The July 18, 2007 headline in the New York Times
proclaimed, “In Mississippi, Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split.” The story, by Adam
Nossiter, told of a June 8 ruling by District Judge W. Allen Pepper, Jr. of the
Northern District of Mississippi.
In a suit brought by black Democrats, Judge Pepper ruled that
the State of Mississippi must require all voters to register by party, bringing
to an end the practice of moderate-conservative voters supporting centrist
Democrats in state and local primaries, while voting for Republicans and against
liberal Democrats in national elections. As the Times explains, “Black
leaders… want to end precisely what white Democrats seek to preserve, a strong
moderate-conservative voice in the Democratic Party…”
According to Judge Pepper, the Democratic Party in Mississippi
has a right to ‘disassociate itself’ from voters who are not genuine
Democrats… leaving open the question of exactly what a “genuine Democrat” might
be.
Political experts in Mississippi tell the Times that, by
limiting crossover voters – almost all of whom are white – to Republican
primaries, moderate and conservative Democrat candidates will tend to gravitate
to the Republican Party, simply as a means of survival. They say that “few
whites are likely to remain in the Democratic Party, a prospect that Republicans
regard with glee, white Democrats with horror, and black leaders with
indifference.”
But then, in the understatement of all understatements, the
Times tells us, “Not for the first time in the South, Republicans and
blacks have achieved a de facto unspoken alliance of common interests…”
It is understandable that a Democratic propaganda tool such as
the Times would simply ignore more than two hundred years of American
history. For example, it was a Republican president who freed the slaves. It was
Republicans who enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the First Reconstruction
Act of 1867, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It
was Republicans who wrote and passed the 13th, 14th, and
15th Amendments, outlawing slavery, giving blacks full citizenship,
and giving blacks the right to vote. It was Republican presidents who wrote the
Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and it was
Republicans who played a crucial role in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964
and 1968, and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965 and 1972.
Likewise, the Times totally ignored the sordid history
that blacks share with Democrats. It was Democrats who were responsible for
counting each black slave as three-fifths of a person, who fought to extend the
institution of slavery to new states entering the union, and who enacted the
Fugitive Slave Law. It was Democrats who enacted Black Codes and Jim Crow laws,
legalizing the oppression of blacks even after Republicans set them free. It was
Democrats who created the Ku Klux Klan as a party auxiliary, achieving through
lynching, flogging, arson, and other forms of intimidation, that which they
could not achieve within the law.
It was Democrats who enacted the Repeal Act of 1894, repealing
essentially all of the civil rights legislation won by Republicans since the
Civil War. And it was Democrat presidents who banned black newspapers in the
military (Roosevelt), who wiretapped Dr. Martin Luther King, trying to prove he
was a Communist (Kennedy), and who, throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, worked to
establish a new “welfare plantation” for blacks (Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter)
to prevent them from competing against white Democrats in the blue-collar job
market.
The Times story is designed to convince readers that whatever
racism remains in America resides in the Republican Party. Nothing could be
further from the truth. Those southern Democrats who continue to vote solidly
Democratic in state and local races, but who cross over to the Republican column
in national elections, are not the same kind of Democrats who joined the
Republican revolution in the South beginning in the ‘60s. Those voters who’ve
remained with the party are people for whom Democratic politics and white
supremacy are matters of religious conviction. The only reason they vote for
Republicans in national elections is because their party leaders persist in
nominating candidates who offend even their sense of patriotism.
It is not the loss of “yellow-dog” Democrats to the GOP that
threatens Democrats. No, what most threatens Democrats is the prospect of a
comprehensive debate over what the two parties really stand for and what the two
parties have done for, or to, African Americans. It is a debate that Democrats
simply cannot allow because once blacks are confronted with the truth they can
be expected to return, en masse, to the Republican Party, from whence they came.
When that happens, the Democratic Party will die a slow and merciful death.
The Times story represents preemptive propaganda,
nothing more, nothing less. It is racial politics turned upside down.
