George Wallace was a Democrat, so what?

Updated.

Crypto-Confederate Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is taking over from now crypto-Republican Senator Arlen Specter as the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Sessions is a Senator because once upon a time he didn't get to be a federal judge.  He didn't get to be a federal judge because the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time took a look at his record as a U.S. Attorney and the Attorney General of Alabama and recoiled in horror.  There was enough in that record to suggest that Sessions had missed his true calling in life as a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and he took up a career as a government lawyer as the next best way he could think of to undo the Civil Rights movement.

Since he's been in the Senate, Sessions has done his best to prove that the Judiciary Committee was wrong to turn down his nomination for the judgeship because putting him on the bench would have kept him out of the Senate.

Now he's going to be the Republican point man in opposing anyone and everyone President Obama nominates to the Supreme Court and other federal benches, and lest you think that this is just one of those unfortunate accidents of the seniority system and the Republicans might be embarrassed by having an obvious racist heading up their fight against the first African-American President's judicial nominees, they arranged it.  If the seniority system had been working as usual, Iowan Charles Grassley would have stepped right up to replace Specter.

Politics is complicated and messy and, as TPM's Brian Beutler reports, the arrangement was made for Grassley's ultimate benefit not Sessions', but the point is that while they were arranging things the GOP leadership could have arranged it so that someone other than Sessions stepped in and they didn't.  They don't care about Sessions' racism.  They don't mind having someone who is nostalgic for the days of Jim Crow not only in their caucus but as one of their leaders.  They've been quite comfortable with the company of racists for decades.  Why, some of their best friends are racists.

Hell, some of them are racists too, if the truth be told, and darn that political correctness for not letting us tell it.

I have a new reader who I think is a conservative---he or she might just be a contrarian who has briefed himself or herself for the conservatives---who came to the blog for the Dickens but left his or her first comment about the politics.  It was a long, carefully written comment, and I appreciate the effort and hope whoever it is keeps coming back.  I promise more Dickens posts! 

In Monday's post, Hey, hey, my, my, the Republican Party will never die, I wrote that the Republican Party has allowed itself to become the party of greedy rich white folks and bigots, a not unreasonable assertion, since it's, you know, true.

PJK took exception and wrote:

Do you know anything of the other party's history? The Democratic party staunchly defended slavery from its earliest days thru the Civil War (and many northern Dems sympathized with the South during that war). Then they fought against and finally brought an end to Reconstruction (the price of accepting Hayes as president in 1876). And the alliance of Dixiecrats and northern machine Dems kept southern blacks disenfranchised until the 1950's. For all that time-- a century and a half-- it was the party of Jefferson which was linked to slavery, segregation, and Ku Klux terrorism.

I've seen this before.  Whenever they're faced with evidence of racism in their midst, Conservatives resort to pointing out that the Democrats have not always been a party full of saints and heroes.

Well, we've rarely been a party full of saints and heroes.

But besides insulting us with the assumption that we don't know that the Democratic Party was for a long time a congenial home for slaveowners, secessionists, and segregationists, don't these conservatives know that we're glad to talk about it because it gives a chance to brag---because we ran the racists out?  We closed the door on the  last of them a long time ago.

Forty-five years ago now.

The Democratic Party had a divided soul since its inception.  It was the party of Southern planters, which is to say the party of the slavers, but it was also the party of the urban middle and working class and the party of the small farmers in the South and on the western frontier (at the time that meant upstate New York and then expanded to Ohio and the northwest territories that are now Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.  Abraham Lincoln's father was a Democrat).  These three groups had very different interests and ideals but they were united in their fear and loathing of the Northeastern capitalist elites who eventually came to dominate the Republican Party after the Civil War.  But both the small farmers and the urban workers were highly suspicious of their Southern planter allies who they were afraid would be just as glad to see all free labor everywhere replaced with slave labor and wouldn't much mind what color those slaves were, when you got right down to it.

So there was a tension between the factions from the start and alliances were fitful and uneasy.  Also, in the 19th Century all politics really was local and locally, that is up in the Northern cities, the Democrats figured out quickly that they could increase their power by increasing their numbers by recruiting among the tens of thousands of European immigrants pouring into the country.  First, they signed up the Irish.  Then the Irish in their turn signed up the Italians and the Jews and later the Puerto Ricans and Chicanos and...you can see where this is going...the party of the Ku Klux Klan was also the party of Catholics and Jews.

More tension.

I'm eliding too much because time is short, but the Progressive Era arrived, and it arrived at about the same time the Northeastern Capitalists took control of the Republican Party lock, stock, and barrel, during the Presidency of William McKinley.  Theodore Roosevelt resisted, with some success, but he goofed---he decided not to run for what would have been essentially a third term, thinking that his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, was as committed to the Progressive cause as himself.  Not quite.  In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, who temperamentally and in principle was probably not as Progressive as either Roosevelt or Taft, captured the White House and with it the Progressive movement for the Democrats.

Meanwhile, down south, thanks to all those small farmers, the Democratic Party, while racist, was also strongly populist and progressive.  This became a moral challenge for Franklin Roosevelt, who could count on the enthusiastic support of Southern politicians as long as he didn't push them on the issue of Civil Rights.  So he didn't push.

But he nudged.

And that annoyed a lot of Southerners, who began to wonder if the Democratic Party really did want their votes, and who could count and could see that certain numbers were running against them.  The urban Democrats were at it again, recruiting among the new wave of immigrants to the cities.  This wave wasn't coming from overseas though.  It was coming from within, up from the South, as African-Americans moved North to escape Jim Crow and to get jobs in the factories.  Urban white Democrats were not necessarily more enlightened on the subject of race than white Southerners, but they liked to win elections and they were happy to let black people vote and understood black people expected certain things in return for those votes.

Southern Democrats knew that it wouldn't be long before Northern Democrats would be able to outvote them and they had two choices:  accommodate themselves to the changes that they could see coming or leave the Party.

I said we ran the racists out but the truth is they started leaving on their own, starting with Strom Thurmond's run for the Presidency as a proud Dixiecrat in 1948. 

More elision.  It's 1964, Lyndon Johnson is President.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act was a Democratically-led but still bi-partisanship achievement and many Republicans did themselves proud not just by voting for the Act but by having supported the Civil Rights Movement generally.  They were rewarded for their courage and effort by being reviled within their own Party.  The GOP had been moving farther and farther to the right to the point that even Dwight Eisenhower was no longer a hero to the base.  Liberal and moderate Republicans were finding it more congenial, and more productive, to work with liberal and moderate Democrats.  Right Wing Republicans were finding it more congenial, if not nearly as productive, because they were still the minority, to work with those Southern Democrats who could not get over their segregationist hatred for the Liberals who now controlled their party.

The party of slavery, secession, and segregation had become the party of Civil Rights.

Where was a die-hard racist to go?

Ideally, the answer should have been home.

It turned out to be the Republican Party.  The Right Wing Corporatists who ran the Party were happy to welcome them as long as they helped the GOP become the majority party, and here we are.

That's the history, in too small a nutshell.

I don't know what point conservatives think they're making by pointing it out.  Yes, once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of George Wallace.  Once upon a time the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln.  But what does that say about either party today?  Jeff Sessions is a Republican, a leader of the Party, in good standing and held in high regard.

Meanwhile, the African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee is telling Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe that they're not welcome in the Party anymore.

Updated because Rachel is smarter than me and more fun and she's on video: 

_____________

Digby says:

These wingnuts truly seem to believe that the reason people voted for a left leaning Democratic government across the board was because they actually wanted a far right government. If that makes sense to you, then you must be a conservative too.

Comments

[PrahaPartizan]

You might have also pointed out that pragmatic Demcorats recognized during WW2 that our racist attitudes were imperiling the nation. The United States had a larger population than the Soviet Union, but something like one-sixth of it was African-American, which reduced the potential size of the military accordingly. None other than a child of a slave state, Harry Truman of Missouri, had enough common sense to move on correcting that problem. That's one of the other factors which differentiates real Democrats from Republicans: common sense. Republicans would rather hold their hate close to their bosoms because it feels so good as your boat goes down for the last time. I hate to throw this in, but it is just like the Nazis in WW2 who were shuttling Jews around inside the Reich, to and from death camps, and using up railroad resources accordingly because it was more important to kill Jews than the enemies who were slashing across your borders and bombing your cities. We know how that little experiment in hate ended too, but the haters just can't let go.

[burritoboy]

Your narrative has a number of serious problems:

1. "many Republicans did themselves proud not just by voting for the Act but by having supported the Civil Rights Movement generally. They were rewarded for their courage and effort by being reviled within their own Party."

I think you are getting the timeline wrong here. The liberal Republicans who voted for the Civil Rights Act generally did fine. They were not reviled within their own party. They became more and more marginalized as the party saw it could exploit the backlash against integregation and busing in the North, roughly between 5-10 years after the passage of the CRA, but they weren't reviled perse.

2. "Urban white Democrats were not necessarily more enlightened on the subject of race than white Southerners, but they liked to win elections and they were happy to let black people vote and understood black people expected certain things in return for those votes."

Not only is that simply dubious, it was strongly UNTRUE about many Democratic urban machines in the North: for example, the careers of Sam Yorty, Frank Rizzo, Richard J Daley, and many others whose regimes were strongly implicitly racist and not infrequently explicitly racist. There is a reason why the Reagan Democrats emerged as such a powerful demographic from the late 60s onward. While most of the urban Democratic machines of the North were willing to let blacks technically vote, they were only willing to let blacks vote if those votes were entirely meaningless.

[burritoboy]

It's more accurate to say that both parties were substantially reshuffled at least twice (and probably more like three or four or more times) over the period 1860 through today.

If you're ignoring the phenomenon of the strong move right throughout the US (and certainly not at all confined to the South) from 1968 onwards, then your history is so partial it's not very useful at all.

[Jeremy]

The problem with your theory is that you equate opposing Obama's policies on their merits with "racism". Even though Republicans brought about affirmative action, you equate the opposition to it as "racism", instead of equal rights. Where does the 14th amendment say that "one shall be given undue favorable consideration for employment/education, due to their skin color". Do you think this is what real civil rights activists wanted, to be given a pass based on white guilt, or do you think they wanted the opportunity to prove themselves equally, if not more, worthy of fair treatment than their white counterparts based on the merits of their own skills and education? Why dont you tell me how stifling the societal development of an entire group of people with govt handouts and programs amounts to "equality". People like you dont have the mental capacity to understand the harm your "animal farm" policies do to the populace at large.