Looking back at the stalwarts of the Right in those days—Goldwater, William F. Buckley, William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, and Ronald Reagan—one can say that it was always something, always something that pissed them off about the Civil Rights movement. William F. Buckley supported black protests like the Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott and the first sit-ins, but also argued that southern whites, being “culturally superior” to blacks, had the “right” to maintain control over southern society by whatever means necessary—even extra-legal ones—and the Constitution be damned, an argument similar to the one made by Rehnquist while he was clerking at the Supreme Court, though Rehnquist at least spared us the notion of racially based cultural superiority. According to Buckley, an illiterate white was “culturally superior” to a black Ph.D. (or even, one supposes, a black bishop) simply on the basis of the color of his skin. In the Reagan era, of course, both men would worship at the shrine of the “color-blind Constitution,” exalting the federal power over state and local governments alike to prevent affirmative action in favor of blacks, though they had studiously ignored a century of brutal “affirmative action” in favor of whites. States’ rights, dude, states’ rights! They always apply! Except when they don’t!
In his article, Tannenhaus lays a good deal of the blame to John C. Calhoun, who, he says, became a bit of a cult figure among conservatives of the time. In fact, conservatives, particularly after 1960, were looking for anyone who could help them figure out how to control a democratic society without having to actually, you know, win an election. To many, Nixon’s loss to JFK proved that they couldn’t win with a fake conservative, much less a real one. There had to be a way to arrange things so that the minority ruled. In the aftermath of 1960, Ronald Reagan, along with a number of other conservatives, proposed that electoral votes be cast by congressional district rather than the prevailing “winner take all” system, an arrangement that, coincidentally enough, would have produced a Nixon victory.
Calhoun had some appeal to Buckley, who had southern roots and European Catholic notions of elitist rule, not to mention a stable of aging agrarian writers who, well into the Nineties, continued to write screeds denouncing Abraham Lincoln as the First Fascist.* However, what really united Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan against the Civil Rights movement was not Calhoun but communism.
The spectre of communism drove the three of them almost insane. That it should exist at all was an offense against God.† That it should prosper was unendurable. White southerners were passionately anti-communist and, unlike the old Taft Republicans, resolutely war-like. Martin Luthor King, Jr., on the other hand, palled around with communists! Actual communists!‡
Unlike Buckley, Goldwater did not have southern roots. In fact, he had Jewish ones, which may have been why he never made his peace with the evangelical right during the Reagan years. In her testy response to Tannenhaus (one of the few on the right) Mary Grabar at Town Hall quotes from a biography of Barry:
As a member of the Phoenix City Council [elected in 1949], Goldwater had voted to desegregate the restaurant at Sky Harbor Airport. As chief of state for the Arizona Air National Guard, he had pushed for desegregation of the guard. As a businessman, he had opened his doors to everyone. As senator, he had desegregated the Senate cafeteria in 1953, insisting that his black legislative assistant, Katherine Maxwell, be served along with every other Senate employee. As an individual citizen, he had donated generously to the Arizona NAACP, including a $200 check in 1952 to its legal defense fund to speed integration of the public schools.
Before the race riots of the Sixties—the first American race riots in which the blacks were the aggressors rather than the victims—the South was the only part of the country that was actively hostile to the federal government, who made the connection between liberalism and communism that was the basic tenant of the right-wingers’ faith. Reading Goldwater’s comments about trade unionists today, one gets the feeling that it made him physically sick to see union leaders like Walter Reuther walking around the halls of Congress like they owned the place. Those men should be in jail! Telling a businessman how to run his own business, a business that he created— that he owned!—was a violation of the “sacred” law of contract, the iron law of wages, and every other damn law that existed to keep the working class in its place.
Several years ago, the estimable Bruce Bartlett wrote a book, Wrong on Race The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, exposing that buried past, and anyone with a taste for political antiquarianism will enjoy these meticulously collected tit-bits, but Bruce a little too shrewdly ends his history at the time of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, skipping entirely the Reagan Administration, of which he was a part. Reagan, as I’ve probably said before, was anti-segregation, personally, but aggressively pro-segregationist. Running for governor of California in 1966, Reagan promised to undo the state’s ban on housing discrimination, though he tacked to the center once in office. As president, he sought to provide tax benefits to segregated “academies” and lied about doing so, claiming that he didn’t know there were any such academies to receive the benefits he sought to provide. He passionately defended apartheid South Africa, claiming that they had “fought beside us in all our wars,” an even more preposterous lie.
Well, Ronnie left office in 1988, and the Republican Party is probably more racist now than it ever. What happened? I really don’t know the entire answer, but much of it has to do with first the election of 1992, which shattered the Republican hold on the presidency, and then the election of 1994, which did the same to the Democrats’ hold on Congress, both outcomes largely a result of the end of the Cold War.
With no more Cold War to fight, Americans no longer felt they needed a Republican president. At the same time, southerners no longer felt they needed to vote for “Defense Democrats,” moderates like Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia who relied on both black and white support. These men liked to feel that they were defending democracy, gratifying their southern obsession with things military and somehow, in some small manner, avenging the overwhelming humiliation of the South’s defeat more than a hundred years before. With no more Cold War, and with no more majority party perks, Washington held little charm for these men. They retired, and were replaced by right-wing Republicans, who had no interest in courting the black vote. The old, white, racist southern majority, divided and diluted by centrist Democrats, revived itself, but this time under the Republican banner rather than the Democrats’. In 1948, Sen. John Thurmond, running for president as a “Dixiecrat,” won 87 percent of the vote in Mississippi, a feat duplicated by Barry Goldwater in 1964. In both cases, the electorate was virtually all white. In 2012, Mitt Romney got about 90 percent of the white vote in Mississippi, and less than 10 percent of the black vote. Well, maybe by 2065, things will be more even in Dixie.
Afterwords
I won’t end this rant/ramble without taking another poke at Robert Bork, who in 1963 denounced the very idea of forcing commercial establishments to serve black customers in the following manner: “The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.” ¶
Years later, Bork would claim that he only opposed the 1964 Act because he was afraid it wouldn’t work. But now that it did, he was delighted! My bad! I wish I were wrong more often!
*Why did Buckley publish this crap? Was he that desperate for copy?
†God, or, in Barry’s case, nature. I suspect that Barry, with his Jewish roots, regarded religion, and Christianity in particular, as gal stuff. Charity’s fine at a Sunday social, but when there’s something that needs to be got done, it don’t do to turn the other cheek. Both Barry and Ronnie started out as country-club Republicans when it came to abortion. Ronnie quickly shifted his position to accommodate the evangelicals, but Barry never did.
‡In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, communists were virtually the only whites who would associate with blacks. The FBI instructed its agents to be on the lookout for whites who appeared to be comfortable in social situations with blacks—they were probably communists.
§James Madison and Thomas Jefferson should really take the rap for this rather than John C. Madison, though not Jefferson, had assumed that the newly founded federal government would prove to be a perfect partnership between the northern merchants and southern planters. When that proved not to be the case during the Adams administration, they combined to write (secretly) the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, arguing that the states did not have to obey laws they regarded as unconstitutional.
¶Conservatives who opposed civil rights legislation liked to insist that it was somehow wrong to “legislate morality,” as though they did not do that all the time.
