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You can follow the path of today�s Republican Party�which many in the media believe represents an eight-lane superhighway to power�and, if you follow the routes that flow into it long enough and far enough eventually you will find yourself on a dusty dirt road somewhere in the rural South. As your tires grate in the dirt, the dust rises and hangs in the humid air, ghostlike, until you make out the specter of one James Strom Thurmond.
Occasionally, events like Virginia Senator George Allen�s infamous �macaca� remark, the GOP’s opposition to renewing the Voting Rights Act (see previous post), or Louisiana Senator Trent Lott�s �Thurmond was right� remark lift the veil on a dirty little secret about today�s Republican Party: its roots lie squarely in the racist, Dixiecrat ideology of segregationists like Strom Thurmond. Doug Marquardt at All Things Democrat lists some of these ties between Southern Republicans and the old Confederacy.
If you remember your history, Thurmond and the Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in 1948 over the Democrats� insistence on what Hubert Humphrey called in a famous speech that precipitated a delegate walkout lead by Thurmond, walking �out of the shadow of states’ rights and.. forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.� Running for president on the States Rights Party ticket, Thurmond managed to capture most of the old Confederate states.
In 1964, Thurmond split with the Democrats for good, announcing he would support Barry Goldwater against Lyndon Johnson. “If the American people permit the Democratic Party to return to power,” Thurmond said, �Freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intimidation and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington.”
If someone today were to read that statement, but not tell you who said it, you might guess any number of prominent contemporary GOP politicians, including George W. Bush as well as Allen and Lott. For Thurmond�s words in essence became the foundation of today�s Republican Party. For all the revival of Barry Goldwater it is important to note that the only states he carried in Johnson�s 1964 landslide win were the former Dixiecrat states plus his own Arizona.
In 1968, Richard Nixon, no slouch at adding up votes, capitalized on Thurmond�s defection as well as those of some of his colleagues and created what was called the Southern Strategy, which some historians credit to Thurmond and later White House aide Harry Dent. But the person who most realized what Thurmond had bequeathed him was none other than Ronald Reagan, who clothed the segregationist �states� rights� in respectable clothes, morphing it into opposition to �big government.� That has been the Republican mantra ever since.
Lately a new generation of Southern historians has been tracking the path from the Dixiecrats to today�s GOP. In The Rise of Southern Republicans, Earl and Merle Black make a convincing case, backed by a daunting number of charts and tables, that it was Reagan who truly solidified the South for the GOP. In her fascinating study of the Dixiecrat rebellion, historian Kari Frederickson writes, �Thurmond and the Dixiecrats represented a reaction to the modern welfare state that over time would reach a broader audience frightened by school desegregation decisions, fair housing laws, and race riots and eventually give rise to the backlash led by George Wallace and to the growth of the Republican Party in the South.�
For many Democrats and Liberals, the gospel of the moment is preached by George Lakoff, who has done wonderful work in pointing out the importance of framing. Yet, Allen and others remind us that without the perspective of history we have little understanding of the roots of our current dilemma. I have written much more on this past in The Strange Death of Liberal America, tracing it back into the 19th century, but all you have to do is open an almanac to find the ghost of Strom Thurmond. Southern states typically rank near or at the bottom of surveys on education and health care�two areas where government must play a role–whether in measures such as student performance or infant mortality.
As it has remade America, the Republican Party borrowed this template, cutting back spending on education, health care, and welfare with a zeal that would have pleased the Confederate apologists. Today, GOP budgets for social programs both federally and locally seem to be trying to emulate those of Mississippi and Alabama. The question all Americans need to ask is, do we want our entire country to follow this path?
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