So this was a switch: blacks switched from Republican to Democrat. Democrats could scarcely believe their good fortune. They found that they could continue to exclude, exploit, and subjugate blacks, and still get the black vote. Democratic strategists at the time expressed their amazement and delight that blacks votes came so cheap. In subsequent decades, progressive Democrats recognized that they could secure a virtually permanent hold on the black vote by creating plantation-style dependency on the state.
Later, Obama added a finishing touch to this macabre picture of welfare dependency by offering people free Obamaphones. This way, you see, he could even text you messages about how to support progressive Democrats and keep the benefits flowing in your direction.
LYNDON JOHNSON’S UPPITY NEGROES
The third member of this progressive troika—building upon Wilson and FDR—was Lyndon Johnson. During Johnson’s tenure the Democratic Party completed the tilt away from old-style racism toward progressivism. In his early career, Johnson was a typical racist southern Democrat. But over time Johnson evolved.
What shape did this evolution take? Johnson came to understand that keeping blacks and other minorities in the Democratic camp required him to be more creative, more flexible. Not that Johnson became a convert to the idea of black improvement. On the contrary, he was convinced that keeping blacks poor and dependent was essential to maintaining long-term Democratic supremacy.
Why was this? Part of the reason was to retain the black vote. If blacks became independent they would have no more reason to vote Democratic. There was also a second reason. Black suffering gave Democratic progressivism a continuing claim to “social justice.” In other words, black hardship provided a fund of moral capital that Democrats could use to cajole and intimidate voters into supporting a centralized progressive state and keeping progressive Democrats in power.
Johnson and his fellow Democrats cynically recognized that as long as blacks were beholden to them—as long as they stayed on the Democratic plantation—anyone who dissented from the progressive program could then be accused of being anti-black. Republicans who opposed progressivism could be charged with being racist! Blacks themselves—politically beholden to their providers—could be counted on to make these accusations. They could also be counted on to keep other blacks on the progressive plantation.
In an incredible twist, black conservatives and the party of black emancipation and of civil rights could now be tarred with the charge of bigotry and being against civil rights. Of course black leaders needed help to sustain these charges, especially with young people. So progressive historians and pundits kept up a drumbeat of progressive Democratic propaganda. To this day, they continue to recite those mantras, hoping that young people will swallow their story line about Republican perfidy and Democratic virtue.
What Lyndon Johnson actually thought about blacks was something else entirely. Here’s what Johnson actually said, in a conversation with Democratic Senator Richard Russell of Georgia: “These niggers, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they got something now that they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” Otherwise, Johnson concluded, blacks may start voting Republican and “it’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”19
This was not the only time Johnson—even after his evolution from a racist Democrat to a progressive Democrat—used the N word. Traveling on Air Force One with two Democratic governors, Johnson told them how important it was to him that they vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The governors asked why. Johnson replied that it was part of his long-term strategy. “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.”20
We can see from this statement that Johnson—hailed as a progressive civil rights hero—remained a thoroughgoing racist. I don’t mean to place him in a special category; rather, he belongs in the same category as a multitude of other Democrats. The significance of Johnson’s statement is not in his predictable bigotry, but in his recognition that, for the first time, Democrats needed the black vote.
Previously Democrats sought to prevent blacks from voting in the South, and maintained Democratic majorities by monopolizing the white vote. This was done, as we saw, through boisterous appeals to racism and white supremacy. But as the South became more prosperous economically during the 1950s and 1960s, the racist appeal lost its currency and white southern Democrats realized that they had more in common with the Republican Party. They identified with the GOP idea of controlling your own destiny and improving your own life.
In a remarkable book, The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston make the case that white southerners switched to the Republican Party not because of racism but because they identified the GOP with economic opportunity and upward mobility. As the agrarian South became more industrial and then post-industrial, white southerners switched parties not because of race but because of economic prospects. Interestingly, whites moved to the Republican Party for the same reason blacks moved to the Democratic Party: both groups saw the journey as congruent with their economic self-interest.
Shafer and Johnston show how Democrats tried, and failed, to keep southern whites in the fold by appealing to racism. Southern whites, however, migrated to the GOP as the party that better represented their interests and aspirations. Shafer and Johnston supply reams of data to substantiate their claim that the poorest, most racist whites remained Democratic, while more prosperous whites who were not racist were more likely to become Republicans. To the horror of the Democratic Party, the South moved in the Republican direction as white southerners embraced the GOP as the non-racist party of economic opportunity and patriotism.21
Johnson grew up in rural Texas; he fully understood the politics of the South. He knew that if the Democratic Party were to maintain its viability in the region, it would have to rely on the black vote as never before. This is the basis of Johnson’s insistence that the Democrats, however reluctantly, offer blacks something. Johnson wanted to give as little as possible—he needed the blacks poor and dependent, rather than self-reliant and upwardly-mobile—but he was candid that the rules had changed and blacks had to be bought off with new benefits in order to keep them on the Democratic plantation.
Now we can understand Johnson’s motive for championing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson fought hard for it because his party depended on it. He also knew that the main resistance would come from his own party, as indeed it did. A later generation of progressives would rewrite textbooks creating the false impression that the Republicans were the ones in opposition. Johnson knew better. He actively recruited Republicans across the aisle to help him defeat his fellow Democrats who feverishly tried to block the landmark laws of the Civil Rights Movement.
WHICH PARTY OPPOSED CIVIL RIGHTS?
The voting rolls of the Civil Rights laws speak for themselves. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House with 153 out of 244 Democrats voting for it, and 136 out of 171 Republicans. This means that 63 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans voted “yes.” In the Senate, 46 out of 67 Democrats (69 percent) and 27 out of 33 Republicans (82 percent) supported the measure.
The pattern was similar for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It passed the House 333–85, with 24 Republicans and 61 Democrats voting “no.” In the Senate, 94 percent of Republicans compared with 73 percent of Democrats supported the legislation.
Here’s a revealing tidbit: had Republicans voted for the Civil Rights laws in the same proportion as Democrats, these laws would not have passed. Republicans, more than Democrats, are responsible for the second civil rights revolution, just as they were solely responsible for the first one. For the second time around, Republicans were mainly the good guys and Democrats were mainly the bad guys.
Here’s further proof: the main opposition to the
Civil Rights Movement came from the Dixiecrats. Note that the Dixiecrats were Democrats; as one pundit wryly notes, they were Dixiecrats and not Dixiecans. The Dixiecrats originated as a breakaway group from the Democratic Party in 1948. For a time, the Dixiecrats attempted to form a separate party and run their own presidential ticket, but this attempt failed and the Dixiecrats reconstituted themselves as a rebel faction within the Democratic Party.
Joined by other Democrats who did not formally ally themselves with this faction, the Dixiecrats organized protests against desegregation rulings by the Supreme Court. Dixiecrat governors refused to enforce those rulings. Dixiecrats in the Senate also mounted filibusters against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson’s Democratic allies in Congress required Republican votes in order to defeat a Dixiecrat-led filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Leading members of the Dixiecrat faction were James Eastland, Democrat from Mississippi; John Stennis, Democrat from Mississippi; Russell Long, Democrat from Louisiana; Strom Thurmond, Democrat from South Carolina; Herman Talmadge, Democrat from Georgia; J. William Fulbright, Democrat from Arkansas; Lester Maddox, Democrat from Georgia; Al Gore Sr., Democrat from Tennessee; and Robert Byrd, Democrat from West Virginia. Of these only Thurmond later joined the Republican Party. The rest of them remained Democrats.
The Dixiecrats weren’t the only racists who opposed civil rights legislation. So did many other Democrats who never joined the Dixiecrat faction. These were racists who preferred to exercise their influence within the Democratic Party, which after all had long been the party of racism, rather than create a new party. Richard Russell of Georgia—who now has a Senate Building named after him—and James Eastland of Mississippi are among the segregationist Democrats who refused to join the Dixiecrat faction.
Now the GOP presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater, did vote against the Civil Rights Act. But Goldwater was no racist. In fact, he had been a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. He was active in integrating the Phoenix public schools. He had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Goldwater opposed the 1964 act because it outlawed private as well as public discrimination, and Goldwater believed the federal government did not have legitimate authority to restrict the private sector in that way. I happen to agree with him on this—a position I argued in The End of Racism. Even so, Goldwater’s position was not shared by a majority of his fellow Republicans.
It was Governor Orval Faubus, Democrat of Arkansas, who ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop black students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School—until Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops from the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation. In retaliation, Faubus shut down all the public high schools in Little Rock for the 1958–59 school year.
It was Governor George Wallace, Democrat of Alabama, who attempted to prevent four black students from enrolling in elementary schools in Huntsville, Alabama, until a federal court in Birmingham intervened. Bull Connor, the infamous southern sheriff who unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters, was a Democrat.
Progressives who cannot refute this history—facts are stubborn things—nevertheless create the fantasy of a Nixon “Southern strategy” that supposedly explains how Republicans cynically appealed to racism in order to convert southern Democrats into Republicans. In reality Nixon had no such strategy—as we have seen, it was Lyndon Johnson who had a southern strategy to keep blacks from defecting to the Republican Party. Johnson, not Nixon, was the true racist, a fact that progressive historiography has gone to great lengths to disguise.
Nixon’s political strategy in the 1968 campaign is laid out in Kevin Phillips’s classic work The Emerging Republican Majority. Phillips writes that the Nixon campaign knew it could never win the presidency through any kind of racist appeal. Such an appeal, even if it won some converts in some parts of the Lower South, would completely ruin Nixon’s prospects in the rest of the country. Nixon’s best bet was to appeal to the rising middle classes of the Upper South on the basis of prosperity and economic opportunity.22 This is exactly what Nixon did.
There are no statements by Nixon that even remotely suggest he appealed to racism in the 1968 or 1972 campaigns. Nixon never displayed the hateful, condescending view of blacks that Johnson did. The racist vote in 1968 didn’t go to Nixon; it went to George Wallace. A longtime Democratic segregationist, Wallace campaigned that year on an independent ticket. Nixon won the election but Wallace carried the Deep South states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
Nixon supported expanded civil rights for blacks throughout his career while Johnson was—for the cynical reasons given above—a late convert to the cause. Nixon went far beyond Johnson in this area; in fact, Nixon implemented America’s first affirmative action program which involved the government forcing racist unions in Philadelphia to hire blacks.
To sum up, starting in the 1930s and continuing to the present, progressive Democrats developed a new solution to the problem of what they saw as useless people. In the antebellum era, useless people from the Democratic point of view were mainly employed as slaves. In the postbellum period, southern Democrats repressed, segregated, and subjugated useless people, seeking to prevent them from challenging white supremacy or voting Republican. Meanwhile, northern progressives like Margaret Sanger sought to prevent useless people from being born. Today’s progressives, building on the legacy of Wilson, FDR, and Johnson, have figured out what to do with useless people: turn them into Democratic voters.
CHAPTER 6
PROGRESSIVISM ÜBER ALLES
THE SECRET PACT BETWEEN PROGRESSIVISM AND FASCISM
I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished. I don’t mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman.1
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Mussolini
Hillary Clinton has a big idea that she intends to be the centerpiece of her 2016 campaign. She wants to turn college education into a new entitlement, like health care. To this end, she has an ambitious proposal to help cover the costs of higher education. “Under my plan,” she says, “tuition would be affordable for every family. Students should never have to take out a loan to pay for tuition at their state’s public university.”2
Hillary’s proposal is not “free college” but rather “debt-free college.” For “free college”—or at least free public university education—we have to turn to Bernie Sanders. Hillary is offering the discount program while Bernie comes closest to offering the free program. Bernie’s plan offers no tuition and no fees at public universities. While Hillary’s plan is estimated to cost $350 billion over ten years, Bernie’s plan would cost $70 billion a year.
Under Hillary’s proposal, students and their parents would still pay according to their ability. The federal government would dispatch money to the states to subsidize public universities, which would be pressured to lower costs. So students at state-run universities would presumably get a debt-free education. A fully free education would only be available to some students: low-income students and students who enrolled in government programs like Americorps.3
Critics of Hillary’s program, such as Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum call these plans “Obamacare for higher education.” Obama I think would approve of this label. A couple of years ago, Obama himself offered a $60 billion proposal to make community college free. Even though Obama’s plan languished in the Republican-dominated Congress, Bernie and Hillary build on it, even though they intend to take it much further over the next several years.
Both Hillary and Bernie’s plans appeal to a lot of young people. College debt is a serious problem—it totals $1.3 trillion at last count—so debt-free sounds good. Even more attractive is the idea of not paying for college at all. Young people have historically responded well to offers of “free food” and “free drinks.” Why then should they not respond equally wel
l to the idea of a free college education?
Of course it would never occur to these same young people to work for free when they graduate. And, they would surely realize if they thought about it, college isn’t actually free. Obviously there are buildings to construct and maintain, facilities to operate, faculty to pay, and innumerable other costs to bear. Someone has to foot the bills for all this.
If students and their families are not the ones who are paying, who is? Hillary and Bernie both answer: the taxpayer. The government will pay. College isn’t free, but it’s free to you. Your entitlement comes at someone else’s expense.
The government will pay, but the government, it turns out, doesn’t have the money. Over and above existing allocations for Pell Grants and other federal subsidies, there are no discretionary funds lying about that can be used to fund young people’s college education.
Hillary and Bernie both want to get the money for their college subsidy programs from Wall Street. That means Congress would have to approve higher taxes. If Congress doesn’t do this, there is only one other way to pay: the government would have to borrow the money. The United States government is $19 trillion in debt and counting. So under Hillary’s plan, $350 billion would be added to the national debt over the next decade. Bernie’s plan would add even more.
What happens to that debt? Ultimately it has to be paid. If this generation isn’t going to pay it, then it is going to be passed down to the next generation. It goes, in other words, to young people. They inherit the debt and the accumulated interest from their profligate predecessors. In the end, the national debt is a claim upon the future earnings of the younger generation.
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Page 16