Republicans lament how the GOP has come to find itself in the damnable position of having Donald Trump as its 2016 standard-bearer. How could this happen to the Party of Lincoln?
This story begins in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson defeated the racist, segregationist Southern Democratic power bloc that controlled Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. The passage of the Voting Rights Act, and the Civil Rights Act the year before, would not have been possible without the support of Midwestern and Northeastern Republicans in both the House and Senate. LBJ said that the Democrats “just lost the South for a generation.” He was right about the consequences, but the timeline has been more like a half-century and counting.
At that point, the Republican Party made a fateful decision. They could continue their historic 100-year commitment to civil rights and work to help America move beyond the moral shame of its Jim Crow past, or they could choose another path. The chose another path. They seized an opportunity for political gain based upon the bigotry, fear, ignorance and racial resentments of angry Southerners and other marginalized white Americans.
An enduring folktale of the Mississippi Delta revolves around what happens when you go to the crossroads at midnight to cut a deal with the devil. The devil will give you whatever you want, but the payment he requires is your soul. After the signing of the Voting Rights Act, the Republican Party travelled South to make that midnight deal. They got what they wanted: the opportunity to dominate presidential politics and dictate the terms of the national political dialogue. They had to trade their soul.
First Richard Nixon created the Southern Strategy to go with his Law and Order and Silent Majority themes and won two terms in the White House. Watergate was not part of the deal, and his unexpected early exit meant that a good man, Jimmy Carter, would be POTUS for four years. But in the interim, Storm Thurmond joined the Republican Party, taking all his racist minions with him, and Jessie Helms became the moral center for congressional Republican politics.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi – where, in June of 1964, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by the KKK for registering black people to vote. This is where Ronald Reagan – the patron saint of the modern Republican Party – launched his presidential bid with a speech about states’ rights.
George H.W. Bush was too much of a New England aristocrat to go to Mississippi, so for his 1988 presidential campaign he retained a blues-playing white South Carolina political thug named Lee Atwater, who gave us Willie Horton. His son, George W. Bush, delivered the Republican political coupe de grace by appointing John Roberts as chief justice, who gutted the Voting Rights Act. It took almost 50 years, but the South got its revenge.
Now the hounds from hell that the Republican establishment unleashed on America have turned on them in the form of an uncontrollable mob – their white, mostly male base – led by a vacuous, narcissistic bigot. Donald Trump overturned every Republican orthodoxy of the last 40 years as he was decimating a Republican field of 16 presidential contenders. He now stands as undisputed champion of a party in shambles that has no foreseeable chance of connecting to the young, diverse emerging American demographic majority.
There may be something more important – and tragic – at stake than what’s to become of the Republican Party. The Ancient Greeks had a term, ochlocracy, which translated as mob rule. They considered ochlocracy – democracy spoiled by demagoguery – the rule of emotion over reason. The founders of the American Republic feared the tyranny of the mob. Democratic self-governance depends upon a people with sufficient intelligence and restraint. The Trump phenomenon represents a perfect example of ochlocracy in a modern society and a failure of American democracy.
Mike Jones, who has held senior policy positions in St. Louis city and county government, serves on the St. Louis American editorial board and the State Board of Education.
