The GOP: Rewriting history

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice….Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Barry Goldwater
Acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention
San Fransisco, summer 1964

What a difference forty-seven years makes, huh? Back in 1964 Goldwater’s campaign slogan was, “In your heart you know he’s right. The Democrats has a snappy comeback for that one: “In your guts you know he’s nuts.” During that long ago campaign against Lyndon Johnson, he had actually proposed the idea of introducing low-level nuclear weapons into the Vietnam conflict. He had even identified himself as a staunch opponent of LBJ’s proposed civil rights bill. So extreme did Goldwater appear to most Americans all those decades ago, the very thought of him serving so-much-as-a-single-day as president was enough to give every thinking person pause.

To quote the Monkees: “That was then, this is now.”

Truth be told, Goldwater – when compared to his present day, ideological heirs – is staring to look pretty good. He had to take a lot of positions during the campaign of 1964 that he privately abhorred – his militant stance against equal rights for African Americans being one of them. All in all, he turned out to be a fairly good senator. He would end his life as a strong proponent of equal rights for gay people.

But as undoubtedly conservative as old Barry was, at the end of his life he was disgusted and alarmed at the direction his party appeared to be headed. At the time of his death on May 29, 1998, he was collaborating with John Dean on a book that decried the state of the modern day Republican party. Dean eventually completed the book a few years ago. It was called, “Conservatives Without Conscience”. Maybe it’s a blessing that Goldwater did not live to see Sarah Palin.

One of the newest (and most amusing) GOP talking points is that – way back when – it was the Democrats who were the enemies of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and that it never would have been passed without the Republicans. This is partially true. It was the southern Democrats who were rabidly opposed to basic human rights for people of color that is guaranteed by the Constitution. But what is undeniable is the fact that the present day GOP has no right whatsoever to claim credit for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Let me explain….

You see, a half-century ago the Republican party was virtually nonexistent south of the Mason Dixon line. Oh, sure, there were a few people in that region on the country who identified themselves as Republicans, but the majority of them were black – and they weren’t even allowed to vote! In the former Confederacy, white people were almost exclusively registered with the Democratic party. Why you ask? Because none of these jackasses could bring themselves to register with the party of Republican Abraham Lincoln: “That nigger-lovin’ bastard that freed the slaves.” That all changed in the mid-nineteen-sixties.

When President Johnson signed into being the Civil rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it marked the end of the “solid south” for the Democratic party. At the time, Johnson told his two aides Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers, “We’ve lost the south for a generation.” It turned out to be an optimistic prediction.

THE SOUTHERN STRATEGY

In 1968, the Nixon campaign, sensing the outrage and resentment of nearly all southern Democrats, devised a strategy to win over the hearts and minds of the nitwits who controlled that party in the south. Exploiting the riots that had occurred in cities all across America in the aftermath of the murder of Martin Luther King, Tricky Dick ran a campaign that emphasized, “Law and Order”. He didn’t actually come out and say, “I’m going to protect you good people from those nasty, filthy Negroes. He didn’t have to. All the Trickster had to do was to rely on code words. It worked. When he was reelected in 1972, the descendants of the old confederacy had fled – like frightened rats – to the Republican party, which, by the way, was no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln, but the party of Richard Milhaus Nixon.

Now they are trying to get us to swallow the notion that the mass exodus of Democrats to the GOP nearly forty years ago had absolutely nothing to do with race. It was all about economics. Bullshit. It had everything to do with race.

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TOM DEGAN is a fifty-one year old video artist who in 2006 became so thoroughly disgusted at the state of America’s national political dialogue, he decided to take time off to become a freaking civics teacher. When you’re not reading him here, check out his awesome blog “The Rant”