Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (3 page)

Frustrated, the suffragettes—who were mostly Republican—took the issue to the states. By 1900 several Republican-dominated states granted women the right to vote. In 1916, Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress.

Congress, however, only took up the issue again in 1914, when it was again rejected by Senate Democrats. Only when the GOP won
landslide majorities in both houses in 1918 did the Nineteenth Amendment finally have the necessary two-thirds majority to pass.

President Woodrow Wilson, who had led his party’s opposition to women’s suffrage, gave in when he saw its inevitability. The Democrats, however, took their opposition to the states, and eight of the nine “no” votes on the Nineteenth Amendment came from Democrat-controlled state legislatures. So the GOP is responsible for women having the right to vote.
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The inclusion of women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was, oddly enough, the work of a group of racist, chauvinist Democrats. Led by Democratic Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, this group was looking to defeat the Civil Rights Act. Smith proposed to amend the legislation and add “sex” to “race” as a category protected against discrimination.

Smith’s Democratic buddies roared with laughter when he offered his one-word amendment. They thought it would make the whole civil rights thing so ridiculous that no sane person would go along with it. One scholar noted that Smith’s amendment “stimulated several hours of humorous debate” among racist, chauvinist Democrats. But to their amazement, the amended version of the bill passed.
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It bears repeating that Republicans provided the margin of victory that extended civil rights protection both to minorities and to women.

A LARGER DECEPTION

The canard about the Civil Rights Movement is embedded within a larger deception that progressives uniformly put forward. This deception is intended to defuse the sordid history of the Democratic Party’s two-century involvement in a parade of evils from slavery to segregation to lynching to forced sterilization to support for fascism to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All these horrors are the work of the Democratic Party.

Progressive Democrats seek to escape responsibility for all this with their tale of the Big Switch. Initially devised by progressives like Dan
Carter and Earl and Merle Black, the Big Switch can be understood as a last-ditch attempt to rescue progressive and Democratic Party history. This progressive defense is akin to the lawyer who says, “Yes, my client shot the clerk and killed all those people, but since then he has completely reformed and now lives a blameless life. Meanwhile, his accusers have all become criminals.”

Actually, even if that were true, the man should still be held to account for what he did. He should be expected to make a confession of his crimes and make some reparation to his victims and to society. Progressives, of course, have no intention of doing any of this. Neither do Democrats. Whenever these people talk about reparations they want “America” to pay. But “America” didn’t commit these crimes; they did. They’re the ones who should be held accountable.

Back to the Big Switch: the basic idea is that starting with the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats saw the light and became the good guys, while Republicans became the bad guys. What happened to all the racist southern Democrats? Look, say the progressives, they all became Republicans! That’s why the South today is largely Republican.
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This would seem to support the progressive story line.

The narrative of the Big Switch has one more thing going for it: blacks, who once voted overwhelmingly Republican, now vote overwhelmingly Democratic. This is a switch, and it would seem to go along with the idea that Republicans used to be friendly to black interests but now Democrats are. Why else would 90 percent of blacks today support the Democratic Party?

This book takes on the narrative of the Big Switch, and debunks it as the final—and most ingenious—installment of the progressive lie. In reality there was no switch. For the film that accompanies this book, I made a list of 1,500 racist Democrats—a list that includes members of Congress, governors, appellate and Supreme Court justices, and all the notorious figures who opposed the Civil Rights Movement. Of this group, I count exactly fourteen—less than 1 percent—who switched to the Republican Party. So the idea that racist Democrats became Republicans is a myth.

Of course many southern whites did switch from voting Democrat to voting Republican, helping the GOP become the majority party in the South, as the Democrats once were. But remember that racism declined sharply in the South during the second half of the twentieth century. There is quite literally a mountain of scholarly data that documents this. And this was the very period of GOP ascendancy. So as the South became less racist, it became more Republican.

I provide evidence in this book to show that southern whites became Republican not for racist motives but for economic ones. The most racist poor whites never left the Democratic Party; they remained loyal to the party of racism until they died. In this sense, the data show that racism slowed the movement of whites toward the Republicans.

But many southern whites were not under the racist hold of the Democrats. As they became more prosperous, these whites came to see the GOP reflect their beliefs in economic opportunity and upward mobility. They also found Republicans more in tune with their patriotism as well as their socially conservative views. Quite naturally, they moved over to a party that better reflected their interests and aspirations.

Remarkably, southern whites made the journey from Democratic to Republican for the same reason that southern blacks switched parties from Republican to Democratic. In both cases, the switch occurred for economic—not racial—reasons. The black switch occurred first, in the 1930s, while the white switch occurred much later, in the 1960s and 1970s. In both cases, the timing is significant.

Blacks clearly didn’t switch for reasons of race because the Democratic Party was, in the 1930s, the undisputed home of racism. It remained so until at least the early 1960s. (I say “at least” because I believe that modern progressive Democratic ideology remains infused with racism, although this racism manifests itself in a new way.) So many blacks switched reluctantly, because they knew they were leaving the party of Lincoln for the party of segregation, lynching, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Why did they do it? They did it because the Democrats promised them economic benefits. These benefits meant a great deal to blacks then
living through the hardships of segregation and the Great Depression. Democrats offered blacks some of the same security that blacks had during slavery—in which the basic needs of blacks were met on the plantation—and blacks, during a desperate time, went for it.

This was one of the most significant political transformations in American history. Long-term, it has proven to be a terrible bargain for blacks. They have remained the worst-off group in America, surpassed even by poverty-stricken immigrants who came to this country much later with nothing. The inner city remains a kind of Third World enclave in America, and whether or not blacks realize it, the Democrats intend to keep it that way.

Yet counterproductive though the black shift of political allegiance has proven over the past seventy-five years, I cannot entirely blame black Americans for making it. They were under extreme economic stress. And they were conned by the artful pitch men of the Democratic Party. These pitch men said to blacks: you have had it hard enough in the past; now you deserve to be taken care of by the federal government. And many blacks figured: after all we’ve been through, this is our due.

But if the Democrats were such racists, why did they offer to uplift blacks in this way? Here we find the true switch, which was a switch of tactics by progressive Democrats. Democrats had already tried various exploitation schemes after slavery, from segregation to lynching to white supremacy. Yet from the 1860s through the 1920s, the Democrats remained the minority party nationwide.

A NEW SCAM

So progressive Democrats realized they needed a new and bigger scam. For two centuries they had oppressed and stolen from blacks and other minorities; now they had an idea for how to do it to the country as a whole. The new Democratic scam was progressivism, not the old progressivism of forced sterilization and support for fascism, but a new progressivism that turned blacks and other minorities into pawns in a grand larceny scheme.

The scheme works like this. Progressives supply the basic needs of poor blacks, creating for them a new plantation called the inner city. There blacks are provided with food, subsidized housing, medical care, and so on. In this regard, the new plantation functions pretty much like the old one, with a few modifications. Under slavery, this was rural paternalism; now it is urban paternalism. The slave master is replaced by the government; i.e. the Big House of slavery is now replaced by the White House.

In both cases, it’s a meager living. But there is an important difference. Under slavery, blacks had to work; today’s blacks don’t have to work to inhabit the progressive plantation. In fact, they must not work, because if they become self-reliant, then the progressives have no future use for them. Consequently, many young blacks have productivity, creativity, even human dignity sapped out of them. This is the core of today’s progressive racism.

Progressive racism is dedicated to uplifting poor blacks to a certain point and then keeping them there. The proof is that poor blacks today are about as poorly off as they were a half-century ago, when the progressive schemes of black uplift went into place. Every other ethnic group in America has dramatically improved its life except this one. Blacks have delivered for progressives, but they haven’t progressed very much themselves. This, I suggest, is by design.

Several years ago the black pastor and activist Eugene Rivers made the startling statement that today’s young black males in the inner city are “ill-equipped to secure gainful employment even as productive slaves.” Rivers’s point was that at least slaves had skills like masonry, carpentry, and agricultural skills that made them useful; today’s inner-city black males don’t have any skills at all. They have truly become useless people.
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Actually the Democrats have made them that way. That’s because these inner-city blacks, though useless in the traditional sense, are useful to the Democratic Party—first, as voters, and second, as public exhibitions of the need for progressive redistribution programs. Under Democratic supervision, blacks in the inner city must
remain poor
, because
their poverty is required to support and justify the progressive scheme. In this sense the ’hood is an invention of the Democratic Party.

Progressive Democrats are fiercely protective of these dilapidated, crime-ridden neighborhoods. That’s why they mount fierce opposition whenever some reformer proposes to give poor black parents a choice of sending their children to private or public schools. Here the fear is that poor black children may actually get a good education, and that would liberate them from dependency on the Democratic Party.

Progressive Democrats also fought welfare reform every step of the way. They were outraged at the idea that single mothers with illegitimate children should be required to work. The progressive scheme is to increase their benefits every time they produce a new child. That child, to Democrats, represents a future Democratic voter. Progressives do not want to change this system of intergenerational dependency that has been working for them politically.

Finally, progressives scream every time entrepreneurs attempt gentrification projects in cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis. No matter that gentrification would bring new money, new jobs, and new people into the inner city. Crime would go down, and people could move up. Here progressive opposition is most revealing of all. A transformation of the inner city is precisely what progressives do
not
want to happen.

So progressives talk incessantly about black uplift but no uplift actually occurs, even though black neighborhoods are all run by Democratic officials, from mayors to school superintendents. In fact, the Democratic establishment works to assure that no one gets off the plantation.

Now, Democrats are working overtime to create new Hispanic plantations called barrios. Long-term, they would like to have some Asian American ghettos also. Democrats have created a plantation model for blacks that they hope can be applied to other minority groups as well. In that case, black suffering would extend more broadly to minority suffering, a real political success from the Democrats’ perspective.

Why? Because minority suffering is the basic moral justification for the progressive Democratic rip-off. If there were no minority suffering, then where is the need for all the social welfare programs? The suffering
of blacks and other minorities has actually been caused by the Democrats themselves, but in a crafty rhetorical move, this suffering is now blamed on “America.”

And here we get to the central thrust of progressive education, which is to fault America with the crimes of the Democratic Party. Here’s a choice example from Michael Omi and Howard Winant: “The broad sweep of U.S. history is characterized not by racial democracy but by racial despotism, not by trajectories of reform but by implacable denial of political rights, dehumanization, extreme exploitation, and policies of minority extirpation.”
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Well, who exactly did these things? Omi and Winant refuse to point the finger at the real culprits. From their point of view, “America” did this to the blacks and other minorities, and in recompense, America owes them. For Hispanics, this means a right of free entry and a right of amnesty for illegals; for blacks, it means that government owes you a living into the indefinite future.

So Democrats propose greater government—which is to say, Democratic—control over private industry and over the private wealth of this country, all in the name of advancing racial unification and social justice. Democrats justify their programs as the
sine qua non
of fighting racism and advancing civil rights, and define any opposition to those programs as opposition to civil rights itself and resurgent racism.