On the “Republicans are racist” card
Gerard Alexander has an article at the WaPo describing the history of the perception that Republicans are racist, based on the so-called Southern strategy:
This reading of the conservative movement presents problems of logic and history, relying on assumptions that fall apart on close examination. First, it assumes that Republicans depended on white Southerners to become politically competitive in the 1960s. Second, it assumes that Republican presidents from Nixon forward swayed these voters by giving them the policies they wanted. Third, it assumes that the modern conservative policy agenda is best seen as racially motivated. Finally, it assumes that conservative positions on recent controversies are just new forms of that same white-heartland bigotry.
These assumptions are badly flawed…[T]he GOP presidential majority and much of the party’s modern policy agenda were forged not in the racial heat of the 1960s South, but first in the 1950s and across the country.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) recently argued that race did not play a central role in the partisan shift in the South, saying the transformation was led by a younger generation of Southerners in the post-segregation 1970s. But the best evidence that things other than race mattered most in the shift was that it was an even older generation that moved to the GOP in the peripheral South. By the time Lyndon Johnson reportedly remarked that the Civil Rights Act would deliver the South to the Republicans for a generation, the GOP had already won nearly half the region’s Electoral College votes three times in a row.
Alexander goes on in that vein. But although I think he is correct that some of the thinking behind the “Republicans=racists” accusation follows the sort of reasoning he is critiquing here, most of it does not. Most of it appears to be a reflexive and opportunistic response that is more strategic than anything as well-thought-out or historically aware as arguments about the Southern strategy and how it worked. Most of it is just a habitual way of attacking Republicans that is sure to make a great many liberals nod in agreement.
The question is whether it is going to work any more with the large segment of the American public that liberals (and conservatives, for that matter) ordinarily need in order to win elections: Independents. My guess is that liberals have overplayed their hand on this one. I suspect that their use of the race card against almost all objections to the policies of Obama, our first black president, has caused a backlash because it is so obviously an overuse of the race card strategy.
One of the reasons is that a great many Independents also happen to dislike Obama’s policies. They happen to agree with the Arizona law about illegals, and with the idea that a truly sensitive iman would know better than to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero. They know it is highly possible to hold such views for reasons that have nothing to do with racism. And they resent the constant harping on the topic, and the transparent political motivations behind it.
[NOTE: Scott at Powerline adds that Alexander is working on a book explaining the history of race and the Republican Party. Promises to be interesting.]
[ADDENDUM: Here’s a previous post of mine that touches on these subjects.]
Liberals think Republicans are racists because Republicans believe in equal opportunity and a level playing field. Liberals believe in quotas and racial preferences as ways of reducing inequality. Liberals do not want equal opportunity. They want equal results. Fortunately, most Americans, including some minority members, don’t believe in preferences.
Let me see if I understand this correctly. The party that
1. fought a Civil War to defend slavery,
2. gave rise to the KKK,
3. segregated the armed forces,
4. implemented poll taxes and literacy tests to impede black voting,
5. passed Jim Crow laws segregating Southern society,
6. fought integration tooth and nail,
7. set dogs on those marching for civil rights,
8. sprayed civil rights marchers with fire hoses,
9. was complicit (through local Democrat office holders, such as sheriffs and city officials) in the murders of civil rights workers,
10. gave the world Lester Maddox, George Wallace, and Bull Connor,
11. boasts a (nominally former) KKK member in its Senate representation,
that party, with that record, accuses other people of racism?
And those they accuse of racism are adherents of the party that actually ended slavery, a party whose members were almost solely the victims of the KKK, and whose President sent Federal troops to enforce integration.
Do I have that straight?
The race card, and the envy card are both strictly emotional appeals to those voters who have a victim mentality. Obviously these devices are quite effective with the crowd that is less competitive and will settle for being dependent upon government.
Due to the liberal way of thinking (racist), I cannot vote for a liberal or Democrat.
Period.
SQ: Is Great Society the most racist piece of legislation excreted from the 20th century’s latter half?
Neo:
At the heart of it, I would be inclined to agree that the Liberal Racist argument is reflexive and hollow, yet those offering it have intellectualized it and taken it to heart despite knowing it is a lie. Cynthia Tucker with her “browning of America” being an excellent example. And therein lies the irony. If one chooses to face off against these people as Alexander has done and dismantle their charges intellectually, it is a mistake and a waste of time. They did not arrive at their charges intellectually, after all, they merely cooked some pseudo-intellectual jargon to make their claims seem rational thought out and respectable when in reality its BS from beginning to end. One cannot reason with those who have consciously thrown up a lie and chosen to believe it, even knowing that they cut it from wholecloth. They are graduates from the Joe and Valerie Wilson School of the Depraved.
Adrian
Occam’s Beard
While Robert Byrd still may be on the voting rolls in West Virginia, or in Chicago for that matter, his ascending to a place where he can no longer inundate West Virginia with federal pork means that he is no longer on the US Senate rolls. 🙂
Here is an excerpt from The Myth of the Racist Republicans .
More at the link.
Adrian Day:
A Wikipedia search on Valerie Wilson yields the following.
Just for fun.
Very good, neo. It is that. But, let’s give Mr. Alexander credit where credit is due.
The paradox conservatives face is they can hardly showcase this wonderful “concern” of theirs without making it an issue of race.
Old lawyerly aphorism: When you can’t attack the evidence, attack the witness.
Yes, I should have shifted to past tense. But I very much doubt that Byrd ascended anywhere. On the contrary, I bet he and Teddy are vying – unsuccessfully, I hope – for a spot near the water cooler.
In a rural school near the border between the Carolinas, a teacher asked us who our parents were voting for. I said Barry Goldwater. I quickly found out my father was the only person in our township who was registered Republican, everyone else in the school said Johnson.
I’ve been reconsidering my views on a number of cultural/historical villains, Goldwater and McCarthy among them (I’m currently reading Stanton Evans’s book on McCarthy).
I’m alternately chilled and angered by the similarity of tactics employed against McCarthy (who was substantially correct, as we now know from the Venona decrypts, but characterized as a liar, and was denied access to State Department files that would have proven his case), Goldwater (“dangerous extremist” who wasn’t), and latterly, against Palin, each of whom has been poorly served by the communist fifth column and their handmaidens, the MSM.
We really need to clean house.
I don’t need read history on Goldwater and McCarthy. I LIVED IT
McCarthy WAS NOT RIGHT! He was a LYING PIG who wanted fame & power.
He screwed up our county as well as many, many lives.
It IS his fault the Christians pushed over the Wall of Separation between Church and State by putting their BS “Under God” CRAP in OUR pledge and the MORE BS “in God We Trust” on OUR Money in 1955.
And Goldwater was one damn find man.
IF people want some facts on Racism and the Dumocrats, they should google LARRY ELDER and read his comments.
Present thinking is upside-down. Slaves were freed by the Republican Lincoln, who I consider an unconstitutional tyrant, but he did free the slaves.
The KKK was organized by Democrats. Jim Crow laws were passed by Democrats. The Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, another tyrant, re-segregated federal service.
The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was only passed with Republican votes.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican.
And the Republicans are racist? Typical New England socialist reasoning. By the way, both of my universities, B.S. and J.D., were land grant schools. Oh, the horror!!
Neil C. Reinhardt:
If you want to establish yourself as a source of facts, you have to get the facts right yourself.
For instance, “In God We Trust” first appeared on US money in 1865, and was made mandatory for coins, except the nickel and the penny, in 1908. The nickel and the penny were added in 1938. “Tailgunner Joe” wasn’t born in 1865, and wasn’t in Congress until 1947. He was censured by the Senate in 1954, and afterwards had no power whatsoever, so he really had almost nothing to do with the adoption of “In God We Trust” on paper money in 1955.
Besides which, there never was a “Wall of Separation between Church and State.” It’s not in the Constitution, and no one even thought there was such a thing until the 1950’s. Except for an obscure letter of Jefferson’s, not mentioned by anyone in public life for 76 years, the framers did not use the term, and not even Jefferson understood it to mean what you do – as president of the Senate, he authorized the use of the Capitol as a church, and voted for spending federal funds on Christian missionaries to the Indians, among other things.
Aside from that, your letter is fine.
YOU SHOULD TAKE YOUR OWN ADVICE
Yes, while I made a boo boo by not stipulating it was “paper money” which I was referring to, most understood what I meant..
And it is true that due to the actions of some SELFISH Christians “In God We Trust” did appear ON COINS where it SHOULD NOT HAVE EVER BEEN in the first place!
(Makes me ask WHICH god as humans have INVENTED and named some 25,000 of them SO FAR!)
It WAS put on our paper money ONLY do to McCarthy’s Communist Witch Hunt.
PERIOD!
END OF THAT STORY!
Those who have actually studied American history know:
A The MAJORITY of our Founding Fathers were NOT Christians they were, as were MOST of the more successful and more educated colonists, DEISTS!
“Not only were a good many of the revolutionary leaders more deist than Christian, the actual number of church members was rather small. Perhaps as few as five percent of the populace were church members in 1776”
[Lynn R. Buzzard, Exec Dir of Christian Legal Society, as quoted in _They Haven’t Got a Prayer_, Elgin IL: David C. Cook, 1982, p. 81]
B. The MAJORITY of our Founding Fathers as well as the Colonists WANTED the Complete Separation of Church and State!
For as Madison said:
“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”
Pres. James Madison, 1803
And I LOVE what one of OUR MOST Important Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson said:
“The Christian god is Cruel, Capacious Vindictive and Unjust!”
Lafayette hit it on the head when he said:
“If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.”
Lafayette
(1789)]
Those who want to know the facts about our Founding Fathers and the founding of the United States, should read what is in the link below.
It was researched and written by R.P. Nettelhorst who is an Extremely Honest, Fair, Knowledgeable Christian Historian and Minister.
http://www.theology.edu/journal/volume2/ushistor.htm
I’ve found the following book to be quite Enlightening as to who believed what and how much:
The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed
It selects a number of well-known (and not so well-known) FFs and discusses their attitudes and presumptions and the justification for such ideas in their writings. They were a disparate lot, Protestants and Catholics and Jews and other creeds — a good read.
> A The MAJORITY of our Founding Fathers were NOT Christians they were, as were MOST of the more successful and more educated colonists, DEISTS!
This is an inaccurate statement. Most professed a belief in Christ that tied to their believe in God. Hence, they were Christians in most cases.
What they did not trust in was the idea of Established Religious Authority, particularly when intermixed with the power of the State.
I would, however, point out that the idea that the term “separation of Church and State” does not appear in early commentaries and letters is an equally disingenuous claim. I cite at least one Madison quote from a letter to Rev Jasper Adams, spring 1832:
…[I]t may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points….
The above partial quote does not defacto use the phrase, “Church and State”, but it’s rather blatantly self-evident that the terms “rights of religion” and “the Civil authority” are a distinction without a difference.
And I found that while not even making a serious effort to debunk the idea, just while checking out another quote. It’s clear that the notion existed, even if the exact term used was microscopically different in wording.
I’ve got something on this whole issue I’ve posted in various places before:
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I believe we need to steal the term “racism” back, by taking a leaf from the Leftists’ communist predecessors with regards to “democracy”: Remember the “German Democratic Republic“? Neither a Republic nor Democratic.
The fun part is, we can do it and still tell Truth, not Pravda.
Whenever you open a discussion regarding anything with a Democrat, work hard — very hard — to get in a line something to the effect of “Well, I’ve just never understood how Democrats can have such a long history of promoting racism against negros/blacks/Africans/whatever-the-PC-term-is-today”
At this point, of course, they are going to almost certainly be dumbfounded, possibly spluttering and perhaps even verging on apoplectic.
It is a certainty that they will be utterly confused, however, so take your advantage and run with it.
Begin discussing how it is that they have decided so imperiously that black people who, by equality, should be presumed capable of doing virtually anything which whites or Asian/Oriental/whatever-the-PC-term-is-today can do, are instead taken as a matter of course by the Democrats to be utterly incapable of pulling themselves out of impoverished conditions as those two groups — including people of every stripe, creed, nationality, or religious affiliation — have managed to do in America.
Why/how is it that the Democrats insist on racist policies which basically claim that blacks cannot help themselves, unlike, say, Jews, who have fought anti-Semitism not just for a couple centuries but for millenia, yet still managed to succeed and succeed well.
Why/how is it that blacks are incapable of doing exactly what so many others have managed to do, which is to educate themselves and produce the kind of genius and work product to excel as a group in American culture.
Now, around this time, they might be regaining their feet, and throw out something to the effect of, “well, those groups had no history of slavery to overcome…”
Do not allow them to retain this advantage — knock it out from under their feet immediately by pointing out that the plight of the “coolee” and their descendants — workers from the Orient — was little, if any, better well into the 20th century.
The “coolee” was worked just as brutally, just as uncaringly, as any black slave, performing backbreaking labor for pennies a day, 10,12,14 hours a day, while valued less than a good horse. There were “no oriental” water fountains, too, and any “oriental” who dared look at a white woman sexually, well, he could look forward to the same sort of lynching a black man could.
Yet despite this disparagement, the descendants of those men and women have managed to not only succeed, but usually to surpass the descendants of the average WASP. They rank better financially, and educationally, than the average White Boy.
Now, of course, is the time to press it home… Ask — no, demand — to know why it is that Democrats insist on such racist policies which treat blacks as “lesser people”, utterly incapable of helping themselves.
Around this time their heads should explode with apoplexy, or, alternately, a swing might be made at your face. Be ready for it.
If they do, however, start to regain their feet, then it is time to press home on the history of the Democratic party’s racism.
Cite, first off, the fact of the abolition of slavery in the south, as a part of Reconstruction, was a Republican project, and was strongly opposed by Democrats, who used white racism as a recruiting tool to gain prominence throughout the South, to the point where Democrats are, even now, 140 years later, the dominant party affiliation in the region.
Forward to the 1940s. Cite from the Official 1940 GOP Party Platform:
Negro
We pledge that our American citizens of Negro descent shall be given a square deal in the economic and political life of this nation. Discrimination in the civil service, the army, navy, and all other branches of the Government must cease. To enjoy the full benefits of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness universal suffrage must be made effective for the Negro citizen. Mob violence shocks the conscience of the nation and legislation to curb this evil should be enacted.
Then contrapose this with the 1948 Democrats, which split off to form the Dixiecrats, a blatantly racist political affiliation. These people, rabid racists all — over a million — were Democrats in 1944, and they were Democrats again in 1952.
It continued into the 1960s, at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, wherein duly elected black representatives were blatantly disenfranchised by Johnson and Humphrey. I have no doubt that it was this treatment which contributed strongly to the race riots that occurred later on in the 1960s.
And it continues on through today. In the 2004 campaign, John Kerry’s campaign staff did not include a single prominent black person until someone commented on it publicly. And we all know how the immensely talented and highly competent Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice were treated at the hands of liberal cartoonists, with blatantly racist depictions.
Q.E.D.: The conclusion is inescapable. The Democrats are a party of racism, founded in racism, devoted to promoting racism through the last 140 years, and inexcusably supporting racist ideas and perceptions for that entire time.
A more reasonable explanation for the shift of the South toward Republicans after the end of Jim Crow, is that the south has always been basically conservative and the only thing tying them to the Democratic party was the long-term racist policies promulgated by that party. When those policies were removed by the passage of the (heavily Republican supported) civil rights acts of the 50s and 60s, the conservative southerners had no reason to support the increasingly liberal Democrats.
It turns out that we were able to read some Soviet intelligence cables of that time, in what are known as the VENONA decrypts (secret at the time, obviously, but now revealed). These decrypts, along with the revelations of CPUSA defectors Whitaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and Louis Budenz, prove unequivocally that McCarthy was absolutely correct. It is now clear that he was being fed highly accurate information by loyal American sources in the State Department and FBI, to the great discomfiture of the Truman Administration, which moved heaven and earth to find out who his sources were. McCarthy’s information was so good he knew the results — chapter and verse – of closed-door loyalty board hearings within days of the event.
For example, consider Solomon Adler, one of those accused by McCarthy. (Adler was/is now widely “credited” with playing an instrumental role in losing China to the Reds by cutting off the loan of gold to the Chinese Nationalists.) His contributions figuring prominently in the VENONA decrypts, he left the country under a loyalty board investigation, and ultimately wound up in…Communist China. You know, the way loyal Americans tended to.
A few other nuggets. V. Frank Coe – now proven by the KGB archives to have been a Soviet agent — also wound up in Communist China.
Other accused: Frederick V. Field, Harry Dexter White (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, and the lead U.S. negotiator at the Bretton Woods conference), to name a few. All guilty as sin.
Bottom line: McCarthy had a point — the government had been seriously penetrated by Communist agents. He was absolutely correct.
So I beg to differ. You do need to read the history of McCarthy. Whatever his other faults, real or imagined, he fought hard — and almost singlehandedly – to protect this country, and was smeared mercilessly for his efforts.
Neil and Igot: You miss my point — not that they never used the term “separation of Church and State,” but what they meant was very different from what Neil means. How could Jefferson have voted to fund Christian missionaries if he believed that “separation of Church and State” meant that government and religion should never touch each other? How could Franklin urge that US paper money bear a picture of the Israelites leaving Egypt?
“Most of it is just a habitual way of attacking Republicans that is sure to make a great many liberals nod in agreement.”
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Especially true now that the Progressives have taken control of the “mainstream-liberal narrative” in this country. Their worldview coincides with the Marxist belief that White Westerners are -simply put- the Predatory Class of the world.
Any failure or inadequacy of a non-white or non-European society is obviously due to the consequences of evil colonialism reverberating down through history.
All non-whites / non-Europeans (1) are noble and honorable, (2) live in harmony with Gaia, (3) have no racial or ethnic or cultural biases of their own, (4) have societal and cultural norms that “work for them” (so therefore those cultures have equal if not superior moral value compared to ours).
If there is any conflict or disagreement between some white/ Western/ capitalistic/ group and any other, that “other” is automatically considered innocent and oppressed, while the white/ Western/ capitalistic is just as automatically judged to be racist, bigoted, oppressive, greedy, hateful, and arrogant.
The short version of this Progressive-Liberal understanding of “how things are” is the often-repeated “only whites can be racists — and ALL whites ARE racists”.
Richard, that was not necessarily directed at you, it was more a generic note about the term “no one used the phrase in the first 75 years of this country except Jefferson, and even that only in passing.” Which is often used to portray the idea that it’s yet another recent twisting of the Founders’ intent.
Funding of Christian missionaries was probably (without my looking into it) done in a non-sectarian, non-denominational way. I believe they much more had an issue with so-called “organized” religion, not with religion itself.
I don’t think they had any issue with religious views themselves. I’d suspect it would be debatable if they would’ve argued in favor of it if the modern overall issue was raised — more than likely they simply didn’t imagine what could possibly be objectionable about it, not that they would have disagreed with modern objections. We are all products of our environment in many ways. No less so the FFs, who did have plenty of Christian influences… their disgust with religions derived from abuses of the Church to suppress dissent and gain power over others, not with notions of God.
It’s clear from their writing that they DID believe in “separation of religious functions from civil authority”.