Are Democrats the "real racists"? Well, they used to be: Here’s the history – Salon

Republicans have an obvious race problem one they prefer not to admit, even to themselves. The party's voter base is overwhelmingly white, and Republicans are now actively trying to suppress Black voters (and other voters of color) through a range ofJim Crow tactics. They reflexively support police even in the most egregious cases of racist violence (such as the murder of George Floyd last year) and have consistently depicted Black Lives Matter as a subversive, anti-American movement. But they can't win elections without moderate and independent voters who are uncomfortable with overt and blatant manifestations of racism, so they claimthat Democrats and liberals are the "real racists."

It seems that everyone on the right, from crackpotfilmmaker Dinesh D'Souza to The Federalist,enjoys pointing out that the Democratic Partyused to be the main political vehicle for white supremacyin the United States.They assume their readers will pretend not to notice that decades ago Democrats and Republicans "switched sides" (at least on the issue of race), since that would cancel out this attempted "gotcha." In fact,the Democratic and Republican parties did not assume their current identities as"liberal" and "conservative," respectively and as we understand those terms today until partway through the 20th century,and neither party stands for what it once did, especially but not exclusively on racial issues.

Three presidential elections play key roles in this story: Those of 1912, 1932 and 1964.

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The modern two-party system began to take shape in the 1850s, with the demise of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republicans (from the anti-slavery faction of the Whigs, more or less). But in the decades after the Civil War, neither party much resembled its latter-day version.As the party of Abraham Lincoln, Republicans theoretically supported citizenship rights for Black people (at leastup to a point), along with other vaguely "liberal" policies like a more centralized approach to economic policymaking, expanding the post-Civil War veteranpension system to create what some scholars argue was anearlywelfare state, and lavishing government support on America's burgeoningindustries. Democrats likeGrover Cleveland the only Democratic president ofthe later 19th century, and something of a libertarian by modern standards thought those ideas werewasteful and dangerous.

But the Democrats of the time, incoherent heirs to the populist tradition of Andrew Jackson,were a chaotic mixture of ingredients: Big-city political bosses and urban white immigrants, agrarian populists likeWilliam Jennings Bryan (some of whose proposals would be "liberal" or even radical today), Jeffersonian idealists who preached bromides about limited government,business interests who favored lower tariffs and opposed protectionism,andSouthern white supremacists, who often supported progressive economic policies alongside vicious Jim Crow segregation. Essentially, the Democrats were a motley crew consisting of everyone who wasn't a Republican a situation that is perhaps oddly echoed today, albeit without as many jarringphilosophical contradictions.

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Then came the 1912 election. Republican President William Howard Taft ran for re-election but was challenged by former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who believed the GOP had veered too far righton economic, environmental and good government issues. Roosevelt lost the nomination struggleto Taft, but ran anyway as candidate of the newly-invented Progressive Party and won the highestpercentage of the popular vote ofany third-party candidate in American history. In fact, he got more votes than Taft, and carried six states but both of them were overwhelmed by Democrat Woodrow Wilson. In the process Americans suddenly became aware ofthe Republican Party's ideological schism, and over time self-described "progressives" would feel increasingly unwelcome in the GOP.

With Democrats back in power after many decades in the wilderness, Wilson realized he had to deal with his own party's progressive and reactionary wings.He pushed forantitrust legislation andlabor rights, lowered tariffs, and later tried to launch the League of Nations, a precursor to the UN. The native Virginian alsoexpanded Jim Crow policies (and turned a blind eye to racist violence in the South)and clamped down on the free speech rights of socialists and other dissident groups. Wilson identified with the progressive movement when thatwas politically convenient, but he was also awhite Southerner deeply invested inthe "Lost Cause"mythology of the Confederacy. While there are other contenders for this prize, Wilson mayhave been America's most overtly racist president; his attitudes seemed extreme even to other white Americans at the time. He proved to be the practical embodiment ofhis own party's deep internal tensions, and unsurprisingly closed his second term widely despised.

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But the point here is that while the Democrats were certainly still racist in 1912 and thereafter, the two parties were losing the respective identities they'd had since the Civil War. The words"liberal" and "conservative," which were used very differently before the Wilson presidency, began to take ontheir modern ideological associations. But there werelarge numbers of liberals and conservatives in this modern sense within both parties, and that would take several more decades to sort out.

The big sort began in earnest 20 years later, in Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide victory over PresidentHerbert Hoover, a Republican who was widely blamed (fairly or otherwise) for the stock market crash of 1929 and the trauma of the Great Depression. Roosevelt set out, quite literally, to save capitalismwith his famously ambitious agenda, known as the New Deal. Politicallythe New Deal allowed Democrats toforge a majority coalition by becoming the party that offeredeconomic security to America'smost vulnerable citizens, and by greatly expanding government aid and assistance in many other areas of life.The basic premise of this agenda was summedup by Roosevelt himself in his 1944 State of the Union address:

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

Roosevelt's economic and political innovations laid the foundations for several decades of Americanprosperity that, among other things, allowed the baby-boom generationto flourish as no other generation had before (or has since). They also greatly expanded the Democratic constituency, which now included unionized workers (a much larger fraction of the population at the time), "white ethnic" immigrants, students and intellectuals and Black people in Northern cities (which were pretty much the only places they could vote). Southern whites continued to vote for Democrats for several more decades, partly based on tradition but also because the New Deal did a tremendous amount to improve living conditions in the South. But arguably, the die was cast: Rural white supremacists, leftist intellectuals and the rapidly growing Black populations in big cities couldn't remain in the same party forever.

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And indeed all that changed after 1964, when Democratic PresidentLyndon B. Johnson, who took office in the traumatic aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination, began pushing through historiclegislation on civil rights and voting rights partly out of genuine conviction and partly under enormous pressure from the civil rights movement and leaders like Martin Luther KingJr. As Johnson himself clearly foresaw, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of1965 which established full racial equality, at least as a matter of law drove white Southerners out of the Democratic Party, apparently forever. A conservative insurrection within the Republican Party began immediately, resulting in the nomination of Barry Goldwater (essentially a segregationist, although he was not from the South) in the 1964 election. Goldwater lost to Johnson in an epic blowout, with the Democrat receiving a higher percentage of the popular vote than any candidate before or since but, again, that's not the important part. Black voters and other minority groups almost unanimously supported Johnson and the Democrats, who were now officially the party of civil rights. In practical terms, and allowing for ideological outliers like Clarence Thomas and Candace Owens,Republicans have effectively been an all-white party after that election.

So in fact it's toosimplistic to saythat the Republicans and Democrats"switched sides." It was clearly a bit more complicated than that. From the pre-Civil War period through Woodrow Wilson's administration, the Democrats really were a white supremacist party along with a whole bunch of other more or less incompatible things.But in a gradual process that began with the arch-racist Wilson and accelerated through FDR and LBJ, the Democrats assembled what we would now call a "liberal" coalition, with support for racial equality (at least in principle) as a central pillar. Even after 1964, the transformation was not complete, and some "conservative Democrats" and "liberal Republicans" hung around into the late 20th century. (George Wallace was a Democrat, for instance, whileNelson Rockefeller was a Republican; both would absolutely switch parties if they were alive today.)

You probably knew this already, but the bottom line here is that it's either ignorant or dishonest (and likely both) to claim that Democrats are the "real racists" based on history. There is a lot of context especially involving milestone events likethe 1912, 1932 and 1964 elections that pretty much invalidates the claim. Maybe the real answer is that neither party is very much like it used to be. Democrats used to be a nonsensical coalition that harbored lots of white supremacists (and other groups who more or less looked the other way), so in that sense the charge contains a tiny grain of truth. But then again, Republicans used to be a blandpro-business party and not afascistic cult of personality. They should think twice about encouraging any other political party to juxtaposethe present with its ownhistory.

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Are Democrats the "real racists"? Well, they used to be: Here's the history - Salon