NB: The democracy described below is one of universal suffrage. The
Framers as well as the White Grievance Party (whichever one currently is
representing supremacy) have always been limited suffrage -- originally,
white male landowners. Although there have been many fundamental
inequities, the largest and most compelling to many who want suffrage is
wealth inequality as well as the lack of real opportunity (e.g.,
including an educational system that today will provide the underserved
with a "diploma" but without an education, including the lack of
tutoring to allow persons to get a real education, not just a diploma).
This institutional inequality is sometimes phrased as "the power to tax
is the power to destroy"
(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/111287-the-power-to-tax-is-the-power-to-destroy)
-- without understanding that there must be a limitation to both wealth
concentration as well as to wealth inequality for a meaningful universal
suffrage democracy to survive. Typically, the only non-violent (e.g.,
not war) methodology is to use taxation for meaningful wealth
distribution (including public provisioning such as universal health
care) and not simply as mechanism of wealth transference to the wealthy
(e.g., welfare for the wealthy).
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democracy-race-power/
The Party of White Grievance Has Never Cared About Democracy
From the Democrats of the Civil War era to the Republicans of the Trump
years, the white party has always posed the greatest threat to our
political system.
By Steve Phillips
May 26, 2021
Capitol building
(Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images)
The Nation
Alarm bells are ringing about the dangerous implications of the behavior
of the Republican Party. By doubling down on defense of the Big Lie that
the 2020 election was stolen, punishing any members who reject that lie,
refusing to support an investigation into the January 6 insurrection at
the Capitol, and unleashing a fusillade of voter suppression legislation
across the country, many see these actions as an ominous new trend in
American politics that threatens the foundations of our democracy itself.
Viewed through the lens of history, however, none of this is new. The
hard truth is that whichever United States political party has been most
rooted in the fears, anxieties, and resentments of white people has
never cared much about democracy or the Constitution designed to
preserve it. Those who do want to make America a multi-racial democracy
must face this fact with clear eyes and stiff spines to repel the
ever-escalating threats to the nation’s most cherished institutions and
values.
Contemporary analysis of domestic politics is obscured by the historical
fact that white Americans fearful of the ramifications of equality for
people of color have moved their political home from the Democratic
Party, which was their preferred vehicle at the time of the Civil War,
to the Republican Party, where they reside today. In the 19th century,
Democrats dominated the South, led 11 states to secede from the Union,
and waged a murderous multiyear war against their fellow Americans.
Today, it is the Republicans who are the standard-bearers of the
modern-day Confederate cause.
Whatever the label, the party that prioritized protecting white rights
has always been more willing to destroy the country than accept a
situation where people of color are equal and can participate in the
democratic process.
Donald Trump was not the first politician to refuse to accept the
results of a presidential contest. After Abraham Lincoln and the
anti-slavery Republican Party won the election of 1860, the Confederates
did not waste time filing lawsuits and trying to bully state election
officials into overturning their state’s election results. They simply
severed their ties with the United States of America, seceded from the
union with the defiant 1861 Cornerstone Speech by Confederate Vice
President Alexander Stephens declaring that “the negro is not equal to
the white man,” and quickly organized an army that killed hundreds of
thousands of their formerly fellow countrymen.
The violence, bloodshed, and contempt for America’s democratic
institutions did not end with the conclusion of the Civil War. Just five
days after the Confederates formally conceded defeat and surrendered on
April 9, 1865, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot the
president of the United States in the back of the head, having told
colleagues that Lincoln’s speech in support of allowing Black people to
vote “means nigger citizenship,” with Booth vowing, “That is the last
speech he will ever make.”
Even passage of constitutional amendments ending slavery, securing equal
protection of the laws to people of all races, and guaranteeing the
right to vote (the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments) meant little to the
political leaders committed to the concept that America is, first and
foremost, a white nation. Much as Southern leaders in the past few
months have passed a blizzard of voter suppression legislation in states
across the former Confederacy, so too did their predecessors furiously
draft laws designed to accomplish with pens and ink what they could not
achieve with guns and bullets.
In her book One Person, No Vote, Carol Anderson outlines the “dizzying
array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled
voter registration rules” adopted in 1890, all designed to evade and
undermine the 15th Amendment’s provision prohibiting laws restricting
voting “on account of race.” The antidemocratic motivation behind these
new laws was cheerily articulated at the time by Virginia State
Representative Carter Glass, who explained in 1890 that that era’s
election law reform was designed to ““eliminate the darkey as a
political factor.”
A hundred years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederates
continued the crusade of doing everything in their power to stop America
from becoming a multiracial democracy. As the civil rights movement
gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s, public officials and party
leaders across the old Confederacy openly defied and actively undermined
the pillars of American democracy.
In response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision desegregating public schools, public officials in Virginia’s
Prince Edward County shut down the entire school district for five
years. After civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and
Michael Schwerner were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964
for helping register Black people to vote, the state’s leaders
essentially sided with the white nationalist domestic terrorists
responsible for the killings by refusing to investigate or prosecute the
murderers (some of whom were public officials themselves).
The partisan political migration of the defenders of the Confederacy
began as the Black demands for the constitutionally-mandated rights of
equality and democracy began to reach a crescendo in the South in the
1960s. After Democrat Lyndon Johnson unequivocally embraced the cause of
multiracial democracy declaring in a 1965 nationally television address
that “their cause is our cause…and we shall overcome,” fearful whites
felt betrayed and abandoned, and Republicans swooped in to offer their
party as the home for white racial resentment.
What has been dubbed the Southern strategy began in the 1960s with South
Carolina segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond striking a deal with
Richard Nixon to rally white support for Nixon against Alabama’s
segregationist governor George Wallace’s more naked appeals to aggrieved
whites. It worked like a charm, building to the point where Ronald
Reagan sealed the deal by offering the unmistakable symbolic solidarity
of beginning his 1980 presidential candidacy with a pro “states’ rights”
speech to a massive crowd “almost entirely made up of whites” in the
very county where Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner were murdered.
More recently, the reaction to the election and governance of a Black
president mirrored prior periods of contempt for the Constitution and
resistance to public policies designed to benefit a multiracial
electorate. Echoing the actions of those who shut down school districts
rather than provide public education to students of all colors,
contemporary Confederates shut down the entire federal government in
2013 in attempt to stop the government from providing health care
through the Affordable Care Act to Americans. It is no accident that the
11 states of the Confederacy were the leaders in rejecting funding for
Medicaid.
Today, 82 percent of Republican voters are white, and the party has
comfortably won the white vote in every single presidential election
since Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The political home
of the defenders of the Confederacy and white power has shifted, but the
strategies and tactics of that constituency and its leaders has not.
While none of this new, fortunately the efforts to defend and expand
democracy also extend back over a century, offering important lessons
about how to repel efforts to destroy our democratic institutions.
The primary strategy that has worked—and we now have 160 years of
empirical evidence to back this up—has been putting the full force of
the federal government on the side of equality, justice, and democracy
for people of all racial backgrounds, not just white people.
What hasn’t worked is seeking compromise with those contemptuous of
democracy, the Constitution, and the social contract underlaying it.
Compromise only works when all parties are operating in good faith and
subscribing to the same set of core values. How do you compromise with
people who identify more with lynchers than with those being lynched?
The most dramatic example of deploying federal power, of course, is the
Civil War itself. Also instructive is that after the military conflict,
clear-eyed congressional leaders recognized the fragility of the victory
and the ferocity of the vanquished and made sure to pass constitutional
amendments to entrench equality in the country’s governing document in
the form of the 13, 14th, and 15th amendments (and even those were
fiercely resisted, barely mustering enough votes in Congress).
In the aftermath of the violent and bloody attacks on peaceful
protesters in the 1960s, who thought that the 15th Amendment did in fact
apply to them, Lyndon Johnson and Congress passed the Voting Rights Act
to, as Johnson said, “establish a simple, uniform standard which cannot
be used, however ingenious the effort, to flout our Constitution.”
In 2021, the imperative of the hour is to pass similar legislation as
was advanced in prior periods of intense conflict with the enemies of
equality. Specifically, HR 1, the For the People Act, and HR 4, the John
Lewis Voting Rights Act, will both protect the democratic process and
advance the cause of expanding democracy that the Republicans are
working so feverishly to obstruct.
Support our work with a digital subscription.
Get unlimited access: $9.50 for six months.
In addition to the voting rights legislation, President Biden can use
the full force of the bully pulpit of the presidency. More than 100
corporate executives have expressed concern about the viral spread of
voter suppression litigation, and he should rally all of them behind a
national crusade for democracy where every corporate, entertainment, and
sports leader uses their platform to aggressively promote and support
voting. Every Amazon package, for example, could come with an 800 number
on it on how to vote. Google could provide easy searching for how to
vote just as it’s doing for vaccines. iPhones could facilitate voter
registration.
Failure to meet this moment would be catastrophic. From the January 1861
start of Confederate secession from the Union to the January 6, 2021,
attempted insurrection and failed coup supported by 147 Republican
members of Congress, the political party fueled by white fear has
scoffed at the Constitution and mocked the notion of fidelity to country
over Caucasians. The result after the Civil War was nearly 100 years of
Jim Crow voter suppression, widespread domestic racial terrorism, and
raging inequality and injustice. None of this is new. The question is,
do the current political leaders recognize what is happening, and, if
so, do they have the courage to do something about it?
Steve Phillips is the host of Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips, a
color-conscious podcast about politics. He is a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress and is the author of Brown Is the New
White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American
Majority. He is a regular contributor to The Nation.
