Kevin D. Williamson's 2012 Article Republished
The
Party of Civil Rights
This magazine has long specialized in debunking
pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an
illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the
myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 will be published by Encounter Books on May 29. This
article appears in the May 28, 2012, issue of National Review.
