By Kevin Williamson
Frank Rich, writing in New York magazine, has taken issue with my pieces on Goldwater, Republicans, and civil rights,
calling it part of “the most insidious and determined campaign to
rewrite racial history on the right.” If you can dig through Mr. Rich’s
characteristically limp and emotive prose, you will discover that his
argument amounts to: “Nyah, nyah! Strom Thurmond!” In Mr. Rich’s words,
“The primacy of Thurmond in the GOP’s racial realignment is the most
incriminating truth the right keeps trying to cover up.”
Asserting the primacy of Mr. Thurmond’s role does not establish the
fact. It also misses the fact that the “racial realignment” that so
interests Mr. Rich happened long before 1964, back when Strom Thurmond
was just another wretched hillbilly pedophile molesting the help. Mr.
Rich simply refuses to deal with the facts: No Republican presidential
candidate has won the black vote since the 1920s (Here’s to you, Herbert
Hoover!), the majority of black voters had become Democrats by the
1940s, Republicans’ gains in the South were concentrated among educated
and relatively affluent suburbanites, the same as they were everywhere
else in the country, not among the redneck bloc. The Southern
congressional caucus went Republican in 1994, not in 1964.
Mr. Rich refuses to deal with the fact that far from galvanizing the
region with his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater
in fact lost the Southern popular vote to Lyndon Johnson (49 percent to
52 percent) and underperformed Dwight Eisenhower’s showing there in
1956. Eisenhower, a civil-rights activist, was the first Republican since Reconstruction to win the Southern vote. As Sean Trende notes,
he “carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53
percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama.
This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board
decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had
appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the
administration had opposed the school board.” But black voters still did
not like Ike: They voted by large majorities for Adlai Stevenson.
The notable thing about Strom Thurmond is that he was the only member
of the Senate Democratic Hickoid Caucus to leave his party and join the
GOP. Robert Byrd, that barnacle upon Washington, stayed in the
Democratic party long enough to roll up the sleeves on his Klan robe to
allow Senator Obama to kiss his ring.
The present orientation of our two major political parties is not
mainly the result of the racial politics of the 1960s. It is the result
of the New Deal. When the Democrats became the New Deal party and the
Republicans became the party of opposition to the New Deal, the trends
that had begun in the 1920s became fixed, at least so far as black
voters were concerned. The historical fact is that black Americans
joined the Democratic party at a time when the Democrats were bitterly
opposed to civil rights and desegregation: the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
Franklin Roosevelt, the commander in chief of a segregated army who had
not lifted a finger in the cause of civil rights, received 71 percent of the black vote in 1936. The New Deal was popular with black voters. It still is.
Mr. Rich can bang his spoon on his high chair day and night, but the facts are the facts.
Democrats act as though race were the only subject of interest in the
1960s. But other social factors, notable among them the explosion of
crime in those years and the radicalism and disorder on college
campuses, certainly played a role in the social character of the
parties, as did the Democrats’ cynically enthusiastic embrace of the
welfare state under Johnson, another Democratic practitioner of truly odious racial politics.
And there was the small matter of revolutionary communism and the
Republicans’ more robust response to it at a time when the Democrats
were becoming the home of the far left, the party of radical chic. Strom
Thurmond’s role in this is mainly that of a story that Democrats tell
themselves to feel good about themselves and their dependency agenda.
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