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13 tweets,
3 min read
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1. Every time I write about race, the South, and history before 1965 (as I did today...see column below), I get bombarded from my right flank by people saying slavery/Jim Crow is a "Democrat problem" w/ GOP as the good guys on race. Let's talk about this philly.com/columnists/att…
2. I will say this: Any association with either slavery or Jim Crow is morally abhorrent. Up through the mid-latter 20th Century, Southern white supremacists were mostly Democrats. Some Northern white Dems like FDR and even JFK tolerated racists in the party -- not good.
3, Unlike a lot of folks who talk smack about the South, I've actually lived there. And it was 3-plus critical years, in the early-mid 1980s, when Reagan was POTUS and whites rooted in the segregationist legacy were shifting quickly to the GOP. I even covered Richard Shelby...
4. ...when he was a House Democrat (!). What I saw 1st-hand and learned was that the 1 constant was a steady bloc of voters who supported the politics of white supremacy, be it segregation or the "welfare queen" myth championed by Reagan/Lee Atwater.
5. So from 1964 (year of the Civil Rights Act enacted by Democrat LBJ over the 'no' vote of GOP presidential nominee Goldwater) through the '90s, these voters found Democrats no longer had the stuff of supremacy they craved. The GOP gave it to them.
6. To steal the great Andrew Gillum quote, now the racists thought the GOP was the racist party. If I were a decent, God-fearing Republican, I'd be ashamed by that. But politics doesn't work like that now. Instead, the fact that a bunch of mostly dead racist Southerners were...
7. ...Democrats somehow proves that today's Democrats, even those born after 1980, are somehow "hypocrites." And by changing the conversation to this supposed "hypocrisy" and how Democrats are "the real racists" (despite not supporting any policies that, you know, promote...
8. ...racism), they duck the real conversation of why all stripes of white supremacists, misogynists and other reactionaries feel so at home in today's Republican Party. No wonder former Democrat Donald Trump and this GOP have embraced each other.
9. That's because Trump has mastered this fog of confusion, because both Trump and the GOP fire each other up with their conviction that any evidence of "hypocrisy" -- no matter how ancient or isolated or trivial -- ends the conversation about race they want to end.
10. The latest example is Trump's tweets about Biden and his (regrettable) support of the 1994 crime bill. No matter that Trump in the early '90s was trying to execute 5 black youths for a crime they didn't commit, or that his base GOP voters laughed at that 1994 bill because...
11. ...it went too EASY on urban blacks (remember "midnight basketball"?). Their point is that Biden is "a hypocrite," Dems are "the real racists," Trump "tells it like it is" and this conversation about racism is OVER. Here's the truth...
12. Racism and white supremacy are a constant in this country. The Dems' ancient history on this is horrible; their recent history is far from perfect. But in 2019, only 1 party is going after this vote with their words and deeds -- the Republicans. They deflect blame because...
13. ...they are shameless. -30-
