Racists are Not A Part of the Democratic Voting Bloc...Anymore

 

There’s this common thread in progressive articles these days about how Republicans are trying to rewrite history. That they’re banning the 1619 Project from being taught in schools, that they’re  having books ban that might educate children with the right values, that they’re using critical race theory as a stalking horse, etc. I have to say there is a part of me that has always gotten a chuckle of this considering that they are the people who argue for books called The People’s History  and Lies My History Professor Told Me.  In other words Republicans are rewriting the history that we’re trying to rewrite.

This is a cliché particularly in fundraisers from so many progressives who are also advocating for Democrats. If you believe their history, all Republicans with the possible exception of Lincoln (I expect them to find information he was actually a slaveowner himself someday) have always been evil and bigoted, beholden to the corporate oligarchs and the Moral majority. At the same time, Democrats have always been the party of progress and equality, believing the rights of the minorities, woman and the LGBTQ+ community. To say this involves a ridiculous amount of contortion is an understatement but it’s one that leftists have always been capable of.  Recently they wrote a long article arguing that Theodore Roosevelt, one of the greatest presidents in history, was actually a racist. There is truth to this. So were his contemporaries and rivals Woodrow Wilson and William Jennings Bryan, but you’ll never see that in an article they write. LBJ was a saint for creating the Great Society; they leave out any involvement he had in Vietnam, which as we all know was entirely Richard Nixon’s fault. Eisenhower and Ford barely get mentioned but as we all know JFK and Jimmy Carter were saints.

The most recent example of this came in yet another piece of clickbait that says, “Does the Republican Party worship poverty, death and disease?” They then gleefully list how red states are leading in so many horrible statistics including poverty, illiteracy, etc. all of which are meant to basically say: “See, we’re better than them.” Then they ‘explain’ how we got there using so many of the usual talking points about the Republicans adopting the Southern strategy, the Christian televangelists becoming a block of the Republican party and the destruction of corporate finance for Republicans. And in the narrowest sense of the word, it’s accurate. But like everything else about progressives, it leaves out everything else.

Of course, they write the usual line that LBJ said after signing the Civil Rights Act: “I think we just delivered the South for the Republicans for a long time.”  What they always leave out, of course, was that from Reconstruction until the 1968 election, the South was essentially Democratic. Indeed, it was called the Solid South. Every time the Democrats met to nominate a President from 1844 until 1936, there was a rule in place – that the Republicans pointedly did not have – that it took two-thirds of the delegates to nominate a candidate. In essence, this gave the South veto power over any candidate who might even seem to argue for something regarding equal rights for blacks.  After this rule was eliminated and Harry Truman began to advocate for Civil Rights, governor Strom Thurmond – then the Democratic governor of South Carolina – led a branch of Southern Democrats who demanded that the DNC, among other things, reinstate that two-thirds rule at the next convention. After that refusal, a branch of Southern Democrats walked out to form their own party – which was called the States Right Party. From the 1930s to the 1960s when the Southern Democrats essentially controlled the Senate, it was understood – if not liked – that no bill involving Civil Rights would be the House floor without meeting a filibuster.

Now to be clear many of the great Democrats of that era were Southern representatives – Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell, Alben Barkley, Estes Kefauver and Kenneth McKellar – most of whom played vital roles in the New Deal that got passed.  But make no mistake during this period the South was a one-party system and it was entirely Democratic.

Now you’d think that progressives would remember this because they are constantly mentioning the Jim Crow South. There was, just yesterday, an article in which they boasted that there was a ‘brain drain’ in which during this period the Great Migration took place to the North. They left out that the Jim Crow  was Democratic and the party of White Supremacy while the North was not only almost entirely Republican but the party of Progressivism. They also leave out that much of the Progressive era – you know, what they’re named for – comes from a large bloc of the Republican party, led by Theodore Roosevelt and the Populist Party, which was in the West and among its platform advocated for regulation of the railroads, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators and female suffrage.  But that part never enters their narrative because it would be acknowledging that states that consider fundamentally Republican now are and always have been irredeemable.

The decision for equality was the right one for America, but every time the progressives repeat his quote, the implication is always: “Good. We’re better out without them.” That’s not the kind of opinion that works for unification.

Next, of course, they make the argument about the Christian Right and the moral majority. This is a harder one to refute but not impossible. The Bible Belt, it’s worth remembering, was part of the Solid South up until the 1960s and the Democrats were fine with exploiting it to their benefit as much as possible. It’s worth noting that Prohibition, which was fundamentally a movement by that Southern bloc, was done in part in order to get the 21^st Amendment passed: the one for full women suffrage. Indeed, many women voters were in favor of Prohibition being put in the constitution as much as the right to vote.  

The Democrat Party was just as inclined to religious bigotry during much of their history. During the 1920s, the KKK enjoyed a major revival and back then, they were as much an anti-Catholic party as they were an anti-African American party. The Democrats were fine counting them as their members. In a major vote that took a long time to resolve as part of the 1924 Democratic Convention, a plank in the platform to condemn the Klan passed – by one vote. That year, the party nominee was John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer. Davis  might be familiar to some scholars as arguing against Brown V. Board of Education before the Supreme Court.The majority opinion, of course, was written by Earl Warren. He was a Republican at the time. They won’t tell you that part.

 When Al Smith became the Democratic nominee for President in 1928, many of his own party were opposed to it.  The anti-Catholic bias that dominated the nation came from the Klan.You might think we finally overcame when JFK became the Democratic nominee in 1960, but he had to make a lot of speeches arguing and defending his religion. (Ironically, Kennedy was barely a Catholic.) But it worked and Kennedy became President – by one tenth of one percent of the popular vote, and even now we’re not sure how accurate that count is.

All of which is to say when it comes to freedom of religion the Democrats don’t entirely have the best track record either: Carter may have been a born-again Christian, but its worth noting that bothered a lot of Democrats at the time too.

Finally there is the argument that the Republicans are the party of corporations and money, always have been always be. This is closer to accuracy than some of their other claims, in the sense at the start of the 20^th century the GOP was as much a party of Big Business as it is now. The fact that Theodore Roosevelt spent much of his presidency campaigning for the rights of the undervalued – such things as the Square Deal, The FDA, the National Parks Service happened in his Presidency, the fact that the bosses didn’t even want him to be on the ticket in 1900, the fact that they were trying to replace him prior to 1904 – doesn’t enter their thinking because the only Roosevelt who counts his Franklin. (Eleanor, for the record, was more enlightened on civil rights than he was.)

But during much of the 20^th century most Democrats had their noses in rings too. They were called political bosses.  Their were machines across the country that for most of the Democratic Party’s existence controlled their candidates as much as they did the Republicans and didn’t really let go until JFK’s victory over them in 1960. Richard Daley the last real one, as many Republicans are sure of, made sure he won the Presidency that year.  When George McGovern managed to break the bosses chains when he won the 1972 nomination, they essentially reacted by sitting on their hands during the campaign, waiting for him to completely collapse in a forty-nine state loss. He formed a coalition that would eventually be the model of the Democratic voting bloc but it took the party until 2008 to acknowledge it.  Democrats might now be the party of the working man, but they spent a lot of their time fighting it.

Progressives, I am certain of, will never tell you this, if they know it in the first place because it does not fit their narrative. I find this fundamentally hypocritical, but as we all know hypocrisy in bipartisan. What is harder to fathom is the contempt they look at on all of these states, many of whom were Democratic far longer they have been Republican. You’d think, if they are the party of equality that want to help everybody, that they would want to raise these red states that are suffering from all of the evils that they list. The message, however, is always the same.

They deserve it. They were misled by the racist bigotry, the latent religious messaging and the corporations disguised as populism.  The fact that the ads that Lee Atwater aired for Bush were not removed from the ones that George Wallace famously used, that churches used to be prominent in campaigning for Democratic voters in the South, that the machines had no problem giving money to people to vote for Democratic candidates for a very long time – the Kennedys in particular were fond of this – is irrelevant. We’re not like this, they say.  We’re more enlightened now.

No. You made a cold-blooded political calculation. You decided the African-American vote was more important than the racist vote. You don’t get to blame them for deciding to go elsewhere when they aren’t part of your constituency any more.

You’d also think, considering how much you mock the idea of the national divorce and that there are so many of the downtrodden in these states – they should know this, many of their articles are about tragedies involving these minorities in these states -  that they’d want to do something to help these deep red states, considering that many of these people are suffering.  But I’ve read their blogs about elections to often to know that they don’t give a damn. If your African-American, or Latino, or LGBTQ+, or a woman, or you know, any of the constituencies that progressives want to vote for, and you happen to live in this state, the overall message you get from so many of these articles are you’re on your own.  We will raise money off your suffering, but electorally, we don’t really want to help you. Not on a national level, not a local level, not at all. It’s your own fault really. You didn’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do the right thing – move to a blue state when you had the chance. I mean, it’s possible there were other factors – after all your states are run by the party that worships poverty, disease and death -  but since they’re not going to help you, we really don’t think we should either.

That’s the thing about all of these red states. Many of them, particularly in the South, were solidly blue for a lifetime.  We were willing to overlook so much of the blatant and bigotry for decades – hell, we counted them as vital members of our constituency – as long as we got their votes. Then many of them started making enough noise, and as a political decision we decided to help.  The Democrats had a much further right than the Republicans did for more than a century. We decided to cut them off and they went somewhere else. Now we’re doing everything in our power to deny that we ever had them as members, and some of our newest set want to pretend that even the ones who were radically progressive by the standards of their party were not real progressive or even real Democrats – and that the party that took them on was always reprehensible because they saw a different kind of political opportunity that we once did.

And can we really blame them? Because it worked for them. Between 1968 and 2004, the Republicans won seven out of ten Presidential elections. Yes I know, we’re still hung up on 2000 (I’ve written about that one before). May I remind you that in four of the first five after adopting ‘the Southern strategy”, Republicans won big. In four of the next five wins, the Republican candidate received at least 400 electoral votes. In two of them, the Republican candidate carried 49 of 50 states. That’s basically the entire country.

Oh, and the sainted Jimmy Carter, the one who won in that gap? It was closer than it looked. Few hundred thousand votes change, Ford would have been elected. The only reason Carter won was because he basically carried the South. And Clinton won both his election with less than fifty percent of the popular vote much of which included the South.

So make your argument it was a short term solution on a historical perspective. They carried the Presidency five out of six elections, and by the time Clinton first term was half over, they would control both houses of Congress for the next twelve years.

So go ahead, mock the conservative strategy as a failure. But when you decide to trash Republicans as a whole – and make no mistake, articles like this do just that – all you’re doing is basically ensuring they’ll keep that voting that way. Articles like this basically call Republican voters ‘simple-minded constituents’ that we’re better off not having part of our bloc anymore. That’s not an effective long-term strategy either..

Now, you know some of the story. There’s more to it than it, of course, but it’s definitely more than the progressives want you to know.