Posted on 12/16/2002 11:16:37 AM PST by new cruelty
By Cynthia Tucker
The spectacle of conservatives scurrying to denounce Trent Lott has provided comic relief in a capital otherwise obsessed with a dubious war. But it's hard to take Lott's GOP critics seriously. After all, he is not the only reactionary in their ranks.
The simple fact is that the modern Republican Party has built a Southern power base by accommodating racists. Lott may become a sacrificial lamb -- forced to give up his assumed position as the next Senate majority leader -- but that won't change the dirty little secret that fuels the GOP's Southern juggernaut: Whenever it is politically expedient, Republicans cozy up to segregationists, Confederate sympathizers, anti-immigrationists and other mossbacks who still resent the civil rights movement.
As political scientists Earl and Merle Black note in their book, "The Rise of Southern Republicans," the ascension of the Republican Party in the South can be traced back to Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964 on a states' rights platform that rejected desegregation.
With Goldwater's campaign, they wrote, "the (Republican) party attracted many racist Southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. ... Gradually, a new Southern politics emerged in which blacks and liberal to moderate whites anchored the Democratic Party while many conservatives and some moderate whites formed a growing Republican Party that owed little to Abraham Lincoln but much to Goldwater and even more to (Ronald) Reagan."
Lott has spent the last several days apologizing for his endorsement of the segregationist platform from which retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948. At a party for Thurmond earlier this month, Lott had reminded his colleagues that his home state of Mississippi had supported Thurmond's bid.
"We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either," Lott declared.
His apologies notwithstanding, he meant what he said. He had made nearly identical remarks in 1980, after Thurmond gave a fiery speech in support of Reagan's presidential bid. Lott also has a long history of association with the Conservative Citizens Council, an heir of the old segregationist White Citizens' Councils of the 1960s.
But Lott is hardly the only prominent Republican who is comfortable consorting with bigots. In 1998, John Ashcroft (news - web sites), then a U.S. senator, was interviewed by Southern Partisan, the last redoubt of secessionism. Among other quaint views, the magazine celebrates the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, defends slavery, and holds in high regard Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ashcroft praised Southern Partisan. "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
Yet President Bush (news - web sites) still nominated Ashcroft as his attorney general, and he was easily confirmed.
Indeed, Bush himself yielded to the expediency of the Southern strategy when he found himself in a tough primary campaign in South Carolina. Bush boosted his chances by giving a speech at Bob Jones University, a bastion of ultra-conservative Christianity which not only opposed interracial dating at the time but also espoused a virulent anti-Catholicism. In so doing, Bush sent a signal to the fergit-hell crowd that he was on their side.
As recently as this election season, Georgia's Gov.-elect, Sonny Perdue, sent a similar signal by campaigning as the champion of the Confederate battle flag, which had been exiled by the Democratic incumbent. Thousands of resentful whites threw their support to him, assuring his victory over incumbent Roy Barnes.
Given the Republican Party's rich tradition of cozying up to bigots, Lott's remarks are no surprise. And his GOP colleagues' denunciations are no comfort.
Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for the Atlanta Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.
She pretty much referred to everyone in her column as a racist.
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