Bob Herbert, the most racist person writing at the New York Times, can’t help but leverage the ongoing racial turmoil in Jena, LA against a Republican party that he claims has done naught but stomp on the necks of black people. The left side of the blogosphere, of course, has swallowed that bilge whole.
Unfortunately for them, Herbert’s accusation is nothing but fantasy and balderdash. Gateway Pundit points out just how wrong he is with actual historical incidents that the average leftist blogger could look up in a library or the Internet, if they were interested in anything more than knee-jerk racist accusations.
What strikes me as really funny is that Kevin Drum, after congratulating Herbert on his “history lesson” notes that today is the 50th anniversary of school integration in Little Rock. That was when a Republican president ordered the schools in a city run by a Democratic mayor in a state with a Democratic governor (who had called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent integration and had to be ordered by a judge to allow it) to admit eight black students to a Little Rock high school. Oh, and the black-hating Republican went so far as to mobilize the 101st Airborne to protect the black students and to make sure the order was carried out.
Drum should know better. I suppose that part politics trumps everything on the left these days, including what really happened in Little Rock fifty years ago.
(via memeorandum)
UPDATE: Mahablog thinks she’s found a flaw in the argument that’ll let her keep calling Republicans racists with a clear conscience. Well, let’s see.
I realize most of you know this, but it still has to be spelled out for righties. They refuse to acknowledge this is what happened. Yes, 50 years ago the Republican Eisenhower supported civil rights, and the Democratic Faubus did not. That was before the Southern strategy, my dears. Things have changed a bit since.
Hmm…a stinging retort. I can only reply with a few short notes. First, it was Robert Byrd, who still stands as the most senior member of the Demcoratic party, who set a record for a Senate filibuster while trying to defeat the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was Congressional Republicans that eventually broke the Dems chokehold on blacks’ voting rights and allowed them to vote like the rest of us. That was, not quite 50 years ago.
And what of the “southern strategy”? Did it ever really exist? Well, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both won the White House from the South by garnering a large chunk of the south. Carter, in fact, took every southern state save Virginia and Oklahoma (and that was six years after this so-called southern strategy). Louisiana had two Democratic Senators from the dawn of Reconstruction all the way up to 2005. Georgia didn’t get a Republican governor after Reconstruction until 2002. Florida didn’t grab a Republican governor and Republican state legislature until the early 2000s.
Can you use a strategy as a weapon if it seems to have never really been employed?
Let’s go on. Since Mahablog’s southern strategy bogeyman, the Republicans have not been slouches when it comes to racial diversity in their appointments. The first black National Security Advisor, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State (and the second as well), and one of two Supreme Court Justices were all appointed by Republican Presidents over vociferous Democratic objection.
So yeah, as long as we’re counting black faces, the Republicans do pretty darned well, even after 1970.
But does counting black faces really mean that you’re doing better for black people? Not hardly, and any educated person knows that. What Maha can not deny is that when you look at the faces in Congress and the history of civil rights in America, there is no doubt whatsoever that Republicans have done far more right than wrong. They’ve pushed for civil rights – real civil rights instead of the sort of crippling govermental paternalism with which the likes of Bob Herbert want to shackle blacks today. They’ve made darned sure, as Trent Lott can tell you, that racism enjoys no comfort in their party politics, even if its a joke at an old man’s birthday party. I wonder when the approbation for Robert Byrd will happen? I’m still waiting for Demcorats to step up and rebuke him for his use of an incendiary slur. Is the Republican party perfect? Hardly, because it is made up of human beings just like the Demcoratic Party, or any other party in the United States. Human beings are base creatures who, when given a choice, find it easier to indulge the darker parts of their souls. That will always be so. It’s wrong, morally and historically, to label the Republican Party as populated by racists or as seriously harmful to blacks in America today just as it is wrong to label the Democratic Party that way. At least Republicans aren’t puffed up with their own self-righteousness and political stupidity on this particular subject, though. That’s something.
[...] supported civil rights, and the Democratic Faubus did not. That was before the Southern strategy, my dears. Things have changed a bit [...]
The assumption that Democrats today are unaware of its party’s racist past is false. The whole point of Herbert’s mention of the GOP’s Southern Strategy is to say the national Republican Party has pandered to and captured the Southern Democratic base by the promulgation of racism.
Old history does not negate the history of the past 25 to 35 years.
[...] The Gun Toting Liberal™, The Mahablog, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Flopping Aces, QandO, Macsmind, The Sundries Shack, Friends of Justice, Norwegianity, Shakespeare’s Sister, Feministe, The Atlantic Online, All [...]
“And what of the “southern strategy”? Did it ever really exist?”
I provided examples in the post, which of course you ignored. Certainly the Democratic Party has a terribly racist past, just as the Republican Part actually had a brief fling with progressivism long ago. Parties change and evolve over time, and citing something that happened 50 years ago to defend present-day Republicans is a bit like comparing present-day birds to dinosaurs.
Beginning with the 1948 DNC platform the Dems moved toward favoring civil rights and desegregation, and during the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of southern white supremacist Democrats switched to being Republicans. This is a plain fact. Republican Party strategists noticed this and decided to exploit it — the Southern strategy. As explained by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”
Most people understand this is what happened. You righties are only fooling yourselves.
I’m not giving the Dems all that much credit, because as far as African Americans go they promise a lot more than they deliver. What’s really persuading African Americans to vote for Democrats isn’t the Democratic Party; it’s the Republican Party. Deal with it.
You provided examples and I provided counterexamples. Together, they prove absolutely nothing. Yep, you have a great quote from Kevin Phillips. I have actual electoral results to prove that that quote produced little to no actual wooing of Southern racists.
You clearly want to hang the racist label on Republicans. It doesn’t fit and it’s pretty sad that you keep trying. Whatever wins an election though, right?
Kevin Hayden,
Your kind of logic leads Democrats to claim that welfare reform is racist. You see a hidden racist agenda in everything that Republicans stand for…like personal responsiblity and free markets. I submit that the real racists in our society are those who support policies with the assumption that minorities are incapable of taking care of themselves.
Ah grasshopper, you have enlightened me about my kind of logic. Welfare reform? Never in my life have I made such a claim and in fact would refute that there is anything racist in the welfare reform I’ve observed coming from Wahington.
I submit that your opinion and mine do not change what exists. Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater and other Republican strategists have admitted it – the very guys who put it into play – and if that doesn’t meet any objective test of fact, I might as well go to Monty Python’s room for arguments (Yes it is. No, t’isn’t.) Because mere contradiction does not a rational debate make.
Electoral results show precisely Maha’s points. The Southern states have consistently voted against Democratic presidential candidates. ONLY when Southerners like Carter and Clinton were Dem candidates did a very few break this pattern, just enough to tilt the electioral total the other way.
In fact, no candidate who was residing above the Mason-Dixon line during their run(if that line was drawn completely to the West coast) has been elected president since FDR. Except one, Kennedy, who barely eked out a win then was killed before he completed it.
The only thing mythical about the Southern strategy and its racism is that it is completely confined to the South. A few northern and western states have sufficiently strong records of racism in their populace that they’ve reacted similarly. Idaho, Utah and Indiana are the three most visible examples.
I’ve seen racism in many more states – including blue states like Massachusetts and Oregon. But they didn’t exist in sufficient numbers to swing those states the other way.
Racism denial is similar to Holocaust denial. And any political activist in any party who can’t see its impact on presidential races is either an amateur or has an agenda in denying it.
[...] A) A propagandistic, racist movie, like D.W. Griffith’s ”The Birth of a Nation.” B) A czarist-era, secret police blood libel, such as the fraudulent ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” C) A New York Times Op-Ed by Bob Hebert. D) All of the above. [...]
Heather MacDonald says:
“To be sure, black incarceration rates are off the charts. Black men were 41 percent of the more than 2 million men in federal, state, and local prisons at midyear 2006. At the end of 2005, there were 3,145 prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared with 1,244 inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 471 inmates per 100,000 white males.”
I wonder if the IQ correlation would fit roughly along those lines. 85 for blacks… 90…Hispanics 100 for whites. There was a very good ABC Evening News piece about how the Black/White divide looks fifty years later in Little Rock Central high. Sort of what you expect… blacks predominate remedial, whites in AP courses and grades. Yet the principal, a white female, was weeping over society’s being at fault…and, oh yeah, she mentioned something about reading not being promoted in black families.
Your analysis has a couple problems. First, the so-called southern strategy wasn’t around when Kennedy was elected. It happened right around 1970, and was supposed to be a Nixon creation.
Second, you claim that since only Carter and Clinton were elected President, the strategy worked. Let’s note that those two have accounted for three of the nine Presidential elections since then. Four of the remaining six we can throw right out the window: Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 were landslides – they won in the South and everywhere else. That leaves only the two Bush 43 elections.
So, of the non-landslide elections since 1970, Democrats won three out of five (and incidentally enjoyed great support in the south). Your comment is hardly convincing.