Lincoln calls this the free-labor system, by which he means the free-market system. It operates on self-improvement, as Lincoln’s own story illustrates. “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails at work on a flat-boat.” The free-labor system, in Lincoln’s words, “gives hope to all and energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.”
Naturally, Lincoln says, people want to keep what they earn. “Even the ant who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest,” he says, “will furiously defend the fruit of his labor against whatever robber assails him.” And while the temptation to envious confiscation is inevitable, Lincoln told a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War, “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”
Failure to succeed, Lincoln said, is “not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly or singular misfortune.” As political scientist Harry Jaffa interprets Lincoln’s words, “The brain surgeon and the street sweeper may have very unequal rewards for their work. Yet each has the same right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hand has earned. The brain surgeon has no more right to take the street sweeper’s wages than the street sweeper to take the brain surgeon’s.”
Why not? Because for Lincoln such schemes of confiscation are a restoration of the slavery principle where “some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.” Lincoln added, “This is wrong and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of good government.”35
Lincoln’s philosophy can be seen in its practical implementation when his own stepbrother, age thirty-seven, wrote him to ask for a small loan to settle a debt. Lincoln responded, “Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think best, to comply with now.” Lincoln reminded him this was not the first time he was being importuned for money; they had been down that road before. The problem, as he put it, is that the man was “an idler . . . You do not very much dislike to work; but you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it.”
Here’s what Lincoln proposed: “You shall go to work, tooth and nails, for somebody who will give you money for it.” Lincoln added an incentive. “If you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month . . . Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again.”36
It should be obvious from this that Lincoln’s basic ideology—that people have a right to the fruits of their labor, and that government, if it gets involved at all, should merely provide idlers and indigents with the means to become self-supporting—is even today the basic ideology of Republicans. And it is equally clear that the confiscatory principle “You work, I eat” is even today the basic ideology of Democrats. The entire welfare state, from the New Deal through the Great Society to contemporary Democratic schemes, is rooted in the same plantation philosophy of legally sanctioned theft that Lincoln identified more than a century and a half ago.
WHY BLACKS BECAME DEMOCRATS
Now we turn to our third question: why did blacks become Democrats? They were once at home in the Republican Party. As Frederick Douglass put it, “The Republican Party is the deck; all else is the sea.”37 How different things are now. After the Civil War nine out of ten blacks voted Republican; now nine out of ten blacks vote Democratic. So something happened to cause blacks to switch their allegiance. But what?
For progressives, the huge backing of blacks for the Democratic Party proves that the Democratic Party is the party of racial enlightenment and black interests. It follows by the same reasoning that the GOP must be the party opposed to blacks. As Jamelle Bouie put it in the Daily Beast, “If the GOP is so supportive of African-Americans, then why have black voters abandoned the party in droves?”38
Here I give a surprising answer to that question. The data show that blacks did not switch from Republican to Democratic in the 1960s. They did not do it because of civil rights. Rather, a majority of blacks became Democrats in the 1930s. This was at a time when the Democratic Party was manifestly the party of segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. FDR, who got less than one-third of the black vote in 1932, got 75 percent of the black vote in 1936.
Why would blacks leave the party of emancipation and resistance to segregation and lynching and join the party of bigotry and white supremacy? The depressing answer is that blacks did it in exchange for the pittance that they got from FDR’s New Deal. We have seen earlier how FDR designed the New Deal to exclude African Americans and preserve Jim Crow. How delighted and amused FDR must have been to see blacks coming over to his camp even as his administration worked closely with racist Democrats to screw them over.
It should be noted, in mitigation of this horrible decision on the part of African Americans—and it was a horrible decision—that conditions for blacks during the Great Depression were almost inconceivably bad. Historian Ira Katznelson points out that median black family income was around $500 a year, which means most blacks lived at subsistence level without electricity, hot water, refrigeration, adequate plumbing or gas for cooking. “Under these circumstances,” Katznelson writes, New Deal benefits “limited though they were” and “however discriminatory” still offered some relief and solace to a “desperate population.”39
So FDR bought off the African American vote at a bargain-basement price in the 1930s. Yet this secured the Democrats a decisive, but not unanimous, black vote. Democrats had around 75 percent of the black vote, and they remained in that range from the 1930s through the 1960s. Then LBJ consciously directed a large portion of his Great Society benefits to blacks and bought off another big chunk of the black vote for the Democratic Party. Since LBJ, blacks have voted for Democrats in the 90 percent range.
As we will see in the next chapter, the political decision to become part of the Democratic plantation has proven to be disastrous for blacks, although not necessarily for the black overseer class that administers the Democratic plantation. However this may be, the timing and motivation of the black switch is a decisive refutation of the progressive lie that blacks wisely left the Republican Party because they recognized it as the party of white supremacy and joined the Democratic Party because they knew it had become the party of civil rights. That wasn’t the perception; neither was it the reality.
REEXAMINING THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY
Now we turn to Nixon’s Southern Strategy and the reasons for the other switch: the switch of the South from being the political base of the Democratic Party to now being that of the GOP. Here the progressive narrative is that Nixon was convinced by his malevolent advisers—notably Kevin Phillips, author of the bible of the Southern Strategy—to make a racist appeal to the Deep South, winning over Dixiecrats and segregationists to the GOP and firmly establishing the Republican Party as the party of white supremacy, a mantle that has now been inherited by Trump.
The first problem with this Southern Strategy tale is that progressives have never been able to provide a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Richard Nixon at any time in his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to Deep South racists would actually have to be made, and to be understood as such. Yet quite evidently none was.
This is not to deny that privately Nixon harbored all kinds of prejudices, not only against blacks but also against Jews, the Irish, the Italians, Ivy Leaguers and others. The private Nixon, as shown by the Watergate tapes, was a veritable cauldron of resentments. He even called the ancient Greeks “fags.” Yet even in private the worst that Nixon says about blacks is that it may take them 500, not 50, years to fully integrate in America.40 In public, however, Nixon was quite the Machiavellian, and his public sta
tements—including his campaign appeals—are free of these private resentments.
The two biggest issues in the 1968 campaign were the war in Vietnam and, closely related, the antiwar movement in the United States. Nixon campaigned on a strong anti-communist, law-and-order platform. While embracing the welfare state—Nixon was no conservative on domestic issues—he also railed against what he termed the “excesses of bleeding heart liberalism.” Some progressives contend that while not explicitly racist, Nixon’s campaign themes reflected a covert or hidden racism. Nixon was supposedly sending “coded” messages to Deep South racists, speaking as if through a political “dog whistle.”
Now I have to say I consider this “dog whistle” argument to be somewhat strange. Is it really plausible that Deep South bigots, like dogs, have some kind of a heightened awareness of racial messages—messages that are somehow indecipherable to the rest of the country? Not really. Even so, let’s consider the possibility. I concede of course that most public policy issues, from taxes to crime to welfare, are entangled with race. A tax cut, for instance, will have a disproportionate impact on some groups as compared to other groups.
Precisely for this reason, however, it’s incumbent on progressives to have some basis of distinguishing “dog whistle” tactics from ordinary political appeals. Yet never have I seen anyone make this distinction. Progressive rhetoric almost inevitably assumes that Nixon is speaking in racial code. How can this be established, however, without looking at Nixon’s intention or, absent knowledge of his intention, the particular context in which Nixon said what he did? Context, in other words, is critical here.
Consider Nixon’s famous law-and-order platform, which is routinely treated as a racist dog whistle. Now a call for law and order is not inherently racist, and this theme from Nixon resonated not merely in the South but throughout the country. It should be noted that Nixon’s law-and-order argument was directed not merely at black rioters but also at mostly white violent antiwar protesters. Nixon condemned the Black Panthers but also the Weather Underground, led by a man whom I’ve subsequently debated, Bill Ayers, and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. In 2016, my wife Debbie and I had lunch with them in Chicago. Last time we checked, both of them were white.
What of Nixon’s supporters? Were they the stereotypical segregationist bigots we have encountered throughout this book? The left-wing historian Kevin Kruse thinks so. Kruse portrays as racist the phenomenon of “white flight,” which refers to middle-class whites moving out of the crime-ridden inner cities to the suburbs. Kruse terms this the politics of “suburban secession,” a deliberate invocation of the Confederacy itself, as if whites were “seceding” from the cities and establishing their own white nations in the suburbs.41
Yet Kruse conveniently omits the equivalent phenomenon of “black flight,” which refers to middle-class blacks doing the same thing as soon as they acquire the means to move to safer neighborhoods. Witness today the prosperous black suburbs of Washington, D.C., heavily populated with both whites and blacks who got out of the city. Does it make any sense to call all these people bigots? No. Wouldn’t Kruse himself do the same thing for the safety of his family? Of course he would.
Kruse’s portrait of Nixon’s base of white middle-class Republicans as a reincarnation of the Old South racists is contradicted by Norman Mailer, who reported on the Republican Convention in Miami Beach in 1968. He found “a parade of wives and children and men who owned hardware stores or were druggists, or first teller in the bank, proprietor of a haberdashery or principal of a small-town high school, local lawyer, retired doctor, a widow on a tidy income, her minister and fellow-delegate, minor executives from minor corporations, men who owned their farms.”42
As Mailer recognized, this was not a rally of Ku Klux Klansmen of the type that attended, say, the Democratic Convention of 1924. In fact, this was not a Southern-dominated group at all. Most of the attendees were from the Northeast, the Midwest and the West. This was Nixon’s “silent majority,” the ordinary Americans whom Nixon said worked hard and played by the rules and didn’t complain or set fire to anything and, precisely for this reason, had been ignored and even reviled by the Democratic Party.
Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon supported it. He also supported the Voting Rights Act the following year. When Nixon was elected in 1968, nearly 70 percent of African American children attended all-black schools. When he left, in 1974, that figure was down to 8 percent.
Tom Wicker, progressive columnist for the New York Times, gave his appraisal of Nixon’s desegregation efforts. “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort . . . That effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”43
The Nixon administration went even further, putting into effect the nation’s first affirmative action program. Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan and carried out by Nixon’s labor secretary, Arthur Fletcher, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions, first in Philadelphia and then throughout the country. Basically Nixon moved to kick in the closed union door and to force racist Democratic unions to admit blacks. The progressive legal scholar Neal Devins admits that Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan was “the genesis of affirmative action in government contracting (and arguably all federal affirmative action programs).”44
Let’s pause to consider: would a man who is seeking to build an electoral base of white supremacists in the Deep South promote the first program that actually discriminates in favor of blacks? Once again, progressives here go into their familiar hemming-and-hawing mode. Historian Howard Gillette is typical in that he insists Nixon only did this as a “wedge issue,” to break up the New Deal coalition that included both African Americans and racist white unions.45
But even if Nixon’s objectives were purely strategic, one would have expected him to break up this coalition by courting the white unions. Instead he courts black workers. He could hardly have expected that forcing white unions to hire blacks would have endeared him to the supposed racist constituency that had just elected him. Nixon’s resolute backing of affirmative action alone makes nonsense of the progressive view that his electoral base was made up of Deep South bigots.
LEARNING FROM GOLDWATER’S MISTAKE
Moreover, Nixon lost the Deep South. Goldwater won five Deep South states in 1964, the only states he carried other than his native Arizona. Not that Goldwater was a racist—he was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and had pushed to integrate the Arizona National Guard and the Phoenix public schools. He had supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which established a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, as well as another civil rights bill in 1960.
Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater’s principled stand was misunderstood by many African Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.
These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP, they cost the party dearly. Previously Martin Luther King Jr. had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives.
Even so, Nixon learned from Goldwater’s mistake. This point is made with unmistakable clarity in Kevin Phillips’ The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969. A recent article i
n the Huffington Post makes the standard progressive claim that Phillips “helped construct” Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Historian Dan Carter calls him its “nuts and bolts architect.” Yet Phillips admits that Nixon could not have read the book prior to the 1968 campaign since it didn’t come out until the following year. What Phillips set forth was not a recipe for Nixon’s success but an ex post facto explanation for how Nixon had succeeded.46
According to Phillips, Nixon understood that he could never win a majority by appealing to the Deep South. He had just seen Goldwater win that region and lose the rest of the country in considerable part because of his position on the Civil Rights Act. We should remember that in 1968 the Republican base was in the Northeast, the Midwest and some parts of the West. Nixon was not foolish enough to endanger this entire base while seeking merely to bag a handful of Deep South states.
What Nixon did, according to Phillips, was appeal to the Sun Belt, “a new conservative entity stretching from Florida across Texas to California.”47 The Sun Belt reflected a modernizing economy grounded in defense, manufacturing, technology and services and was—and still is—the fastest-growing part of the country. Phillips argued that whoever won the Sun Belt would win the presidency. Notice that the Sun Belt encompasses much of the South but stretches from coast to coast and includes non-Southern states like Arizona and Nixon’s home state of California.
In the South itself, Nixon targeted the urban population of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon was not after the Deep South states of Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina or Alabama; he barely campaigned in those states. Rather, he was after the Peripheral South states of Florida, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, the latter four of which Phillips calls “the four most reluctant Confederate states.”48 And within these states, Nixon’s campaign focused on cities: Tampa, Houston, Dallas, Little Rock, Norfolk, Raleigh, Nashville.
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