It was the Democratic Party that ginned up the racist mob against blacks and it is the Democratic Party ginning every new mob today—ironically, all portraying themselves as the equivalent of the Freedom Riders. With real civil rights secure—try to find a restaurant that won’t serve a black person—modern civil rights laws benefit only the mob, not the victims of the mob, as American blacks had been. Just as fire seeks oxygen, Democrats seek power, which is why they will always be found championing the mob whether the mob consists of Democrats lynching blacks or Democrats slandering the critics of ObamaCare as racists.
Democrats have gone from demagoguing white (trash) voters with claims that Republicans are the party of blacks, to demagoguing black voters telling them Republicans are the party of racists. Any mob in a storm.
The liberal fairy tale that Southern bigots simply switched parties, from Democrat to Republican, is exactly wrong. What happened is: The Democrats switched mobs. Democrats will champion any group of hooligans in order to attain power. As Michael Barone said of the vicious segregationist (and Democrat) George Wallace, he was “a man who really didn’t believe in anything—a political opportunist who used opposition to integration to try and get himself ahead.”1
This is why the Democrats are able to transition so seamlessly from defending Bull Connor racists to defending Black Panthers, hippies, yippies, Weathermen, feminists, Bush derangement syndrome liberals, Moveon.org, and every other indignant, angry mob.
Every segregationist who ever served in the Senate was a Democrat and remained a Democrat except one. Even Strom Thurmond—the only one who later became a Republican—remained a Democrat for eighteen years after running for president as a Dixiecrat. There’s a reason they were not called the “Dixiecans.”
Democratic senators Ernest Hollings, Richard Russell, and Sam Ervin all voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all remained Democrats for the rest of their lives.2 Al Gore’s father, Albert Gore, voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; both he and his son remained lifelong Democrats. J. William Fulbright voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a Democrat and became the political mentor to Bill Clinton. Senator Robert “Sheets” Byrd voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; he remained a senior statesman in the Democratic Party until his dying day.
A curious sleight of hand is required to hide from the children the fact that all the segregationists in the Senate were Democrats. In history books, such as Robert A. Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, the segregationists are not called “Democrats.” They’re called “Southerners.”3
Except it wasn’t just “Southerners” voting against civil rights. Not every senator who opposed black civil rights was a Southerner, but every one was a Democrat. In addition to the Southern Democrats who voted against putting the 1957 civil rights bill on the Senate calendar, for example, there were five Democrats from nowhere near the South: Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon—a favorite target of Senator Joe McCarthy—Democratic senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, Democratic senator James Murray of Montana, Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, and Democratic senator Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming.4
According to Caro, the Western Democrats traded their votes on civil rights for a dam authorization on the Idaho-Oregon border.5 That’s how dear black civil rights were to liberals—they traded them away for a dam.
While Democrats are the party of the mob, Republicans are the party of calm order, willing to breach the peace only when it comes to great transgressions against humanity—slavery, abortion, and terrorism.
Republican president Abraham Lincoln fought a Civil War and sacrificed 600,000 American lives to preserve the union, rallying the union with the principle that all men are created equal. The Democrats favored allowing slavery in the territories, and the Whigs were pro-choice on slavery—rejecting extremist rhetoric on both sides. The Republican Party was founded for the express purpose of opposing slavery.
After the Civil War, it was Republicans who passed the Thirteenth Amendment, granting slaves their freedom; the Fourteenth Amendment, granting them citizenship; and Fifteenth Amendment, giving them the right to vote. It was Republicans who sent federal troops to the Democratic South to enforce the hard-won rights of the freed slaves.
Then, as now, the Democrats favored the hooligans. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formed as a terrorist group to attack Republicans who had come to the Democratic South after the Civil War to help enforce legal equality for freed slaves.
It was—again—Republicans who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, both signed into law by Republican president Ulysses S. Grant. Under the “living Constitution,” the Supreme Court upheld fraudulent “separate but equal” accommodations for blacks in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.
Republicans kept introducing federal civil rights bills and Democrats kept blocking them—a bill to protect black voters in the South in 1890; antilynching bills in 1922, 1935, and 1938; and anti–poll tax bills in 1942, 1944, and 1946.
With a lock on the racist mob vote, Democratic politicians won elections and promptly resegregated the entire South with Jim Crow laws. In 1913, Progressive Democrat president Woodrow Wilson even instituted segregation in Washington, D.C., bringing Jim Crow to the federal workforce. Wilson summarily dismissed black officials from their federal jobs in the South and in D.C. “Segregation is not a humiliation,” Wilson explained to a black delegation that came to the White House to complain, “but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” During Wilson’s first term, Booker T. Washington went to Washington, D.C., and reported, “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”6
President Wilson’s racist policies were fully supported by Democrats in Congress, and angrily denounced by Republicans.
Much as elected Democrats promote deranged documentarian Michael Moore today, Wilson hailed the virulently racist, pro-KKK movie Birth of a Nation as “writing history with lightning,” saying his only regret was that “it is all so terribly true.” Wilson even held a special showing of Birth of a Nation at the White House for cabinet members and members of Congress. (By contrast, President Reagan showed Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s anti-abortion documentary, Silent Scream, in his White House.)
A friend of Wilson said that with him running the country, “Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race.”7 There’s your post-racial Democratic Party.
A crucial part of the Democrats’ victim folklore is that they have been losing the South to Republicans over the past half century because the Democrats stood on principle to oppose race discrimination, while the Republican Party pandered to racists in the South—a region of the country liberals believe is composed primarily of Klan members. (That might be your first clue as to why Southerners don’t like liberals.) The Republican Party’s allegedly racist appeal to Southerners is darkly referred to seventeen times a day in the mainstream media as the “Southern Strategy.”
In 1996, R. W. Apple, then–New York Times Washington bureau chief, casually referred to “the Republican Party’s recent record as the vehicle of white supremacy in the South beginning with the Goldwater campaign and reaching its apex in Richard M. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ in 1968 and 1972.”8
Apple continued, “Republicans appealed to Nixon Democrats (later Reagan Democrats) in the northern suburbs, many of them ethnic voters who had left the cities to escape from blacks, with promises to crack down on welfare cheats and to impose law and order, and they fought against affirmative action.”9
It never dawns on liberals that people might actually want to crack down on welfare cheats, impose law and order, and abolish racially discriminatory “affirmative action” plans. In any event, Nixon wasn’t one of them: He invented affirmative action. Apple’s statement was the opposite of the truth.
In 2002, Jack White, which I believe is a pen name for Keith Olbermann, wrote an article for Time magazine online accusing the Republican Party of having a “four-decade-long addiction to race-baiting.” White said Reagan “set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door.”10 To insult Republicans, liberals compare them to Democrats.
In 2008, Newsweek matter-of-factly reported, “In 1968, Richard Nixon used code words like ‘law and order’ to exploit racial fears as part of his ‘Southern Strategy.’ ”11
In fact, it was Eisenhower who broke the Democrats’ hold on the South in 1952, and if anyone was appealing to bigots that year, it wasn’t Eisenhower. Democrat Adlai Stevenson, known to experience “personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes,”12 chose as his running mate John Sparkman of Alabama, a Democrat segregationist.
And yet the Old South—which according to mainstream media accounts voted Republican solely out of racial resentment—suddenly started voting Republican in 1952. Ike carried Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida outright, and nearly stole Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia from Stevenson. (Eisenhower lost Kentucky by a microscopic .07 percent and lost West Virginia and South Carolina by fewer than 4 percentage points.) This was just four years after Democrat-turned-Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond won four Southern states. But running with a segregationist didn’t help Stevenson in the South a few years later.
Then, in 1956, the Republican Party platform endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools; the Democratic platform did not, and would not, as long as Democrats were winning elections by appealing to the racist mob. This led the black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to break with his party and endorse Eisenhower for president.
Governor Orval Faubus, progressive New Deal Democrat, blocked the schoolhouse door to the Little Rock Central High School with the state’s National Guard rather than allow nine black students to attend. In response, President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to take it out of Faubus’s hands. Then he sent the 101st Airborne Division to walk the black children to school and stay with them throughout the day.
Eisenhower implemented the 1948 executive order President Truman had issued—but then ignored—desegregating the military. Also unlike Truman, Eisenhower hired blacks for prominent positions in his administration, such as assistant secretary of Labor (J. Ernest Wilkens), chairman of the U.S. Board of Parole (Scovel Richardson), UN delegate from the United States (Charles Mahoney), administrative officer on White House staff (Fredrick Morrow), minister to Romania (Clifton R. Wharton), and members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (George M. Johnson and J. Ernest Wilkens).13
It was Republicans who overwhelmingly introduced, promoted, and passed every civil rights act from the end of the Civil War right up to and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Eisenhower pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, written by Attorney General Herbert Brownell, guaranteeing black voting rights, to be enforced by the U.S. Department of Justice.
During the endless deliberation on Eisenhower’s civil rights bill, Senator Lyndon Johnson warned his fellow segregationist Democrats, “Be ready to take up the goddamned nigra bill again.” Senator Sam Ervin, another liberal luminary—instrumental in the destruction of anti-communist Republicans Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon—told his fellow segregationists, “I’m on your side, not theirs,” and advised them to face up to the fact that “we’ve got to give the goddamned niggers something.”14
As president of the Senate, Vice President Richard Nixon “came down strongly on the side of civil rights,” as even Robert Caro admits, by issuing an advisory opinion that the filibuster could be stopped with a simple majority vote changing Senate rules.15 Meanwhile, Democrat Lyndon Johnson gutted the enforcement provisions of the 1957 bill to nothing: Anyone accused of violating a person’s voting rights was guaranteed a jury trial—and, consequently, jury nullification by Democratic juries.
Republican senator Charles Potter stood on crutches in the well of the Senate, having lost both legs in World War II, to denounce LBJ’s killer amendments, saying, “I fought beside Negroes in the war. I saw them die for us. For the Senate of the United States to repay these valiant men … by a watered-down version of this legislation would make a mockery of the democratic concept we hold so dear.”16 Even in its watered-down form—thanks, Democrats!—all eighteen “nay” votes came from the Democrats.
The following year, President Eisenhower introduced a bill to create the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and to fix the enforcement provisions of the 1957 civil rights bill that had been gutted by the Democrats. In response, Democrats staged the longest filibuster in history—more than 125 hours. But in the end, the bill passed and was signed into law by Eisenhower on May 6, 1960.
The Senate vote on the 1960 Civil Rights Act was 71–18. Once again, every single vote against a civil rights bill came from a Democrat, including legendary liberal, hero of Watergate, Sam Ervin.17 Representative George McGovern voted “present.” He would also be the Democrats’ candidate for president in 1972.18 The vote of the Tennessee delegation in the House was typical: The two Republicans from Tennessee voted for the 1960 civil rights bill, the six Democrats from the state voted against.19
Until 1964, every civil rights act had presented no possible constitutional problems—those federal laws were fully within Congress’s enumerated powers to enact because they were directed at government officials (Democrats) who were violating the Constitution by denying black citizens the right to vote.
Federal laws aimed at discrimination by government actors are expressly within Congress’s authority under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Democrats opposed these civil rights laws not because of any questions about Congress’s authority to enact them—they couldn’t care less about the Constitution—but because they wanted to keep discriminating.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was again supported overwhelmingly by Republicans and less so by Democrats. As with the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, it was Republicans who passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act by huge majorities, with a distinctly smaller majority of Democrats supporting it. In the Senate, for example, 82 percent of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, compared with only 66 percent of Democrats. In the House, 80 percent of Republicans supported the ’64 bill, compared with only 63 percent of Democrats.
The only reason Democratic majorities were beginning to support civil rights for blacks was that by 1964—thanks to Republican voting rights acts—more blacks were voting. Democrats couldn’t keep winning elections in some parts of the country by appealing to the racist mob. As Democratic senator Carter Glass of Virginia had explained years earlier, “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” saying the Democrats sought to “remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”20 The Democrats’ position on civil rights depended on where the votes were.
Of course, there were some serious civil rights champions among Democrats in the twentieth century—we’ve been hearing endless panegyrics to them our entire lives. This is the history you’ve never read.
Although Democrats act as if the 1964 act was the only civil rights act that ever mattered, it is a curious fact that, as Thomas Sowell says, “the rise of blacks into the professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in all the years following passage of that act.”21
Once the Democrats got involved, civil rights became just another racket with another mob. Unlike previous civil rights laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included provisions aimed at purely private actors, raising the hackles of some constitutional purists, notably Barry Goldwater, the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee. Goldwater, like the rest of his party, had supported every single civil rights bill until the 1964 act. But he broke with the vast majority of his fellow Republicans to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Like many other conservatives opposed to a living, growing, breathing Constitution, Goldwater actually opposed only two of the seven major provisions of the bill—those regulating privately owned housing and public accommodations. But there were other provisions he would have made tougher. For example, Goldwater wanted to make it mandatory that federal funds be withheld from programs practicing discrimination, rather than discretionary, as President Kennedy had requested.22
Goldwater was a vehement foe of segregation. He was a founder of the NAACP in Arizona, donating the equivalent of several thousand dollars to the organization’s efforts to integrate the public schools. When he was head of the Arizona National Guard, he had integrated the state Guard before Harry Truman announced he was integrating the U.S. military. As the Washington Post said, Goldwater “ended racial segregation in his family department stores, and he was instrumental in ending it in Phoenix schools and restaurants and in the Arizona National Guard.”23
But he was also a believer in limited government. It was, after all, racist Democratic politicians in the South using the force of the government to violate private property rights by enforcing the Jim Crow laws in the first place. As Sowell points out, it wasn’t the private bus companies demanding that blacks sit in the back of the bus, it was the government.24
Goldwater not only had personally promoted desegregation, he belonged to a party that had been fighting for civil rights for the previous century against Democratic obstructionism. Lyndon Johnson voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure in the Senate. But by the time he became president, he had flipped 180 degrees. Appealing to regional mobs wouldn’t work with a national electorate.
Unlike mob-appeasing Democrats, Goldwater based his objections to certain parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on purely constitutional principles. Along with other constitutional purists in the Republican Party, Goldwater opposed federal initiatives in a lot of areas, not just those involving race. By contrast, segregationist Democrats routinely criticized the exercise of federal power and expenditure of federal funds when it involved ending discrimination against blacks—but gladly accepted federal pork projects for their states.
It would be as if, after fighting the Democrats for a hundred years over the issue of abortion, Republicans finally got Roe v. Wade overturned, and then, out of pure political calculation, Democrats jumped on the bandwagon and demanded a federal law outlawing abortion. Some pro-life Republicans would probably object that federal law outlawing abortion is not one of Congress’s enumerated powers. On the basis of Republicans’ constitutional objections, Democrats would then reverse the entire history of the pro-life movement and start claiming the Democratic Party alone fought to end abortion in America. That is exactly what they have done with the history of civil rights.
This is why idiots like Bill Maher can make jokes like this (about the 2010 Republican sweep of Congress)—“I haven’t seen Republicans so happy about taking seats since they made Rosa Parks stand up.”25 When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, the mayor of Montgomery enforcing segregation on the buses was—of course—a segregationist Democrat, William A. “Tacky” Gayle.26
Even after a federal district court struck down segregation on Montgomery’s buses, Gayle appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which also ruled against Gayle. That’s when the Montgomery buses were finally desegregated. But try searching Gayle on Google—try searching his name in the history books—and see if you can find his political party. Who’s the “dumb twat” now? (As Maher called Sarah Palin on his HBO show.)27
In fact, it was only when there was an electoral risk to their political careers that the entire Democratic Party made a big show of supporting civil rights. Even then, both Eisenhower and Nixon did a better job enforcing the Court’s color-blind rulings than Kennedy or Johnson did. The Democrat presidents were always dragging their feet, trying not to upset the segregationist Democrats, the same way today’s Democrats refuse to upset abortion-mad feminists. In a hundred years, liberals will rewrite the history of abortion to make pro-life Democrat Robert Casey Sr. the country’s sole defender of the unborn.
Nixon indeed had something called the “Southern Strategy,” but it had nothing to do with appealing to racial resentment. His idea was to force nice patriotic, churchgoing Southerners to recognize what a rotten, treasonous bunch the Democrats had become. It was a regional version of his appeal to the Silent Majority.
Nixon had worked to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which he was personally thanked by Martin Luther King. He was a card-carrying member of the NAACP in 1960. His Democratic opponent, John F. Kennedy, was not.
After losing his race for governor of California in 1962, Nixon began his political comeback with a 1966 column proclaiming that the Republican Party stood for small government and a strong national defense and would leave it to the Democrats “to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.” Nixon referred contemptuously to the Democrats as the “party of Maddox, Mahoney and Wallace”—all segregationists.
Not surprisingly, with an opening gambit like that, in the 1968 presidential election the segregationist votes went to Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, not Nixon. As Michael Barone notes, Nixon’s “status as a longtime supporter of civil rights in the Eisenhower administration and at the 1960 national convention, made it difficult for him to steal away Wallace’s votes.”28
Provably, Humphrey got the Wallace vote. At the outset of the campaign, Nixon was polling at 42 percent compared with Humphrey’s 29 percent. Meanwhile, segregationist George Wallace was polling at 22 percent. On Election Day, Nixon’s percentage remained virtually unchanged at 43.4 percent. Wallace’s had dropped to 13.5 percent. Where had the rest of the Wallace vote gone? It didn’t go to Nixon. Humphrey’s vote surged by about 12 percentage points—nearly as much as Wallace lost—giving him 42.7 percent of the votes cast on Election Day.29 Even if those Wallace voters stayed home, Nixon’s and Humphrey’s vote percentages ought to have increased by exactly the same factor. But Nixon’s percentage remained steady, while Humphrey’s skyrocketed.
And yet—just as with the Tea Partiers today—when Americans opposed Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, liberals accused them of racism—of really opposing LBJ over civil rights. Here’s a thought: Maybe they were angry about the massive, wasteful government spending on expensive federal programs wrecking society. Or maybe they were upset about intrusive rulings out of the Warren Court having nothing to do with race but discovering new rights for pornographers, atheists, and criminals. Or maybe they were alarmed by the Democratic Party transforming itself into the party of acid, amnesty, and abortion—as an anonymous Democratic senator told journalist Bob Novak in 1972.
But as Johnson’s popularity nosedived, liberals just kept patting themselves on the back and saying it was because he was pushing desegregation. Except he wasn’t. It took the Nixon White House to get the schools desegregated.
In Nixon’s first inaugural address, in January 1969, he said, “No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together. This means black and white together, as one nation, not two. The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to what is in the law: to ensure at last that as all are born equal in dignity before God, all are born equal in dignity before man.”
And then he started feverishly desegregating the schools, something his Democratic predecessors had refused to do. On a statistical basis, there was more desegregation of Southern schools in Nixon’s first term than in any historical period, before or after. Practically overnight, Southern schools went from being effectively segregated to being effectively integrated. To highlight the Democrats’ double-talk, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, famously said, “Watch what we do, not what we say.”
While presiding over massive, voluntary desegregation of the schools, Nixon forbade his cabinet members to boast about it. But between his election in 1968 to the end of his second year in office in 1970, black students attending all-black schools in the South declined from 68 percent to 18.4 percent and the percentage of black students attending majority white schools went from 18.4 percent to 38.1 percent.30
Despite all this, when black agitator Julian Bond was asked about Nixon’s civil rights record, he said, “If you could call Adolf Hitler a friend of the Jews, you could call President Nixon a friend of the blacks.”31
If Nixon had planned to appeal to white racists, speeding up desegregation was not an effective strategy. But he turned around and won an even bigger landslide in 1972, running against George McGovern and the party of acid, abortion, and amnesty. Yes, racism must explain the Republicans’ sweep of the South.
Not only did Nixon desegregate the schools, but he broke the back of the discriminatory building trades in 1968 with his “Philadelphia Plan,” the first government affirmative action program. In response to aggressive racial discrimination by construction unions to keep wages high, Nixon imposed formal racial quotas and timelines in hiring on the building trades. Under Secretary George P. Shultz, Nixon’s Labor Department rode federal contractors hard, demanding results. Even back when he was Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had been recommending “a positive policy of nondiscrimination” for government contractors. When running for president in 1967—the zenith of his alleged “Southern Strategy”—he had said, “People in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend.”
Most histories drone on and on about LBJ’s beneficence in having proposed a similar Philadelphia Plan, but LBJ completely abandoned it the instant his comptroller general vetoed the idea. Nixon, by contrast, overruled the comptroller and staged a full-throttle campaign to get congressional approval for his affirmative action plan. As he said, the Democrats “are token-oriented. We are job-oriented.”
Imposing racial quotas has generally not been seen as one of Nixon’s greatest moments by modern conservatives, who oppose all race discrimination. However, it has to be understood as a reaction to a century of Democratic obstructionism on civil rights. Democrats only came around on civil rights when blacks were voting in high enough numbers to make a difference at the ballot box—and then they claimed credit for everything their party had ferociously blocked since the Civil War.
Black civil rights groups gave Nixon little credit for the plan, and white construction workers hated it. He knew the Philadelphia plan hurt him politically, but he did it anyway.32
Being a Republican, Nixon was not a demagogue. He had no interest in demonizing the South—as if that were the sole locus of discrimination in America. As Mitchell said, “Watch what we do.” Democrats were the exact opposite, demanding hallelujahs for every kind word they ever spoke to a black person, while doing very little to actually end racial discrimination.
In the 1960 campaign, for example, an exceedingly reluctant JFK was pressured by adviser Harris Wofford into placing a quick call to Coretta Scott King when her husband was in the Reidsville jail in Georgia—and then allowed that two-minute phone call to be wildly publicized in the black community.33 His opponent Nixon—who would go on to preside over the most massive desegregation drive the nation had ever seen as well as the country’s first affirmative action program—made no comment on King’s jailing.
But the Kennedy campaign played up that phone call for all it was worth. Pamphlets were printed up titled “No Comment” Nixon Versus a Candidate with a Heart, Senator Kennedy.34 The phone call even persuaded longtime Republican and Nixon supporter Martin Luther King Sr. to switch his support to Kennedy, saying, “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion.” But now, he said, Kennedy “can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this.”35 MLK Jr. stayed neutral, while all the other leading black Baptist ministers “firmly” reendorsed Richard Nixon.
Democrats spent a hundred years enforcing legal discrimination against blacks, or—at best—dragging their heels on enforcing black civil rights, but then turned around and crowed for fifty years about a friendly phone call to Mrs. King. With a few symbolic gestures, the Democrats grabbed the civil rights mantle in 1960 and never let it go.
In fact, it was the Democrats’ obstructionism that created the environment for nonviolent—and then violent—civil rights protests in the first place. Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks’ civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders. Except the problem was, Democrats were in the White House from January 1961 to January 1969 and only Republican presidents would aggressively enforce the law. If Nixon had been elected in 1960, instead of Kennedy, we could have skipped the bloodshed of the civil rights marches and today we’d be celebrating Thurgood Marshall Day, rather than Martin Luther King Day.
Consider that Brown v. Board of Education, eliminating “separate but equal” in the public schools, was decided in 1954. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the decision. And then, from the end of his presidency until Nixon’s election in 1968, nothing much changed. Nixon came in and wiped out segregated schools in one year.
In 1976, the entire South—all eleven states of the Old Confederacy, except the great Commonwealth of Virginia—flipped right back again and voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Was that because Carter was appealing to bigots? Or is it only a secret “Southern Strategy” of pandering to racists when Republicans win the South?
By 1980, Southerners as well as the rest of the country realized Carter was a complete nincompoop and voted overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan. Carter and his vice presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, won only their own respective states of Georgia and Minnesota, plus Hawaii and West Virginia.
In 1984, Reagan won every state in the union, except Democratic candidate Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, which Reagan lost by only 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast—the closest presidential race in Minnesota history since 1916. Reagan’s margin in the popular vote was nearly 16.8 million votes, second only to Nixon’s 18 million popular-vote margin in 1972. It was the largest electoral vote total in history. (No one at the New York Times could bear to write the story on Reagan’s historic victory, so the article giving these figures is bylined “Associated Press.”)36
A party that attributes Nixon’s and Reagan’s landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad. Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize (Why can’t we be more like the Netherlands?). So they dismiss these “flyover” people as racists. The entire basis of liberals’ “Southern Strategy” myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist.
According to liberals’ theory, racists like Orval Faubus should have become card-carrying members of the Republican Party once Nixon came along—or at least by Reagan’s time—and that’s how Republicans swept the South. In fact, however, Faubus never became a Republican. He was finally defeated for governor in 1966 by Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in a state with only 11 percent registered Republicans. Rockefeller’s “Southern Strategy” against Faubus involved running as a strong integrationist, and he immediately desegregated Arkansas schools and rapidly integrated the draft boards.
In addition to being a ferocious segregationist, Faubus was, naturally, a liberal, and an admirer of Socialist presidential candidates Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs, from whom he got his middle name, “Eugene.”37
Years later, Bill Clinton invited Faubus to his gubernatorial inauguration, where he warmly embraced Faubus, to the disgust of Southern Republicans. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Paul Greenberg, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials advocating racial integration and opposing George Wallace’s presidential candidacy, called it a shocking moment for those Arkansans “who had fought—not just for years but for decades—against all that Orval Faubus had stood for, this willingness to exploit racial hatred.”38
So what else might explain the South gradually voting more and more Republican, starting with Eisenhower in 1952? What else was going on in the last half century?
In the mid-sixties, the Worst Generation burst onto the scene and took over the Democratic Party.
That was the decade that launched legalized obscenity, the birth control pill, student riots, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Panthers. The crime rate skyrocketed as the courts granted ever more elaborate rights to criminals. Prayer and Bible-reading were banned from the public schools. The most privileged, cosseted generation in history began tearing apart the universities. One of every ten universities would be hit. The Aquarius generation turned into a drugged-out hippie cult of Manson family murderers.
In other words, the South began to go Republican about the same time as the Democratic Party went insane.
Another minor issue, even in the fifties, was the Cold War. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was growing admiration in the South for the Republicans’ belligerent approach to national security. Southerners are hawks: Sooner or later they were going to join the patriotic party. How long were Southerners going to tolerate a party that ran a peacenik like George McGovern for president in the middle of a war? Name a Southern university that’s ever banned ROTC before answering that question. (Even Duke has an ROTC program.)
Moreover, if it was hostility to civil rights that drove Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, that shift should have come to a screeching halt by the mid-seventies, when segregation was no longer an issue—thanks to Richard Nixon. But in fact, the South only gradually became Republican over the course of several decades, even flipping back to the Democrats to vote for fellow Southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. The South’s move to the Republican Party was as gradual as the Democrats’ shift from the party of Harry Truman to the party of Rosie O’Donnell.
Even the Wallace vote wasn’t exclusively a segregationist vote. Not everything was about the blacks. Cold War hawks thought Nixon would be soft on communism—correctly—and the Democrats were complete pansies. The great World War II general Curtis LeMay—“Old Iron Pants”—was Wallace’s running mate. LeMay supported integration 100 percent, but he didn’t trust Nixon to be tough enough with the Russkies, so he turned down Nixon’s offer to join his ticket and ran with Wallace instead. LeMay was a Reaganesque Cold Warrior. With the slogan “Bombs Away!,” he was as bellicose toward communism as Goldwater had been in 1964—which explains Wallace’s winning a lot of the same states Goldwater won.
Southerners were not the only demographic that shifted party registration in reaction to the turmoil created by the Worst Generation. In 1972, the whole country became the South. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was, in reality, a “landslide strategy.” If you look at the facts, Republicans have been so clearly right about everything, it’s frightening.
Now that the battle for civil rights has been won—the Southern Poverty Law Center is going to have to start placing monitors in people’s homes to ferret out an incident of racism—liberals have suddenly become mighty pugnacious on the matter of of racial equality. (The really great thing about yammering on and on and on, endlessly, day after day, year after year ad infinitum about race is that it pays such big dividends in easing tension between the races.) All these pretend-heroes of the civil rights movement self-righteously claim that any suggestion that size of government be cut is de facto racist. False, indeed preposterous, accusations of racism are just another way for liberals to whip up the mob.
Obama is hysterically defended from every little criticism as if liberals are at war with the Klan. You know, we could have really used them when Republicans actually were at war with the Klan. But back then, Democratic politicians were pandering to the segregationist mob. On the basis of—let’s see—nothing … liberals labeled the loose-knit group of Tea Partiers “racist.” They broadcast to America: You are not allowed to associate with Tea Partiers. We’ll let you off with a warning this time, but the next time you are caught agreeing with Tea Party people, you’re going to be called a racist, too.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, whose life history betrays little association with black people, fancies himself a hitherto unheralded hero of the civil rights movement. He is a scrupulous bean counter when it comes to the number of blacks at Tea Parties—as if some central Tea Party bureaucracy controls who shows up at their rallies. Inasmuch as blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic, you wouldn’t expect to see a lot of them at Tea Parties. Still, the Tea Parties are not as white as Chris Matthews’s staff. They’re not as white as a Jon Stewart audience. They are not as white as Janeane Garofalo’s fans.
But night after night, Matthews accuses conservatives of harboring secret racist views, asking, “What are the Tea Partiers really angry about? Health care reform or the fact that it was an African-American president and a woman speaker of the House who pushed through major change?”39 When Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico endorsed Obama, Matthews called it a “stunning picture” to have a very white but technically Latino governor endorsing the half-black Obama.40 In a special tribute to his own post-racial attitude, after Obama’s first State of the Union address, Matthews announced, “You know, I forgot [Obama] was black tonight for an hour.”41
So we know Matthews is down with the brothers. Needless to say, he sends his own kids to white-as-snow private schools. Washington, D.C., is majority black, whereas St. Albans is probably about 3 percent black. Matthews had to go to a lot of trouble to get his kids into a school like that. It’s not Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. So Matthews may not be the best person to be hectoring Tea Partiers, “How dare you not have black people at your rallies!”
The placid acceptance of glaring contradictions is the essence of mob behavior, according to Le Bon. Neither Matthews nor the rest of the herd grasp any inconsistency between Matthews’s personal behavior and his blustery public accusations against others. He is “in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.”42
Also on the Republican racism beat is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. (Because if a Jewish lesbian doesn’t speak for the black man, then I don’t know who does.) On September 21, 2009, Rachel Maddow introduced a video as if she were presenting a snuff film, saying, “Behold, a Missouri congressman, candidate for U.S. Senate, … telling what seems to be a really long, meandering, gut-churning racist joke.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Representative Roy Blunt (R, Missouri): Supposedly it’s the turn of the 19th century, the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, there was a group of British occupiers in a very lush, very quiet, very peaceful, very uneventful part of India. And this group of British soldiers who were occupying that part of India decided they’d carve a golf course out of the jungle of India. And there was really not much else to do. So, for over a year, this was the biggest event going on getting this golf course created.
And they got the golf course done and almost from the day the first ball was hit on this golf course, something happened they didn’t anticipate. Monkeys would come running out of the jungle and they would grab the golf balls. And if it was in the fairway, they might throw it in the rough. If it was in the rough, they might throw—they might throw it back at you.
And I can go into great and long detail about how many things they did to try to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done. So finally, for this golf course and this golf course only, they passed a rule, and the rule was you have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time.43
(LAUGHTER)
(END VIDEO CLIP)
You could play that tape for the NAACP, and they would say, “I’m sorry, why are you showing us this?” Obviously, Blount was saying, This is how things work in Washington. It could be senators, representatives, government bureaucrats—or other Republicans—who are grabbing the balls. It actually tells you something about liberals that they instantly assume any mention of monkeys must be a reference to Obama.
Longtime New York Times blubberbutt Tom Wicker wrote endlessly about civil rights and racial reconciliation. Naturally, Wicker was another educational chicken hawk, sending his own children to elite, very white private schools and then retiring to Vermont, literally the whitest state in the nation.44 When asked about the glaring inconsistency of his kids’ white private schools, he said, “It gives me a lot of intellectual discomfort, but I am not going to disadvantage my children to win more support for my views.”45
The point wasn’t whether Wicker was required to “win more support” for his views, but that he didn’t actually hold those views in the first place. Manifestly, liberals who don’t send their own children to public schools believe those schools are inferior, but don’t mind dumping poor kids into them—provided they can send their own children to sanitary, private schools. It tells you a lot when the actual behavior of people is at variance with their public position.
Liberals who send their own kids to fancy private schools while wailing about the racism of other people are like stockbrokers pushing stocks they got out of a long time ago. All these friend-to-the-blacks liberals adamantly refuse to give other people the same opportunity they have to escape the public schools through things like school vouchers and parochial schools.
In 2002, when marbles-in-his-mouth Trent Lott stepped down from a leadership position with the Senate Republicans for praising Strom Thurmond (who had a better record on civil rights than Bill Clinton’s pal Orval Faubus), Hillary Clinton said, “If anyone thinks that one person stepping down from a leadership position cleanses the Republican Party of their constant exploitation of race, then I think you’re naive.”
Where did Chelsea go to school again? (Fancy private school, Sidwell Friends.)
In fact, could we get a list of all the sanctimonious white liberals constantly accusing other people of racism who sent their kids to private schools? We’ll start with Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—all of whom sent their kids to lily-white private schools. What other pompous liberals who rank themselves with Martin Luther King won’t let their kids go to school with blacks?
It’s always the people with the most secure, taxicab, doorman-protected lives lecturing those who live on the front lines of integration about their racial attitudes. Howell Raines was editorial page editor of the New York Times from 1993 to 2001. During that time, more than one-third of his signed editorials somehow brought up “racism” (11 out of 29). Raines’s main interaction with actual black people was apparently limited to the family maid, about whom he wrote a book, Grady’s Gift. Like Wicker’s “intellectual discomfort” with sending his kids to elite private schools, Raines felt bad about leaving the maid outside in the car when his family ate at “Whites Only” restaurants.
Raines’s only other famous interaction with a black person consisted of his utter humiliation of Jayson Blair, whom Raines hired, retained, and promoted, despite Blair’s manifest inability to do the job, culminating in an indelible scandal at the Times and both of their firings. When Raines “retired,” he chose the Poconos as his home,46 a famous white-flight destination that lawyer Ron Kuby calls “outer whitelandia.”47
Contrast these hairy-chested civil rights champions with Republican-appointed judge Charles Pickering. He took on the Ku Klux Klan as a prosecutor in the sixties—you know, before it was safe. As a consequence, Pickering required full-time FBI protection for his family. In the seventies, he sent his children to public schools in Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of blacks in the nation. 60 Minutes found a picture of Pickering’s daughter sitting happily in a classroom with nearly all black faces.
But when George W. Bush nominated Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Democrats said Pickering was bad on … civil rights! Yes—civil rights. Of course, by “civil rights” liberals meant abortion on demand. These days, “civil rights” is nothing but a cat’s-paw for the mob’s left-wing social policies, such as abortion. Back when civil rights meant rights for blacks, Democrats were standing in the schoolhouse door.
The fact that Pickering’s nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals under Bush was blocked by Senate Democrats tells you all you need to know about the mob. Pickering was supported by the Mississippi NAACP, which knew him and knew his history. His nomination was fiercely promoted by Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. But Pickering was opposed by an oddball collection of pro-abortion left-wingers. So in the name of “civil rights,” the Democrats filibustered a man who risked his life to take on the Klan.
The inferior reasoning of crowds described by Le Bon allows liberals to puff themselves up and act as if they are Freedom Riders by waiting a safe fifty years after the racist mobs have been defeated and then running around denouncing everyone else for “racism.” A mob’s logic, Le Bon says, resembles that of “the savage, who imagines that by eating the heart of a courageous foe he acquires his bravery.”48
Republicans are always the party of the law-abiding and the productive; Democrats are always the party of the resentful mob. Now that Hispanics are gaining demographic ground, watch for the Democrats to drop blacks as their special friends and move on to illegal aliens.
Angry violent mobs are always Democratic: Code Pink, SDS, The Weathermen, Earth First!, anti-war protesters, and union protesters in Wisconsin. Like them, the Ku Klux Klan was, of course, another Democratic undertaking, originally formed to terrorize Republicans, but later switching to terrorize blacks. It was Democratic juries that acquitted Klansman after Klansman. It was Democratic politicians who supported segregation, Democratic governors who called out the National Guard to stop desegregation, Democratic commissioners of public safety who turned police dogs and water hoses on civil rights protesters.
As the historian Paul Johnson explains, “Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race.”49
Once, Democrats used blacks as the mythical enemy to rally their troops. Today, it’s conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Fox News. To increase their own power, Democrats are perfectly happy to gin up violent ruffians—from the Klan to Moveon.org—to battle this or that human devil. Democrats are always the party of the mob. The only thing that changes is which mob they’re supporting.