Rachel's Democracy & Health News #859  [Printer-friendly version]
June 15, 2006

A WINNING POLITICS BUILT ON RACISM

After the civil rights marches, protests and battles of the early
1960s, the southern states were seething as an end to apartheid was
forced on them by national guardsmen wielding bayonets. When George Wallace
ran an explicitly racist campaign for President he discovered to his
surprise that he could draw huge crowds and a large voter turnout,
even in some northern states -- for example, 30% in Michigan. "They
all hate black people, all of them!," he is reported to have said.
"Great God! That's it! They're all southern. The whole United States
is southern!"[1,pg.6]

This was not quite true of course, but it was true that unspoken
tendencies toward white supremacy were alive and well across America
-- not a majority perspective except in the south, perhaps, but common
enough to be readily exploitable by unprincipled politicians.

During his long career, in which he vowed never to be "out-niggered"
by a white-supremacist political opponent, George Wallace went on to
discover (some would say "invent") the politics of resentment and hate
-- which every major Republican presidential candidate has used to
advantage since, including Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald
Reagan, Pat Buchanan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. If you
don't believe that this is true, I have four books to recommend:

1. Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the
Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994 (1996; ISBN 0-8071-2366-8).

2. Thomas and Mary Edsall's Chain Reaction; The Impact of Race,
Rights and Taxes on American Politics (1992; ISBN 0-393-30903-7)

3. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion; Right Wing Movements and
Political Power in the United States (N.Y.: The Guilford Press,
1995); ISBN 0-89862-864-4.

4. Jean Hardisty, Mobilizing Resentment (Boston: Beacon Press,
1999); ISBN 0-8070-4316-8).

With the historical evidence presented in these four books, I believe
the case is closed. Republican strategists used -- and continue to use
-- race to divide and then conquer the bottom-up New Deal coalition,
which they have replaced with a top-down Republican coalition of
plutocrats and radical Christian fundamentalists, which then allowed
them to engineer the most accelerated upwards redistribution of wealth
in the nation's history.

Racial resentments were carefully cultivated and manipulated, in
combination with anger about "anti-Christian" court decisions
outlawing prayer and Bible readings in public schools; street crime;
"welfare queens;" law-flaunting anti-war protestors; women demanding
liberation from lives of drudgery (and demanding the right to control
their own reproduction, up to and including abortion if needed);
"pointy-headed intellectuals" developing unpopular policies like
busing kids across town to integrate the schools; and hippies thumbing
their noses at the social conventions of sex and drugs. From 1965
onward, coded appeals to white supremacy became standard fare among
Republican politicians (and among those members of the opposing party
who became known as "Reagan Democrats").

As historian Dan T. Carter has concluded, race remains the driving
wedge of conservative American politics -- it is the thing that most
reliably divides the old New Deal coalition and thus allows
Republicans to prevail. The Republicans maintain their tenuous hold on
power through a fractious coalition of social conservatives, fiscal
conservatives, world-empire-through-military-might conservatives,
ethnic conservatives, and religious conservatives -- and the glue that
holds the whole thing together is coded appeals to white supremacy.
Think Willy Horton, the convicted murder who committed another
murder while on furlough from prison -- a furlough arranged by then-
Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. President George H.W. Bush's
subtly but unmistakably racist Willy Horton TV ads sunk Michael
Dukakis's chances of becoming president and in a very real sense began
the Bush dynasty that rules America today.