Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  So the point of creating an internal enemy, whether Jews or Republican businessmen, is to justify stealing from that group. But notice how FDR, like Hitler, laid the political groundwork for the theft by accusing his intended victims of being thieves. Hitler had accused the Jews of manipulating the German economy and leeching off the productive labor of the German people. FDR claimed that rich businessmen were tyrannizing the American people and ripping them off. How exactly? Hitler didn’t say, and FDR didn’t either.

  Presumably FDR meant that businesses were not hiring enough people or paying them enough. This was Hitler’s usury argument: “The Jews are exploiting you because they are charging too much for their money.” But even if this were true, it hardly constituted tyranny. If you don’t like what the moneylender is charging, don’t borrow from him. In a market system, businesses are not required to hire people any more than people can be forced to work for such businesses. Salaries are settled through a bargaining process involving the mutual consent of the employer and employee.

  Yet having identified the group from which he intended to extract money—wealthy Republican businessmen—FDR proceeded to build the Democratic coalition to do it. Here, we see, his technique was very different from that of Hitler and Mussolini. They didn’t need to build wining electoral coalitions. FDR did. So how did he do it? Here the progressive narrative focuses on how FDR replaced the Democratic urban machine system of local big bosses with a single big boss, himself, administering the federal government.

  I have no quarrel with this narrative. It shows, for example, how FDR worked with the bosses when he needed their support and got rid of them when it was politically safe to do so. In New York, for example, FDR as a state senator opposed the Tammany machine. The machine, in retaliation, supported FDR’s rival Al Smith for the Democratic nomination in 1932. But when FDR secured the nomination, he made peace with the Tammany sachems because he needed them to campaign for him in the general election.

  The very next year, however, FDR turned against Tammany once again. He shrewdly allied with the newly elected progressive Republican mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, and even distributed federal patronage through him, bypassing and thus rendering impotent the Tammany machine. That’s how La Guardia got one of New York’s two major airports named after him. “FDR could have saved the Tammany machine,” Jay Cost writes, but instead “he took the kill shot.”43

  In the end, Tammany was doomed not merely because of FDR’s political wiles but also because the federal government, not the local city treasury, became the source of largesse and Democratic patronage. By the 1940s, the Tammany system had collapsed, replaced with a new patronage operation from Washington, D.C. Yet FDR still needed a mechanism to rally the political support necessary to sustain this patronage system—in other words, to keep Democrats in power.

  TAMMANY ON THE POTOMAC

  He found that support in the unions. Here the progressive account gets romantic and dewy-eyed. Even Katznelson indulges in rhapsodic descriptions of how FDR empowered unions, giving them the power to negotiate with management, to get a better deal for workers. Since union membership was voluntary—workers had to vote to start a union—how could anyone deny that this was an arrangement that combined freedom of choice with a more just outcome for workers?

  I deny it. My basis for doing so is that this was not the arrangement that really matters. Once again we have to look behind the mask of progressive concealment. The truly significant deal was not the one between unions representing workers and management; rather, it was the one between unions on the one hand and the Democratic Party on the other. Let’s try to see the arrangement from FDR’s point of view.

  Here’s the deal that FDR and the Democrats offered the unions: We will pass laws that not only enable unions to exist but also force workers who don’t want to join unions to join them as long as a majority of workers approves the union.

  We will also enable unions to collect dues, again from the willing and the unwilling. We will thwart the ability of employers to fire union workers who strike, and force them to hire those workers back after the strike.

  Even more, we will use the government to force management to give in to union demands, in effect putting the full power of the state behind the unions. What private corporation can resist Uncle Sam? The good news, from the government’s point of view, is that we don’t have to raid the treasury to fund union demands. Rather, we intervene to make the auto industry or the energy industry or the construction industry pay. The government is simply the “heavy” that beats the private sector into submission.

  And there’s more. We don’t want the unions to focus narrowly on worker benefits, as they historically have. Now we want them to join with other Democratic groups in pressing for greater welfare benefits, the whole New Deal package. This means that union workers benefit not merely through higher wages and unemployment benefits but also through more lavish Social Security payments to more lucrative welfare programs.

  Unions, in short, were given the opportunity to facilitate not merely the rip-off of the employer but also the rip-off of the taxpayer.

  It was a good deal for unions. Since nothing in the world is free, however, the Democrats wanted something in exchange for all this federal protection, or to be blunt, for running this extortion racket. They wanted the unions to pressure their members to vote for Democratic candidates—saving politicians the trouble of having to persuade them individually—and to use a significant portion of union dues to fund the campaign war chest of the Democratic Party. This would ensure Democrats could stay in power so the racket could continue indefinitely.

  Ironically it was a Tammany man, New York senator Robert Wagner, and not FDR, who first spotted the potential for a union racket. Wagner sponsored the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which created a pro-union federal board for the purpose of actively intervening in labor disputes. FDR was not actively involved. But Wagner and the unions themselves saw the basis for an alliance that would deliver benefits for the unions and voters and funds for the Democratic Party.

  The following year, 1936, FDR showed workers what the federal government could do for the unions. The United Auto Workers announced a major strike against General Motors, and in response GM shut down its huge plant in Flint, Michigan. UAW men then occupied GM facilities, refusing to leave or permit any work to be done there. They also shot at strikebreakers and policemen who sought to remove them from GM property.

  GM turned to the government for support, but neither Democratic governor Frank Murphy nor FDR backed the eviction of strikers. Instead, FDR’s labor secretary Frances Perkins urged GM president Alfred Sloan to come to Washington, D.C., and negotiate with UAW head John Lewis under federal auspices. Sloan declined, saying he could not in good conscience enter into negotiations while GM property was being unlawfully occupied.

  While the public in general supported Sloan, FDR attacked GM management for its recalcitrance, and finally Sloan, having no federal or state support to recover his property, succumbed to the UAW and agreed to its demands. Soon the entire auto industry got the message that unless they gave in, they were subject to the combined force of the unions in cahoots with the federal government.44

  Not every union embraced FDR at first. The oldest and most powerful union, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), remained aloof. But a breakaway group, the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), climbed aboard FDR’s bandwagon and endorsed his reelection in 1936. So did the United Mine Workers and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. And once FDR himself got behind the union movement and showed how he could deliver for them, the AFL was soon also on the Democratic team.45

  In sum, the unions went for FDR’s deal, and through this union racket, FDR remade the Democratic plantation. And although unions, having provided the political backbone of the Democratic Party for two generations, are now much weaker than they u
sed to be, the racket still continues. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, for instance, Obama used the power of the government to bludgeon General Motors into making its shareholders and bondholders take a hit, but not its union workers, who were shielded by federal protection.

  The Nazi state didn’t need to negotiate with unions. Essentially it displaced the unions and incorporated worker protections into its own state-run socialist schemes. FDR, however, had to ensure his reelection in 1936, 1940 and 1944. He also wanted to create an enduring national Democratic plantation system that would outlast him. And so he did. While the fascist plantations in Europe all collapsed by 1945, FDR’s incorporation of fascist ideology and fascist strong-arm tactics into a new Democratic plantation system is still with us today.

  8

  Civil Rights and Wrongs

  LBJ, Nixon and the Myth of the Southern Strategy

  Let’s face it. Our ass is in a crack. We’re gonna have to let this nigger bill pass.

  —Lyndon Johnson to Senator John Stennis, 19571

  An interesting phenomenon in politics is the flip-flop. What would cause a politician who takes a stand on an issue to reverse himself or herself and take precisely the opposite stand on the same issue? Even more interesting is the about-face, or volte face. The volte face goes beyond the flip-flop because it represents a total and usually lasting shift of course, as when Reagan abandoned the Democratic Party and became a Republican.

  More interesting even than the volte face is when a whole group or party makes this shift. Perhaps the most dramatic example in our lifetime is when the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 abolished itself. It’s one thing for an individual to undergo a wrenching conversion, but what would cause a whole party to reverse itself in that way? Could it be a transformation of collective conscience, or a new perception of group interests, or what?

  Our exploration of the subject is deepened by a new possibility introduced by Winston Churchill, who in one of his essays takes up the subject of consistency in politics. Accused on more than one occasion of reversing himself and taking inconsistent positions on issues, Churchill defends himself by invoking the apparent volte face, the change of tactics that is not a change of goals or values.

  Churchill writes, “A Statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other. His arguments in each case when contrasted can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction: yet his object will throughout have remained the same . . . We cannot call this inconsistency. In fact it can be claimed to be the truest consistency. The only way a man can remain consistent amid changing circumstances is to change with them while preserving the same dominating purpose.”2

  Keeping this in mind, let’s examine a series of critical transformations or switches in American politics over the past few decades. Why did blacks, who were once uniformly Republican, become, as they are now, almost uniformly Democratic? Why did the South, once the “solid South” of the Democratic Party, become the base of the Republican Party? How did the GOP lose what used to be its base in the Northeast and become the party of the South, the Midwest and the West, not counting the West Coast? How did Democrats go from their longstanding approach of demonizing blacks to championing black interests and, at least in terms of political rhetoric, demonizing whites? Why did a racist and segregationist like Lyndon Johnson spearhead the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark legislation of the civil rights movement?

  No understanding of current politics is possible without answering these questions. And progressives have put forward their answer, which is now conventional wisdom, commonly invoked as if it were too obvious to require any proof. Even some Republicans believe it, as evidenced by RNC chairman Ken Mehlman going before the NAACP in 2005 and apologizing for the racist history of the Republican Party. In 2010, the first black chairman of the RNC, Michael Steele, conceded the GOP’s supposed Southern Strategy had “alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”3

  You know you’ve got a powerful ideological indictment when even its targets are willing to make a confession. And what is this indictment? Its essence can be expressed in a few key propositions. The parties switched platforms, at least on the race issue. This big switch was brought about in the late 1960s by the GOP, which under the leadership of Richard Nixon employed an infamous Southern Strategy based on an appeal to racism and white supremacy.

  The racist wing of the Democratic Party—the so-called Dixiecrats—responded by switching allegiances and becoming Republicans. Meanwhile the Democrats under LBJ pushed through the signature civil rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Bill of 1968. So the Democrats, once the party of racism, became the party of civil rights, and the GOP, once the party of Lincoln and emancipation, became the new home of bigotry and white supremacy.

  There is no limit to the number of articles chanting this progressive tune. “The Southern Strategy was the original sin that made Donald Trump possible,” Jeet Heer writes in the New Republic. Heer contends that while the GOP has relied for decades on “coded appeals to racism,” or what Heer terms “winking racism,” Trump with his overt racism is the party’s “true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party has pursued for more than half a century.”4

  “Reagan, Trump and the Devil Down South” is the title of a recent article in the left-wing The Guardian that faults the GOP with making a “deal with the devil.” Yes, it’s the Southern Strategy all over again. “Goldwater discovered it; Nixon refined it; and Reagan perfected it into the darkest of the modern political dark arts.” While these Republicans preferred “dog whistle” appeals to racism, “Trump blows it out,” and “that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage.”5

  And from The Atlantic we get the headline, “How Trump Remixed the Republican ‘Southern Strategy.’ ” Here the author Robert Jones blames the Southern Strategy on “the speeches of Richard Nixon . . . who polished George Wallace’s overtly racist appeals for mainstream use in the Republican campaign playbook.” Jones too says Trump has upped the ante. “In a demonstration of just how successful the old strategy was—he’s discarded the dog whistle in favor of a bull horn.”6

  And again—just to highlight the omnipresence of this stuff—we have Salon informing us that “the idea that today’s Democratic Party is the party of militant white supremacy is profoundly wrong.” Why? You see, there was a Southern Strategy and a big switch. “White southern Democrats were explicit about their racism, and it’s no mystery that they left the party.” These people then “joined a Republican Party waiting with open arms.”7

  There is a considerable body of progressive scholarly literature behind this rhetoric. This includes Earl and Merle Black’s The Rise of Southern Republicans and Dan Carter’s From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution. These are the progressive spinmeisters of the narrative of the Southern Strategy and the big switch. Most recently, historian Kevin Kruse’s study White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism invokes the Southern Strategy and the big switch to make the case that white supremacy is now a core doctrine of the Republican right.8

  What dividends this explanation provides for progressive Democrats! Basically it erases most of their history and gives them a Get Out of Jail Free card. Democrats have never publicly admitted their role over nearly two centuries of being the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan and also fascism and Nazism. Yet when pushed up against the wall with the mountain of evidence provided in this book, how can they deny it?

  They cannot deny it. Therefore, their ultimate fallback—their only fallback—is to insist that they changed. The bad guys became the good guys. The
biggest payoff for them is the corollary to this. Supposedly the Republicans also changed, in the opposite direction. The good guys became the bad guys. So now the Democratic left not only gets to accuse Trump, conservatives and Republicans of being the party of racism, they also get to take their own history of white supremacy—with all its horrid images of slavery, lynching and concentration camps—and foist it on the political Right.

  But is it true? Or—as you are entitled to suspect by now—is the whole doctrine of the LBJ moral transformation and the Southern Strategy and the big switch yet another case of progressive deception? More than that, is it an elaborate cover-up for yet another Democratic scheme of exploitation, which is to say, yet another modification of the progressive plantation?

  We’ve covered the role of two of the most prominent progressives, the pedantic bigot Woodrow Wilson and the quasi-fascist dissembler FDR; here I give you the untold story of the third one, LBJ, who happens to be the most cynical conniver of them all. And the real question about LBJ is not how and when he made his conversion—he didn’t—but rather why an old-time segregationist bigot would become convinced that it was in his and his party’s interest to promote a landmark Civil Rights Act. The plot thickens.

  HOW DOES A RACIST CHANGE HIS SPOTS?

  We begin with LBJ because he was the man in the White House who drove the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. He was a man of the South who lived through the transformation of the two parties. Moreover, he himself embodied the big switch. He was a progressive racist who appears to have become a progressive antiracist. He was a Democratic bad guy who became a Democratic good guy. My wife Debbie graduated from the university LBJ went to, Texas State University in San Marcos, and LBJ is regarded there as a sort of demigod. On the campus I walked across LBJ Street to the LBJ Student Center and along the way passed a statue of LBJ in the quad.