The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism

For a while there have been versions of this saying:  Not all Republicans are racist, but if you are a racist the Republican Party is the party for you.

Now this may be taken in either of two ways in terms of the GOP.   The less consequential–even somewhat anodyne–meaning is that American racists are attracted to the Republican Party because it has long favored tough-on-crime policies and low taxes/small government policies, which have always translated into harsh punishments of and weak federal support for poor people, among whom minority populations figure disproportionately.  This view can seem to insulate the Party itself from charges of racism and racial animus.

The other way of reading the statement is not only less forgiving–it is condemnatory.  This view asserts that the Party itself is racist at its core.  Its basic principles and fundamental operations are racist.  They are dedicated to the protection and strengthening of white dominance–and domination–in the United States.  They are racially exclusionary.  Today, in the 21st century, the Republican Party is the nation’s beating heart of systemic racism at both the national and state levels.  It is the principal mechanism of institutional discrimination against minorities of color.  As a result, whether or not individual Republicans feel that they are racist, supporting today’s GOP while remaining silent on its racist policies is itself a racist act.

Sadly, there is no plausible argument against this second reading.  There is no rational or factual way to challenge this conclusion.  There is only the denial of truth, something else that the GOP has adopted as a routine part of its operations that serves its racist purposes.

œœœœ

Racism has been at the core of the Republican Party’s operating policies for decades, from the Nixon campaign strategy in the late 60s–the so-called Southern Strategy–to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and governing strategies in the 2010s, to the Party’s nationwide efforts to restrict minority voting in the 2020s.   At both ends of this unholy trajectory, and throughout it, the GOP has used lies and distortions to create and reinforce fear and loathing among the white working class for people of color, especially African Americans.

The Party’s gambit, more successful than not over the years, has been to focus whites’ discontent on the perception that the major threat to their prosperity and place in the society emanates from black citizens and immigrants of color.   The underlying purpose–and consequence–of this focus has been to divert attention from the Party’s real interests in policies that maintain the wealth and power of the nation’s political and economic elites at the expense of the working and (eventually) the middle classes’ well-being.

In other words, because the divisions between the social classes in the U.S. worked against the interests of the Republican Party–the working classes favoring such Democratic Party priorities as raising the minimum wage, paid parental leave, increased government regulation of Wall Street, increased government support for health care, education and infrastructure, and higher taxes on the wealthy to support such public programs–the GOP decided to weaponize and amplify racial distrust and fear in order to win elections and to control government policies.

œœœœ

It is no coincidence that this approach was forged during Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president.  This developed only a few years after the Civil Rights Movement won passage of the landmark federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and amidst the white backlash against these new laws, especially in the South.

The GOP’s underwriting of this white backlash against civil rights has been a constant ever since.  It has been manifested in Republican opposition to welfare supports for “those people,”  in the racial gerrymandering of congressional districts to limit minority representation in Congress, and in the erection of barriers to voting by African American citizens.  These barriers–from strict voter ID laws that made it harder for minority citizens to vote, to purging voter rolls, to eliminating polling places in minority communities so that their citizens’ access to voting was hindered, to a 2021 law in Georgia that criminalizes the act of non-poll-workers providing food and water to people waiting in long voting lines–proliferated in Republican-controlled states especially after 2013.

œœœœ

It is no coincidence, too, that that was the year when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, in the case Shelby County v. Holder, eliminated the 1965 Voting Rights Act requirement that states and localities with prior patterns of discrimination against minority voting get federal government approval (“preclearance”) before implementing changes in their voting laws and practices.  In this 5-4 decision, early in the second term of the first African-American to be elected president of the United States,  the five conservative justices determined that while the law had made sense when there were areas in the nation that had demonstrated a long pattern of voting discrimination against black Americans, circumstances had changed to the point at which no such patterns any longer existed.  They decided that the federal district court and appellate court had been wrong in upholding the preclearance requirement.

The Supreme Court was wrong on the facts, and decidedly so.  Its decision opened the door for the new wave of racist and anti-democratic laws,  especially in the South, proving the Court’s error.  The Court had taken the lid off stewing racist sentiments in many parts of the country that had only been inflamed by the two presidential elections of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president.

œœœœ

The GOP’s Southern Strategy more than 50 years ago was designed to attract the votes of Southern whites by amplifying their fear and hate of black Americans.  Ultimately even that proved inadequate for securing national elections for Republican presidential candidates.  In the wake of Donald Trump’s failed bid for a second term as president in the 2020 election, he and the Republican Party redoubled their efforts to build a “Pincers Policy” based on racial discrimination.  This policy twins the racist appeals to white voters with increasingly bald-faced state laws to suppress minority votes.

The GOP “justifies” this bold move with the Big Lie fomented by Trump that the election was stolen from him by fraudulent voting, that in fact he won it by a landslide.   In the Republican Party this particularly pernicious falsehood has outlived all of the factual evidence that it is a lie, evidence uniformly delivered by dozens of court decisions and state voting investigations, many of them decided by Republican-appointed  judges and overseen by Republican state officials.  And the Big Lie is further given the lie by its focus on invalidating votes in cities heavily populated by African Americans.

The Party’s aggressive authoritarian assault on the nation’s democratic institutions, on democracy itself, is of recent origin.  Its use of racism as the cutting edge of its efforts is of much longer standing.