Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Legend has it that as he put down his pen Johnson told an aide, referring to the Democratic Party, "We have lost the South for a generation."
President Johnson was fully cognizant of the fact that Democrats risked losing the "Dixiecrat" Southern segregationists to do what was the morally right thing to do. And so he did.
Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made an explicit appeal to Dixiecrats angered by passage of the Civil Rights Act in his presidential bid in 1964. Goldwater carried the "solid South" and just barely his home state of Arizona in an electoral landslide defeat.
But the die had been cast. The Republican Party saw electoral opportunity in playing the "race card" and appealing to disaffected segregationists. When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he ran on a "Southern strategy" devised by the likes of Patrick J. Buchanan and others to use racial code language to appeal to Southern voters. Third party candidate, segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, won the "solid South" and Nixon carried the rest of the South in defeating Hubert H. Humphrey, one of the principal architects and floor managers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
With the success of the "Southern strategy" the Republican Party embraced it whole-heartedly. Dixiecrat Southerners led by Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC), a former States Rights Party candidate for president in 1948, changed their party affiliation to the Republican Party. Between 1968 and 1980, what had been a "solid South" for the Democratic Party became the "solid South" for the Republican Party.
The "Southern strategy" of appealing to racial prejudices did not end there. Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign after being nominated by the Republican Party in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi — site of the slaying of three civil rights workers in 1964, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman — and delivered a speech with a ringing endorsement of "states' rights." Reagan's Race Legacy (washingtonpost.com). Dixiecrats heard the dog-whistle. They now became known as "Reagan Democrats."
Reagan's running mate, George H. W. Bush, resorted to the infamous Willie Horton ad playing upon racial prejudice and fear to rescue his floundering campaign to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. YouTube – Willie Horton political ad 1988
Since then a virulent strain of "Tenth Amendment," "states rights," "nullification" (of federal laws) and "secession" fringe has emerged within the Republican Party (particularly here in Arizona). This has its roots in the fringe elements of Dixiecrats, John Birch Society, Lyndon LaRouche, Dominionists, militia organizations and eliminationists that the mainstream Republican Party opened its doors to in order to build a winning electoral coalition. These parasites have now devoured their host, the Republican Party. The GOP, like the Whig Party and Know Nothing Party which preceded it, has died from rot from within. The traditional Republican Party we knew no longer exists. This is not your father's GOP. Only it's obituary remains to be written.
It is within this historical context with which the opinion of Leonard Pitts, Jr. should be read. Tea party rhetoric has crossed the line into hatred, racism:
So it turns out that, contrary to what I argued in this space a few weeks back, racism is not "a major component" of the so-called tea party movement. I am informed of this by dozens of tea party activists indignant and insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.
In other news, tea party protesters called John Lewis a "nigger" the other day in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.
For the record, Lewis wasn't their only target.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon.
Rep. Barney Frank, who is gay, was called "faggot."
But it is Lewis' involvement that gives the Saturday incident its bittersweet resonance. The 70-year-old representative from Georgia is, after all, among the last living icons of the civil-rights movement. Or, as Lewis himself put it, "I've faced this before."
Indeed. He faced it in Nashville, Tenn., in 1960 when he was locked inside a whites-only fast-food restaurant and gassed by a fumigation machine for ordering a hamburger.
He faced it in Birmingham, Ala., in 1961 when a group of Freedom Riders was attacked and he was knocked unconscious for riding on a Greyhound bus.
Most famously, he faced it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., 45 years ago this month when his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers who charged a group of demonstrators seeking their right to vote.
In the very arc of his life, Lewis provides a yardstick for measuring American progress. The fact that he rose from that bridge to become a member of Congress says something about this country. But the fact that people demonstrating against health-care reform chose to chant at him, "Kill the bill, nigger!" – well, that says something too.
Amy Kremer, coordinator of the Tea Party Express, went on Fox News to dismiss what she called an "isolated" incident. Your first instinct may be to cede the benefit of the doubt on that one. It seems unfair to tar nine reasonable people with the hateful behavior of one lunatic.
But ask yourself: When is the last time organizers of protests on other hot-button issues – say, abortion rights or globalization – had to apologize for "isolated incidents" such as these?
Moreover, given how often tea party leaders have been forced to disavow hateful signs and slogans, and even the presence of organized white supremacist groups in their midst, is it really fair to use the word "isolated"?
Is there not a rottenness here? And is not the unwillingness to call that rottenness by name part and parcel of the reason it endures?
No, my argument is emphatically not that every American who opposes health-care reform is a closet Klansman. Certainly, people can have earnest and honest disagreements about that.
But by the same token, as these "isolated" incidents mount, as the venom and the vitriol increase to the point where even proxy words no longer suffice, it insults intelligence to deny that race is in the mix.
Not that the denial surprises.
Often we tell ourselves lies to spare ourselves truths. Had you asked them, the people who locked John Lewis inside that restaurant, the ones who mauled him at that bus station and smashed him down on that bridge, would not have said they acted from a rottenness within.
No, like the ones who called him "nigger" half a century later, they would have told you they were good people fighting for principle. trying to save this country.
They would not have said they were racists. Racists never do.
NB: The photos above are actual signs at the Tea Party Express rally in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.