MAGA, DOGE, and MAHA: The Origins, Goals, and Documented Record of President Trump’s Agenda

 

A factual assessment of the Make America Great Again movement begins with its stated objectives and the actions taken to implement them. Under President Donald Trump, MAGA has developed from a campaign slogan into a governing agenda emphasizing national sovereignty, border security, domestic production, lower taxes, reduced regulation, constitutional rights, and an “America First” approach to international affairs. Its record includes significant legislation, trade agreements, judicial appointments, diplomatic initiatives, and administrative changes. DOGE and Make America Healthy Again extend that agenda into government efficiency and public health.

An accurate account recognizes these accomplishments while distinguishing enacted policies from campaign promises and measurable results from projections. This statement draws on historical records, federal agency publications, executive orders, and government audit findings available through October 3, 2026.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” did not originate with Donald Trump. Ronald Reagan used it during his 1980 presidential campaign, a fact documented by campaign material in the Smithsonian’s collection. Trump subsequently adopted the phrase and transformed it into the defining identity of his political movement. He applied to register it for political services in November 2012, and registration followed in July 2015. During his 2016 campaign, the slogan became nationally recognizable through rallies, campaign merchandise, and the red MAGA cap.

The movement’s governing objectives are outlined in the Republican Party’s 2024 platform. They include stronger immigration enforcement, expanded domestic energy production, tax reductions, regulatory reform, greater domestic manufacturing, military modernization, protection of constitutional freedoms, and preservation of Social Security and Medicare. The platform also advocates school choice, greater parental authority in education, and changes to federal policies concerning race, sex, and gender. These commitments establish what MAGA seeks to accomplish; their adoption as platform goals does not establish that every promise has been fulfilled.

One of the most consequential legislative accomplishments of Trump’s first administration was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The law changed individual and business taxation and established a 21 percent federal corporate income-tax rate. It also created Opportunity Zones, which offer tax incentives intended to attract investment to designated low-income communities. The creation of these incentives is a documented accomplishment. Their economic impact must be assessed through actual investment, employment, and community outcomes rather than assumed from the legislation’s purpose.

Trump also fulfilled a central trade-policy commitment by negotiating the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement. USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement and entered into force on July 1, 2020. Its implementation represented a concrete change in the rules governing trade among the three countries. Credit for that accomplishment includes the administration’s negotiations, congressional approval, and the participation of Canada and Mexico.

The First Step Act of 2018 was another substantial achievement. Trump signed the bipartisan legislation on December 21, 2018. It changed aspects of federal sentencing and expanded opportunities for rehabilitation, earned time credits, and reentry. On the law’s fifth anniversary, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it had improved criminal-justice outcomes and helped thousands of incarcerated people and their families. Its bipartisan passage demonstrates that a major accomplishment under Trump also involved cooperation across party lines.

Judicial appointments produced a particularly enduring institutional change. During his first term, Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices and numerous federal appellate and district judges, with Senate confirmation. These lifetime appointments extended the influence of his administration beyond its years in office and fulfilled a central commitment to reshape the federal judiciary through the constitutional appointment process.

In international affairs, the administration helped broker the Abraham Accords, including agreements normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. These agreements were identifiable diplomatic achievements. Their significance rests on the establishment of new relationships and avenues for cooperation; they should not be described as having resolved every conflict in the Middle East.

Operation Warp Speed was a major public-health undertaking during Trump’s first term. The federal initiative accelerated COVID-19 vaccine development, manufacturing, and distribution, with two vaccines entering distribution by the end of 2020. That achievement involved federal coordination and investment alongside scientific research, private-sector development, and regulatory review.

Economic conditions before the pandemic also form part of the factual record. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent in February 2020. That figure documents a strong labor market during Trump’s presidency. Economic outcomes, however, reflect multiple influences, including presidential policies, congressional decisions, Federal Reserve actions, private investment, and trends already underway. The pandemic subsequently caused a severe employment contraction, which must also be included when describing the first term as a whole.

Trump’s second administration continued the tax-policy agenda. On July 4, 2025, he signed Public Law 119-21, which established additional deductions for eligible tips, qualifying overtime compensation, certain vehicle-loan interest, and eligible seniors. These provisions constitute enacted tax relief. Their precise operation matters: “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” refer to deductions with eligibility requirements, limits, and phaseouts. They do not eliminate every tax on all tips or overtime earnings.

Border enforcement has remained another central priority. The administration implemented stronger enforcement policies, and its September 2026 account cited Customs and Border Protection data showing sustained low border apprehensions and restrictions on releasing apprehended migrants. These developments support a finding of stronger enforcement and reduced recorded crossings. Apprehension figures measure enforcement encounters, however, and cannot establish that every unauthorized entry has been prevented.

DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—was established through an executive order on January 20, 2025. Its structure involved renaming and reorganizing the existing United States Digital Service within the Executive Office of the President. Despite the word “Department” in its name, the order did not create a new Cabinet department. It established an administrative mechanism for advancing the president’s efficiency agenda, including teams within federal agencies.

The original DOGE order emphasized modernization of federal technology and software. Subsequent orders addressed workforce management, contracts, grants, real-estate expenses, and regulatory review. The intended objectives were to improve productivity, reduce unnecessary costs, and increase accountability for federal spending. Elon Musk was the initiative’s most prominent public figure during its initial implementation.

The founding order designated July 4, 2026, as the termination date for the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization. It expressly stated that this deadline did not terminate the other authorities or provisions of the order. Consequently, the deadline for that temporary organization should be distinguished from the broader continuation of efficiency initiatives within federal agencies.

DOGE conducted spending reviews and published estimated savings through its “Wall of Receipts.” Those actions are documented, but its aggregate savings claims require qualification. In an August 2026 review, the Government Accountability Office examined approximately $110 billion in DOGE-reported savings from contracts, grants, and leases. GAO identified potential savings in selected cases but found that some estimates were incorrect or lacked sufficient supporting evidence. It also identified previously planned lease terminations and a contract credited with savings that was ultimately neither terminated nor reduced.

These findings are official audit evidence. They support recognition of DOGE’s spending-review activity while preventing its entire reported total from being described as independently verified net taxpayer savings. A defensible evaluation asks how much spending was actually avoided, what implementation and termination costs occurred, and whether the resulting changes improved government performance.

Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, became associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and entered Trump’s political coalition as a health-policy agenda. Trump established the President’s MAHA Commission on February 13, 2025, with the secretary of Health and Human Services serving as chair. Its initial mission focused on childhood chronic disease.

MAHA’s stated priorities include better nutrition, increased physical activity, investigation of environmental exposures and other potential contributors to illness, greater research transparency, and examination of incentives within the healthcare system. These subjects provide a framework for research and policy development. Investigating a possible contributor to disease does not, by itself, establish a causal relationship.

Several MAHA actions are verifiable. In September 2025, the commission released a childhood-health strategy containing more than 120 initiatives involving research, public awareness, executive action, and private-sector cooperation. In April 2025, HHS and FDA announced measures to phase out petroleum-based synthetic food dyes, including voluntary cooperation with manufacturers. FDA subsequently approved three additional food colors from natural sources in May 2025. Company commitments and agency announcements document progress toward implementation, although they do not establish that every affected product has already been reformulated.

In January 2026, HHS and the Department of Agriculture released the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The guidance emphasized nutrient-dense foods and reducing highly processed foods and added sugars. Issuing revised guidance is a concrete policy action. Establishing its effect on national health requires evidence about changes in eating habits and subsequent health outcomes.

The distinction between action and outcome is especially important for MAHA. Creating a commission, publishing a strategy, approving alternative ingredients, and changing dietary guidance are demonstrable accomplishments. Determining whether these measures reduce childhood obesity, diabetes, or other chronic diseases requires longer-term population data and careful evaluation.

The factual record establishes that MAGA has produced consequential changes in taxation, trade, criminal justice, the judiciary, diplomacy, immigration enforcement, government administration, and health policy. Some achievements depended on bipartisan legislation and international cooperation; others resulted from executive action. Their durability and effectiveness vary according to the policy involved.

A credible statement of that record can recognize President Trump’s documented accomplishments without relying on either unsupported criticism or unverified promotional claims. Enacted laws, implemented agreements, confirmed appointments, and completed administrative actions provide the strongest evidence. DOGE’s financial results and MAHA’s long-term health effects should be measured with the same commitment to accuracy that gives those established accomplishments their significance.

Black Trailblazers Restores African American Achievement to the Heart of America’s Story

 They Didn’t Just Witness American History—They Helped Make It

American history cannot be told honestly without recognizing the African Americans whose courage, intellect, sacrifice, creativity, and determination helped build the nation.

That is the central message of my book, Black Trailblazers: Pioneering African Americans Who Shaped the Founding and Development of America. These remarkable men and women were not merely observers standing on the sidelines of the American experience. They were soldiers, statesmen, abolitionists, educators, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, civil rights leaders, and patriots.

They did not simply witness American history. They helped make it.

Patriots From the Beginning

The African American struggle for liberty did not begin in the twentieth century. Black Americans were present at the birth of the nation and participated in the fight for independence.

Crispus Attucks, who was killed during the Boston Massacre in 1770, became an early symbol of resistance to British oppression. James Armistead Lafayette gathered critical intelligence for the Continental Army. Peter Salem and Salem Poor distinguished themselves through their bravery during the Revolutionary War.

Their service presents an important historical truth: African Americans fought for the promise of America even when America had not yet extended that promise fully to them.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all people possess unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution created a system of limited government, while the Bill of Rights protected essential individual freedoms. Although these principles were imperfectly applied, they provided the moral and constitutional foundation upon which later generations would demand equal citizenship.

Black trailblazers did not reject America’s founding ideals. They called upon the nation to honor them.

Building and Defending the Nation

After independence, African Americans continued making contributions that shaped the country’s development.

Benjamin Banneker became known for his accomplishments in mathematics, astronomy, surveying, and publishing. Robert Smalls escaped slavery by commandeering a Confederate ship and delivering it to Union forces. He later served in public office and helped build the political foundations of freedom during Reconstruction.

Frederick Douglass rose from slavery to become one of America’s most powerful advocates for abolition, citizenship, and equal rights. Booker T. Washington advanced education, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and economic development through the institution that became Tuskegee University.

African American military service also became an enduring expression of patriotism. From Revolutionary War soldiers to the Buffalo Soldiers and the Black men and women who served in later conflicts, African Americans repeatedly defended a country that did not always defend them.

Their patriotism was neither passive nor blind. It was a determined commitment to helping America become more faithful to its own principles.

Innovators Who Expanded America’s Possibilities

The story of Black achievement is also a story of discovery, invention, enterprise, and scientific progress.

George Washington Carver transformed agricultural science and helped farmers improve their land and livelihoods. Other Black inventors and entrepreneurs developed products, businesses, and ideas that strengthened American industry and everyday life.

Katherine Johnson’s mathematical brilliance helped make human spaceflight possible. Her work demonstrated that talent and excellence cannot be confined by prejudice. She and other African American pioneers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics expanded the boundaries of what America—and humanity—could accomplish.

Their achievements were especially extraordinary because many worked during periods when discrimination restricted their education, employment, financing, professional recognition, and access to opportunity. They succeeded not because the road was easy, but because their determination was greater than the obstacles placed before them.

Courage Across Two Civil Rights Eras

America’s civil rights history did not consist of one movement alone. It included two pivotal eras.

The first emerged during Reconstruction following the Civil War. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment established citizenship and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment prohibited denying men the right to vote because of race.

African Americans entered public life as voters, legislators, community leaders, and officeholders. They helped establish schools, strengthen communities, and expand democratic participation. Yet their progress was met with intimidation, discriminatory laws, and organized violence.

The modern Civil Rights Movement renewed the nation’s demand for equal justice. Through court challenges, peaceful demonstrations, civic organization, and moral courage, its leaders pressed America to enforce the constitutional rights promised generations earlier.

Figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed directly to the founding principles of the nation. They understood that the remedy for America’s failures was not the abandonment of its ideals, but the fulfillment of them.

Achievement in Culture, Sports, Business, and Public Life

Black trailblazers also transformed American culture.

Oscar Micheaux helped establish independent Black filmmaking. Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and demonstrated dignity and discipline under tremendous pressure. African American writers, musicians, performers, athletes, and artists reshaped the nation’s cultural identity while opening doors for future generations.

Entrepreneurs created businesses, jobs, media institutions, and wealth despite facing exclusion from established markets. Political leaders and public servants helped guide the country at the local, state, and national levels.

Their stories demonstrate that opportunity, education, enterprise, character, and perseverance can change not only individual lives but entire communities.

Patriotism as Courageous Participation

True patriotism requires more than celebrating the nation’s accomplishments. It also requires the courage to confront its failures.

The trailblazers featured in this book understood that responsibility. They loved America enough to demand that it live according to its highest principles. They participated in their communities, defended constitutional rights, created institutions, educated the next generation, built businesses, challenged injustice, and served their country.

Their lives reveal patriotism as active citizenship.

They remind us that progress is not delivered automatically by government or guaranteed by the passage of time. It is achieved by people who are prepared to work, sacrifice, organize, innovate, lead, and hold their nation accountable.

Carrying the Legacy Forward

Black Trailblazers is more than a collection of biographies. It is an invitation to understand American history more completely.

African American history is American history. The contributions of Black patriots, inventors, educators, entrepreneurs, soldiers, artists, athletes, and civil rights leaders belong at the center of the national story—not at its margins.

Their legacy also places a responsibility upon us.

We must teach young people that they inherit more than a history of hardship. They inherit a history of extraordinary accomplishment. They come from men and women who overcame oppression, defended freedom, expanded knowledge, created prosperity, and helped move America closer to its founding promise.

The trailblazers came from different generations and pursued different callings, but they shared a belief in the power of courage, education, responsibility, faith, community engagement, and perseverance.

They refused to allow discrimination to define the limits of their potential.

Because they served, America became stronger. Because they created, America became more prosperous. Because they challenged injustice, America became freer. Because they opened doors, new generations can walk through them.

They didn’t just witness American history.

They helped make it.

_____________________________________________

About Frances Presley Rice

Frances Presley Rice is an author, screenwriter, independent documentary producer, retired lawyer, and retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. Her work addresses Black history, constitutional principles, civil rights, education, economic opportunity, and public policy. Rice is a writer and commentator advocating for truth, integrity, and respect in public discourse. Her book "Black Trailblazers: Pioneering African Americans Who Shaped the Founding and Development of America" is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all major booksellers.

The Real Disenfranchisement: Politicians Insult Black Americans by Pretending We Don’t Have ID

By Frances Presley Rice

Everyday Proof of Identity

Across America, Black citizens present identification daily — to open bank accounts, receive medical care, board airplanes, and access government services. Identification is a routine part of life, not a barrier. Yet some politicians insist that requiring ID to vote is “racist” and “disenfranchises” Black people.

“To claim Black Americans can’t get ID is not just absurd — it’s insulting.”

This narrative denies the reality of modern life and undermines the dignity of Black Americans who navigate professional, civic, and personal responsibilities with the same competence and independence as anyone else.

The False Narrative of Victimhood

The claim that voter ID laws harm Black voters perpetuates a damaging stereotype — that we are helpless and incapable of basic tasks. It’s a cynical distortion of truth, designed to evoke outrage rather than promote fairness.

“Politicians use race as a shield to protect their own power.”

In truth, identification requirements strengthen democracy by ensuring that every legitimate vote counts. Equating voter ID with racism is not advocacy; it’s manipulation.

The Real Motive: Power, Not Protection

Why do politicians cling to this absurd argument? Because opposing voter ID laws creates opportunities for election fraud. By framing integrity measures as discrimination, they open the door to chaos at the ballot box.

“This isn’t about protecting voters — it’s about protecting power.”

When leaders exploit racial narratives to justify weak election safeguards, they insult the very people they claim to defend. Black Americans are not disenfranchised by voter ID laws; we are disenfranchised by dishonesty.

Restoring Respect and Integrity

Respecting voters means respecting our intelligence. It means acknowledging that Black Americans are fully capable of presenting identification — just as we do in every other aspect of life.

“Integrity in elections is not racism; it’s respect.”

The real act of disenfranchisement is the political lie that pretends we are less capable than we are. It’s time to reject that falsehood and demand accountability from those who use race as a political weapon.

About the author: Frances Presley Rice is a writer and commentator advocating for truth, integrity, and respect in public discourse.

The Party of Civil Rights

 By Kevin D. Williamson

Published in The National Review on May 28, 2012, Reprinted with Permission.

Senator Everett Dirksen

The National Review magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, but worse than a myth and the cliché is an outright lie, an utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. 

That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. 

Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

The Republican Enlightenment on Racial Issues

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. 

That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower. 

And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson

 Johnson's Opposition to Civil Rights Reform

The depth of Johnson’s prior opposition to civil-rights reform must be digested in some detail to be properly appreciated. In the House, he did not represent a particularly segregationist constituency (it “made up for being less intensely segregationist than the rest of the South by being more intensely anti-Communist,” as the New York Times put it), but Johnson was practically antebellum in his views. Never mind civil rights or voting rights: In Congress, Johnson had consistently and repeatedly voted against legislation to protect black Americans from lynching. 

As a leader in the Senate, Johnson did his best to cripple the Civil Rights Act of 1957; not having votes sufficient to stop it, he managed to reduce it to an act of mere symbolism by excising the enforcement provisions before sending it to the desk of President Eisenhower. Johnson’s Democratic colleague Strom Thurmond nonetheless went to the trouble of staging the longest filibuster in history up to that point, speaking for 24 hours in a futile attempt to block the bill. The reformers came back in 1960 with an act to remedy the deficiencies of the 1957 act, and Johnson’s Senate Democrats again staged a record-setting filibuster. 

In both cases, the “master of the Senate” petitioned the northeastern Kennedy liberals to credit him for having seen to the law’s passage while at the same time boasting to southern Democrats that he had taken the teeth out of the legislation. Johnson would later explain his thinking thus: “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us, since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this — we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

The 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act

Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.

Johnson himself denounced an earlier attempt at civil-rights reform as the “nigger bill.” So what happened in 1964 to change Democrats’ minds? In fact, nothing.

"Democrat Wars"

President Johnson was nothing if not shrewd, and he knew something that very few popular political commentators appreciate today: The Democrats began losing the “solid South” in the late 1930s — at the same time as they were picking up votes from northern blacks. 

The Civil War and the sting of Reconstruction had indeed produced a political monopoly for southern Democrats that lasted for decades, but the New Deal had been polarizing. It was very popular in much of the country, including much of the South — Johnson owed his election to the House to his New Deal platform and Roosevelt connections — but there was a conservative backlash against it, and that backlash eventually drove New Deal critics to the Republican party. Likewise, adherents of the isolationist tendency in American politics, which is never very far from the surface, looked askance at what Bob Dole would later famously call “Democrat wars” (a factor that would become especially relevant when the Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson committed the United States to a very divisive war in Vietnam). 

The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937. Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican. Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.

The American South and Politics

The American South

 Republicans and Civil Rights

At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress. Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South. (As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”) 

The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward. And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race — but among the emerging southern middle class, a fact recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006). Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.

That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. 

Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.

The Transformation of the South

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. 

This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.

” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.

Republican Politicians

Senator Barry Goldwater

 The Ascendency of Barry Goldwater

There is no question that Republicans in the 1960s and thereafter hoped to pick up the angry populists who had delivered several states to Wallace. That was Patrick J. Buchanan’s portfolio in the Nixon campaign. But in the main, they did not do so by appeal to racial resentment, direct or indirect. 

The conservative ascendency of 1964 saw the nomination of Barry Goldwater, a Western libertarian who had never been strongly identified with racial issues one way or the other, but who was a principled critic of the 1964 act and its extension of federal power. Goldwater had supported the 1957 and 1960 acts but believed that Title II and Title VII of the 1964 bill were unconstitutional, based in part on a 75-page brief from Robert Bork. But far from extending a welcoming hand to southern segregationists, he named as his running mate a New York representative, William E. Miller, who had been the co-author of Republican civil-rights legislation in the 1950s. 

The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen: It spoke of the Johnson administration’s failure to help further the “just aspirations of the minority groups” and blasted the president for his refusal “to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens.” Other planks in the platform included: “improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex.” 

And Goldwater’s fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.” Some dog whistle.

Racists in the Political Parties

Of course there were racists in the Republican Party. There were racists in the Democratic party. The case of Johnson is well documented, while Nixon had his fantastical panoply of racial obsessions, touching blacks, Jews, Italians (“Don’t have their heads screwed on”), Irish (“They get mean when they drink”), and the Ivy League WASPs he hated so passionately (“Did one of those dirty bastards ever invite me to his f***ing men’s club or goddamn country club? Not once”). But the legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches — none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights.

Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the South in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the North, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the North. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic party. Unlike the New Deal, a flawed program that at least had the excuse of relying upon ideas that were at the time largely untested and enacted in the face of a worldwide economic emergency, Johnson’s Great Society was pure politics. 

Johnson’s War on Poverty was declared at a time when poverty had been declining for decades, and the first Job Corps office opened when the unemployment rate was less than 5 percent. Congressional Republicans had long supported a program to assist the indigent elderly, but the Democrats insisted that the program cover all of the elderly — even though they were, then as now, the most affluent demographic, with 85 percent of them in households of above-average wealth. Democrats such as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Anthony J. Celebrezze argued that the Great Society would end “dependency” among the elderly and the poor, but the programs were transparently designed merely to transfer dependency from private and local sources of support to federal agencies created and overseen by Johnson and his political heirs. 

In the context of the rest of his program, Johnson’s unexpected civil-rights conversion looks less like an attempt to empower blacks and more like an attempt to make clients of them.

The Senate and Congress: Segregationist Democrats

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.

Republicans did begin to win some southern House seats, and in many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’s John Dowdy, a bitter and buffoonish opponent of the 1964 reforms, which he declared “would set up a despot in the attorney general’s office with a large corps of enforcers under him; and his will and his oppressive action would be brought to bear upon citizens, just as Hitler’s minions coerced and subjugated the German people. I would say this — I believe this would be agreed to by most people: that, if we had a Hitler in the United States, the first thing he would want would be a bill of this nature.” (Who says political rhetoric has been debased in the past 40 years?) Dowdy was thrown out in 1966 in favor of a Republican with a very respectable record on civil rights, a little-known figure by the name of George H. W. Bush.

It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation — and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow.

How the Cold War Changed Politics

A Map of the Cold War

 The Cold War

It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped midcentury partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against the “military-industrial complex,” but in truth Ike’s ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican party over what remained of the America First/Charles Lindbergh/Robert Taft tendency. The Republican party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites — and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the “creeping socialism” conservatives dreaded. 

By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary Left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans’ unapologetic anti-Communism — especially conservatives’ rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party. 

Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party was not his alone.

George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and the South

The schizophrenic presidential election of that year set the stage for the subsequent transformation of southern politics: Segregationist Democrat George Wallace, running as an independent, made a last stand in the old Confederacy but carried only five states, while Republican Richard Nixon, who had helped shepherd the 1957 Civil Rights Act through Congress, counted a number of Confederate states (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee) among the 32 he carried. 

Democrat Hubert Humphrey was reduced to a northern fringe plus Texas. Mindful of the long-term realignment already under way in the South, Johnson informed Democrats worried about losing it after the 1964 act that “those states may be lost anyway.” Subsequent presidential elections bore him out: Nixon won a 49-state sweep in 1972, and, with the exception of the post-Watergate election of 1976, Republicans in the following presidential elections would more or less occupy the South like Sherman. 

Bill Clinton would pick up a handful of southern states in his two contests, and Barack Obama had some success in the post-southern South, notably Virginia and Florida.

The Reality of Democrat Policies

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic Party. 

Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican Party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. 

Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.

Kevin D. Williamson is a roving correspondent for National Review and the author of The Dependency Agenda, which was published by Encounter Books on May 29, 2012. This article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.

__________________________________________________________________________

To view additional black history information, you may visit the National Black Republican Association website.

Here is the direct link: https://nationalblackrepublicanassociation.org/