Kathleen Parker on Race and the Republicans

Kathleen Parker wrote a column lamenting the Republican party’s lack of racial diversity. I don’t have any quarrel with her thesis — I’d like the party to do a better job of attracting blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, too — but I found one remark of Parker’s puzzling.

>>>>Republicans can honestly boast of having once been the party of firsts. The first Hispanic, African American, Asian American and Native American in the Senate were all Republicans. But that was before the GOP went south, banished its centrists and embraced social conservatives in a no-exit marriage.<<<<

In 90 percent of political commentary, the phrase “social conservatives” means people who oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. Hispanics have been slightly more likely, and blacks much more likely, to be social conservatives by this definition. Social conservatism polls better among both groups than does economic conservatism.

The Republican party’s notable minority stars, some of them mentioned in Parker’s column, are slightly more likely to be socially conservative (again using the standard definition) than white Republican officeholders. There are a lot of reasons Republicans tend to do badly among minority groups. If there’s any evidence that the party’s social conservatism is one of them, I haven’t seen it.

...But that was before the GOP went south, banished its centrists and embraced social conservatives in a no-exit marriage...

Marco Rubio?

No, she's talking about "crackerheads". Southern whites, who bolted the Democratic Party after Harry Truman and Hubert Humphrey embraced the black ward heelers and their demand to act against Them -- the Southern populists and their racist social politics. The Democrats ran Them out of the Party, or rather they themselves did. Their Dixiecrat protest movement, combined with the rumping-off of the Stalinists with Henry Wallace at the same time, failed when they failed to deny Harry Truman reelection against Tom Dewey in the famous "midnight reversal" election of 1948.

Jack Kennedy was the last Democrat successfully to paper over the racial rift in the Democratic Party, and by 1964 it was all over -- the South broke for Goldwater, and then LBJ and the FBI beat up the Southern "white citizens committees" and sent some of them to prison, and just about anyone with ties to the KKK. Johnson sent Leon Panetta down to Louisiana, e.g., with orders to take over the Louisiana school system and stomp on the segs: he did so by offering high schools new football equipment. When they accepted it, Panetta then called in their school boards seriatim, in his high terrible aspect as LBJ's executioner, and informed them that a) they could not resign, b) they could not refuse any order, and c) anyone who did not do exactly what he was told to do, when Panetta told him to do it, would spend the rest of his life in a federal prison. That's how Louisiana schools were integrated under LBJ, and it was kept out of the papers, because it was 1966, Vietnam and defeating LBJ had not yet become an obsession for the Left, and LBJ was still, in the immortal phrase of Molly Ivins years later, "sooo good on the issues".

LBJ remarked that he had just given the GOP the White House for the next 20 or 40 years when he signed one of the big civil-rights bills in 1964 or 1965 (the latter, the Voting Rights Act, should have been called the Take-Away-Voting-Rights Act, and is probably unconstitutional: it impaired the powers of the old Confederate States by statute, making their powers to hold elections subordinate to the approval of the Civil Rights Division of the FBI, i.e. the President).

The problem with LBJ's driving Southern whites out of the Democratic Party by making them legal pariahs was that nobody consulted the GOP about this, whose members, remembering Lincoln and Unionism, had proudly voted for both of the civil-rights acts and all their ancillary legislation. They didn't like Southern whites, with whom they'd once fought a brutal war of attrition for control of the country's destiny (making it over from a federal republic of circumscribed powers into a centralized, departmentalized empire with a despotic legislature and an increasingly despotic executive), and they flat didn't like "those people".

That is the divide that animates e.g. George H.W. and Barbara Bush today: they utterly despised people like Rick Perry, Phil Gramm, and other ex-Dixiecrats and considered them below-the-salt socially and indeed barely worth employing as kitchen help. Bush Sr., whose family came from Ohio by way of Yale and the U.S. Senate (Connecticut), refused to embrace them and has always detested them more-or-less openly.

That's what you're seeing when someone like Kathleen Parker or David Frum sneers about "social conservatives": they mean "Kluxers", "racists", "drooling seditious Bircher bigots". In other words, Them.

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