Radio Free New Hampshire: Dreams And Responsibilities

By Michael Davidow, InDepthNH

After signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Lyndon Johnson remarked that the Democratic Party had just lost the South for the next generation. He was wrong about that. They lost the South for the next three generations, and counting.

Johnson was a southerner himself (or southern-adjacent, since he came from Texas) so he knew what he was talking about. But it’s worth recalling why the South had voted Democratic for so long: that little historical detail called the Civil War. The North and the Republican party won that contest, they reaped the spoils of it, which were banks and railroads and factories, and that’s why Democrats drink bourbon and Republicans drink Scotch (cf and cp Coca Cola and Pepsi).

That’s also why New York City’s Republicans in particular became so identified with that city’s power structure, that when immigrants arrived, they could only find room for their abilities and ambitions on the Democratic side of the political ledger: so the Irish came to control Tammany Hall. Protestant farmers in the south and Catholic laborers in the north had very little in common except the urge to punish the rich but things got even stranger when the Great Depression caused progressives, good government types, and waves of newer ethnic communities to join their ranks too. Hence Will Rogers’s famous quip, that he did not belong to any organized political party. Rather, he was a Democrat.

Throughout the 1930’s, though, black Americans themselves still skewed Republican and Republicans were the natural party of civil rights for a century. It was neither Al Smith nor Frank Roosevelt nor Herbert Lehman but Richard Nixon’s mentor, Tom Dewey, who first hired blacks to serve in his government; and it wasn’t until Hubert Humphrey broke the ice in lily-white Minneapolis that Democrats began calling for similar change. That was the world Lyndon Johnson broke apart, those were the cards Dick Nixon inherited, and that is how we ended up with a Republican South that has often flirted with racism and a Democratic North built on the backs of black Americans.

In 1965, anyway, Johnson also signed the Voting Rights Act to make sure the blacks of the South could not be denied power by his own then-dominant Democratic party. The resulting mechanism was an imperfect one, to say the least. Southern legislatures created black majority districts, which not only guaranteed that blacks could win elections in certain distinct places but also weakened their ability to influence elections outside of those areas. Republicans actually promoted this resolution at times, because it suited their needs.

But whatever the virtues of that custom, the law behind it was recently gutted by our nation’s highest court. The case is named Louisiana v. Callais and its reasoning is beautiful: the Supreme Court’s conservative majority now believes our country has made so much progress in race relations since 1965 that we no longer need to consider race when drawing our congressional districts. The upshot is that states across the South and elsewhere are now erasing their safe black districts as quickly as they can, to destroy those reserves of black political power. This decision was a lifeline for the Republican Party, which was facing bad polling in tough times for Donald Trump, and it will skew our politics for decades.

I suppose our politics were skewed in the other direction for decades, too. I suppose there is no way for our politics to not be skewed. Law is power in its natural course, and power tells in the end. Sometimes it’s in your favor, sometimes it isn’t. Politics is a tough business.

I am mindful of Robert Kennedy, however, who at his best embodied his party’s devotion to our nation’s working class, be its members northern, southern, or western. When discussing the uses of government, and how those uses are bound up with its imperfections, he would quote Dante to his audiences (can you imagine a politician doing that today?). He would remind Americans that “divine justice weighs the sins of the cold blooded and the sins of the warmhearted in different scales.”

DEI has gone too far in the past few years. It has become a parody of itself and it has caused great harm. And it’s a nice fiction indeed, to believe that our country has reached the point where we no longer need to help those who were denied help in the past. But it’s still a fiction, and government should not base its actions on wishful thinking.

I don’t recognize the world in which our Supreme Court is living. I guess it must be nice.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.