Party Politics, Part II: The Science of Division

"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." -
Lyndon Baines Johnson to Bill Moyers on the night President Johnson signed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964

Part One of the Republican history with African-Americans revealed the uneasy relationship that surrounds the issue of race and politics in the United States.

While history obviously indicates that Republicans played a role -- sometimes pivotal -- in the freedom of peoples of African descent, one should not be so wedded to the past that present misdeeds go without evaluation. It's kind of like the political equivalent of being a Christian and only regarding the Old Testament as The Word, while completely ignoring the New Testament and its impact on faith. You just shouldn't do it.

I mean, it's easy enough to state that "Nixon, a Republican was pro-affirmative action." But it's myopic at best, disingenuous midway and a lie at worst to estimate that such an act was in the interest of Black peoples. (In fact, it was an attempt to expand the "Southern Strategy" to the North and West, along with racial wedge issues: school busing, and open housing as examples. It was Nixon, not Kennedy or Johnson, who signed affirmative action into law because, as his aides later revealed, Nixon wanted to divide Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal coalition of blacks, Jews and organized labor.)

After the election of 1980, it was obvious that the Republican party had cast its lot with white, social conservatives -- "Dixiecrats," -- now recast as Reagan Democrats. They were for the most part blue-collar, lower- to middle-class, and in economic terms, should have cast votes for Democratic candidates who supported worker-friendly policies. However, they broke for Reagan because, in part, they thought the Democratic Party was catering to, in the words of Stan Greenberg, Democratic uber-analyst: "...the benefit of others: the very poor, the unemployed, African Americans, and other political pressure groups."

In 1980, Reagan carried all the Southern and border states except for West Virginia and the incumbent Jimmy Carter's native Georgia. (Since then, only when Southerner Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee did the party win any Southern states. In 2000, Senator Al Gore, himself from Tennessee, carried no Southern or border states, even though he captured nearly 2 million more votes than the eventual "victor," George W. Bush.)

Reagan purposely alienated many black voters -- and played to the most base instincts of southern white voters -- by, among other things, stating that that racially-discriminatory private schools were entitled to tax-exempt status unless Congress specified otherwise. In essence, he was pandering to those who wished the "darkies" had remained in bondage, and openly advocated that there should be a benefit to being a racist.

It was Reagan's political strategist and campaign chairman Lee Atwater who described best the suble racial tint that would be applied to Republican party politics in the election of 1979:

Atwater: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - 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 'Nigger, nigger.' " - Atwater, in an interview to historian Alexander Lamis.

Atwater would also be responsible for Reagan's infamous "welfare queen" speech in 1976, and 12 years later it would be Atwater who would use a black rapist/murderer named Willie Horton to terrify white America, demonize African-American men and help George Bush overcome a 17 point deficit to defeat Michael Dukakis for president.

And it was also Atwater that impugned the reputation of South Carolina Democrat Tom Turnipseed by "informing" white suburbanites that Turnipseed, a white man, was a member of the NAACP. Turnipseed lost in a landslide.

The result of such open race-play is part of The Reagan Legacy: that up until this Congress, nearly 60 percent of the House members from the South were Republicans. 

Let's be clear: blacks didn't leave the Republican Party. It left us. We've made the switch because the Democrats were great on race starting in the Civil Rights Era, and even earlier, in the Roosevelt Era because Roosevelt's social policies actually helped us.

And today the Republican party, with its insistence that market-based solutions are always the best for almost any issue, continues to miss the boat that the opportunity for educational, and economic parity are considered by most Black folk to be a civil right. While Republicans give lip service to the notion, their policies are indicative of something else. Black voters equate the economy, health care and Social Security as "extremely important" issues of equality. When you tell a black person that unemployment in our community is three times the national average, and the president is spending billions in Iraq (let alone the appearance of complete and utter neglect for say, New Orleans), what are black folks to think other than "George Bush -- and by extension Republicans -- hate black people."

The assertion that black folk -- or anyone, for that matter -- should vote 'straight ticket' solely based on party affiliation is ludicrous, although it is common-place to do. That black folk vote 85-95% Democrat would be considered absurd, if in fact those voters were acting irrationally, voting in a way that injured their own self-interests, based on their local present-day circumstances.

But equally ridiculous is the assertion that a voter of any color should align themselves with a party whose modern politics run counter to their historical good deeds. I guess Ms. Hampton and those like her, in some sort of filial piety, feel we should vote GOP to thank them for actions taken over 130 years ago.

How 'bout this: Thanks, GOP, for the memories. Now, what have you done for me lately?