Monday, May 21, 2012
National Review has long specialized in debunking
pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating
catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the
outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee
for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major
U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the
rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with
the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That
Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of
their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has
allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican
political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B.
Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and
relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats
have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding
affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically
every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may
not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming
elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened
suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing
explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment
over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an
implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old
Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. 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. And from slavery and secession to
remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching
laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875,
and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly
identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting
civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans
in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights
reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated. In the
House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it
“made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by
being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but
Johnson was practically antebellum in his views. Never mind civil rights or
voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted
against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching. As a leader in
the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not
having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere
symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk
of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond
nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up
to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The
reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957
act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster.
In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy
liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same
time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the
legislation. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes,
they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since
they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up
their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give
them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a
difference.”
Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex
nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not
one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for
the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower as a general began the process of
desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main
reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of
Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities.
(“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct
it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held
prominent positions in the Democratic party — and President Wilson chose the
Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.
Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at
civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change
Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.
President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew
something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The
Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time
as they were picking up votes from northern blacks. The Civil War and the sting
of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern
Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was
very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed
his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections —
but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually
drove New Deal critics to the Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the
isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the
surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat
wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under
Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in
Vietnam). The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear
with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.
Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West
Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its
first Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did
Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was
joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican
party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly:
Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with
Texas’s election of John Tower.
At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry
spell on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue
had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been
enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War,
and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the
Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic
development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation
between North and South. (As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that
“the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience,
and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”) The conventional
Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was
poor rather than poor because it was backward. And their strongest piece of
evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among
poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most
retrograde beliefs on race — but among the emerging southern middle class, a
fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The
End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar
South (Harvard University Press, 2006). Which is to say: The Republican rise in
the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important
political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by
economic considerations and anti-Communism.
The South had been in effect a Third World country within
the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom. As Clay
Risen put it in the New York Times: “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 GOP. 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.” The
mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your
white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because
LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately
Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.
There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and
thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several
states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon
campaign. But in the main they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment,
direct or indirect. The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of
Barry Goldwater, a western libertarian who had never been strongly identified
with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the
1964 act and its extension of federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957
and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were
unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork. But far
from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his
running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the
co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. The Republican
platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson
administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority
groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply
Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where
they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other planks
in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to
changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative
actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of
the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed,
national origin or sex.” And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964
platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and
opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog
whistle.
Of course there were racists in the Republican party.
There were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well
documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions,
touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish
(“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so
passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing
men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative record, the
evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none
of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.
Neither does the history of the black vote. While
Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s,
the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New
Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a
majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon
Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread
dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the New Deal, a
flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at
the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic
emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics. Johnson’s War on Poverty
was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the
first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5
percent. Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the
indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the
elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic,
with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth. Democrats such
as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued
that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor,
but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from
private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen
by Johnson and his political heirs. In the context of the rest of his program,
Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to
empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on
civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the
years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the
sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one
would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that
elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining
20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was,
on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican.
If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed
in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to
do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.
Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats,
and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters
in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic
segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish
opponent of the 1964 reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the
attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his
will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as
Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people. I would say this — I
believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the
United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.”
(Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) Dowdy was
thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on
civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.
It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans
represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had
hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.
It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped
midcentury partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against the
“military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the
decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican party
over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency.
The Republican party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war
era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both
abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in
the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives
dreaded. By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest
current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism —
especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad
with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the
Democratic party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party
was not his alone.
The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set
the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics:
Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last
stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states, while Republican
Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through
Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South
Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried. Democrat Hubert Humphrey
was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas. Mindful of the long-term
realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried
about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.”
Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in
1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976,
Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy
the South like Sherman. Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states
in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern
South, notably Virginia and Florida.
The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the
rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative
critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the
rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos
that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation
of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially
the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify
conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue
that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles”
or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the
evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all
backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the
best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous
with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation
President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors
that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic
for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a
relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
No comments:
Post a Comment