2008, a time when the usual adulation for him throughout the major media rose to sickening heights. Conservative “historian” George H. Nash, for example, proclaimed this filthy-rich, racist son of an oil baron “arguably the most important intellectual in the United States in the past half century.”
may i mention, as a white southerner who, like many of us, was in the civil rights movement in the south, that there was and still is plenty of racism right here in nyc. i’ve been trying to nag the times into calling stop and frisk what it is: racism pure and simple. if it were happening in mississippi or atlanta, the times would say so. as it is, i don’t think they’ve even used “racial profiling” or “racial discrimination”. i had to point out to the public editor when the census came out manhattan is lily white. got an article called “not as diverse as we thought”. see is it keaau reeves who mocks “diversity”? to diversify zuccotti park required a march from the bronx, since harlem is majority white, which, even though i fought for integration, bothers me. harlem being the spiritual capital of african america, therefore the american capital in some ways. a friend drove south for the first time since the sixties, occupy savannah was beautifully integrated, with lovely biracial couples holding hands. not much coverage of that on nation of change. let’s do feel free to criticize non corporate media. my dream would a site in which chavez and the castro bros would be criticized as much as any right wing dictator, which makes me an instant pariah? and thomas friedman had written good columns on israel and palestinians. give him credit when he does. i don’t like hate wherever it appears or demonization…
@April: What you say about racism in NYC is certainly true, but Manhattan isn’t lily white–it’s not even majority white. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
I never knew ,Buckley was a racist until it came out after his death. But I didn’t hear it on “National ‘Publican Radio”.
In understanding racism in the South you have to ignore party affiliation. Southerners are Conservatives period: that is why racist Southern Democrats easily became Southern Republicans racists after 1964.
CORRECTION: I think that people who frame the Civil War in terms of strictly race, do a grave dis-service to the modern implications of these Neo-Confederate bastards taking over the GOP. When Ron Paul for example, says he was against the Civil Rights Act, I do believe it is not about race for him (and others). What it is about, is that they want to create a class-based society once again, which really sums up the entire party platform today. One class is the rich, and they get to dictate the rules that they themselves do not have to be subjected to. Equality itself is a perverse idea to these people. They wish to live in a gated-off world with exclusive privileges that others pay the price for, and take all the risks for, while they internalize the profits. Essentially, Neo-Confederate and Neo-Feudal policy is one and the same. The world is a giant plantation and we are a corporate colony…This is the future as well as our past, if we don’t stop this NOW…”Those who own the country ought to govern it.”–John Jay.
“my dream would a site in which chavez and the castro bros would be criticized as much as any right wing dictator, which makes me an instant pariah?”
Why would you want to dream that? How about I dream about a site that criticizes MLK as much as Pol Pot, does it make me an instant pariah, or just an instant idiot.
I have a dream! I dream of a future of when people aren’t judged by the content of their character, but rather by some false sense of equivalence, where the guy who holds the baton and the guy underneath the baton are criticized equally, so I won’t have to think for myself.
Have you listened to NPR lately? They tend to lean on Cuba and Venezuela much harder than Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, but they do come much closer to your dream of false equivalence than FAIR, which does aspire to be fair.
@April – I appreciated many of your points, but the whole e.e. cummings thing of not capitalizing and punctuating sporadically impedes the reader’s ability to figure out what you’re trying to say.
Anyone who was alive and paying attention to politics in the 60s and 70s understood that the GOP set out quite deliberately to get the allegiance of the South by appealing to its racism and conservatism. Even as a child in Virginia during that period I remember getting into arguments with other children parroting their parents’ lines about sending the blacks “back to Africa” (as if they’d ever been there) and allowing civil rights to “develop gradually”, as if allowing people to enjoy their inherent human rights was supposed to be a process akin to planting tulip bulbs. I heard ALL that stuff in Virginia in the 60s, just as I found culverts tagged with white power slogans and knew that one could call the American Nazi Party (headquartered in Arlington, Virginia) for the “White Power Message of the Day”.
@Jim Naureckas, that particular wiki site seems to have jumbled at least some of its numbers and meanings, leading me to think it shouldn’t be trusted for anything.
This meme of Liberals, Progressives and Democrats are the real racists has been around for awhile. How the Conservatives, Regressives and Republican fight the truth that comes out. (Though there are many Democrats that aren’t too different from them.) When the mass exodus from the Republicans to the Democrats showed when the parties changed sides. Where the party of Lincoln moved to the Democrats.
The general ignorance of the population is used to good effect. The Regressives have far more outlets for their redefining of reality and winning at it. Timing is very important and they know it. Too many Democrats just let it happen without fighting back.
Serving on a carrier named the USS John Stennis would cause me to leap over the rail and disappear into almost any foreign port of call. What’s the next one – USS Dick Cheney? After waiting, of course, till the old bastard runs out of hearts of which he never had one to begin with.
Here we go again……..We have a vibrant election going on, and massive problems to deal with.I have an idea……….. lets talk about how FDR was an anti semite and racist.Or how about F lee Buckley ?Him too for damn sure!Anything,anything just as long as we don’t talk about the failures of this administration.I think next we should talk about baseball scandals in the early days.
It bears mentioning, that it is seldom mentioned or remembered, including in FAIR, that
that the Alabama election that George Walker Bush dropped out of the U.S. Air Force to
work in, was that of Winton Blount, Richard Nixon’s former (and the last) Post Master General and the architect of the “Southern Strategy”–wherein George Wallace voters were courted into the G.O.P. as the Nixon administration was attempting to halt civil rights and anti-poverty advancement. Racist policy has been a Republican hallmark since Richard Nixon asked why more Negro voters were then voting for the Democrats since FDR, during the 1960 Presidential debates.
Doug I would like to point out that the president who won with the “Southern Strategy” (Nixon) was the president who successfully enforced the civil rights bill desegregating public schools all throughout the south. Also one of his first Executive orders was to help minorities start businesses. Many racists in the south did not like the way Nixon governed and because of this dissent Democrat candidate Jimmy Carter successfully used the southern strategy in 1976 to take 10 of the 11 original Confederate states. The Republicans do not claim on their website to be the party of civil rights, though they have more right to that title then the Dems do. The Democrats DO claim that title for the last 200 years and that is just a bold faced lie.