The ‘party switch’ explained

Over the past few months, you’ve likely been hearing videos from conservative content creators, many of them black, insisting that the Republican Party was the true home of black Americans and the Democrats were always the racists. Most notably, they’ve been saying that the Ku Klix Klan is the aegis of the Democratic Party and it hasn’t changed in all that time.

The charge is clearly false, but not for the reasons most people think.

It’s true that the founders of the Klan, a Christian nationalist organization founded in Tennessee in 1865 by Confederate Civil War veterans, were registered Democrats — no surprise given that the Republican Party was formed in 1854 and was expressively anti-slavery. But it would be a stretch to say that the Republicans wanted to oppose slavery to free blacks for their own sake — the party, funded by merchants who decided that they couldn’t compete with slave labor, took that stance for economic, not social-justice, reasons. And in fact, the opposition to slavery was originally limited to its expansion; Abraham Lincoln tried to broker a compromise that would mandate one free state admitted to the Union for every slave state, and he also said, “If I can save the Union without freeing a single slave, I would do it.”

(Indeed, the 1876 presidential election put an end to the decade-long Reconstruction era, when Southern electors threw the election to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes after he promised to remove Federal troops from the South, which had the effect of selling out the newly-freed slaves.)

Still, at that time most blacks who could vote were registered as Republicans — until the 1920s, when many left the party over President Harding’s refusal to support a federal anti-lynching bill and President Coolidge became the only candidate not to condemn the Klan. Blacks started leaning Democratic during the New Deal even though the racial policies of that day limited benefits, though Eleanor Roosevelt became a voice for civil rights, for the first time being seriously considered.

The split in the Democratic Party began in 1948, when President Truman — a Democrat from former slave state Missouri — issued an executive order integrating the Armed Forces. That caused many Southern Democrats to form the States’ Rights Democratic Party, commonly known as “Dixiecrats,” and Sen. Strom Thurmond to run for president against Truman. Then you had the fights over desegregation in schools and public accommodations in the 1950s.

And speaking of which, this is where the modern conservative movement caught fire. The machinery, already built with think tanks and media as a reaction to the New Deal by industrialists sore at FDR, was jump-started with the Army-McCarthy hearings, during which Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Wisconsin Republican, accused the Army of harboring communists, leading to a “Red Scare.” And that picked up in the South, with civil-rights demonstrators being accused of such (in fairness, small communist cells were operating in those days in Southern cities, which is why Martin Luther King Jr. was forced to disavow any influence of communism publicly).

But another factor largely overlooked was the rise of libertarianism in the Republican Party in the West and Southwest in the 1960s — and Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for president in 1964. Though never a racist, he had publicly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Johnson, on the grounds that it overstepped the Constitution. (Goldwater, though crushed elsewhere, won the electoral votes of five Southern states.) Suddenly, opposition to civil rights for black Americans had justification — “big government.”

Two years later, another Western Republican, Richard Nixon, who lost the race for president in 1960 plotted a political comeback by unleashing what later became known as the “Southern Strategy” by exploiting the divisions he already knew existed in the Democratic Party. (Pat Buchanan, then an aide, gave the details in an excellent article, “The Fall of Conservatism,” published in May 2008 in The New Yorker magazine.) Slowly, white Southerners began migrating to the Republican Party, cemented with fellow Western Republican Ronald Reagan.

But by this time overt racist appeals had run their course, so Republicans started using “dog whistles” — “welfare,” “crime,” “busing” etc. — to oppose civil rights. It was in that context that Reagan used the phrase “welfare queens driving Cadillacs” when running for president in 1976, and he got even more brazen when, in 1980, he gave a speech near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were found murdered in 1964, in favor of “states’ rights,” clearly a thumb in the eye to the civil-rights movement, which led a Klan leader in Georgia named Bruce Wilkinson to endorse Reagan, saying that “the Republican platform could have been written by a Klansman.” (Reagan did reject the endorsement, to be sure.)

That, in a nutshell, is why labeling the Democrats as the party of the Klan and other white supremacist groups is obsolete. Yes, I’m aware of the late Klan recruiter Robert Byrd being feted by fellow senators upon his death; however, he left the Klan in the 1950s; repudiated it; apologized for joining; and, importantly, after white West Virginians began migrating to the GOP, voted for civil-rights legislation. Contrast that with Southern Republicans such as Bob Barr and Trent Lott attending meetings of the Klan-adjacent Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Council — which was arguably more influential than the Klan because it wasn’t terrorist).

This thus represents a cowardly campaign on the part of conservatives to run away from their own racism. And with the fear-mongering that’s become endemic on the political right, especially with the Make America Great Again and Christian Nationalist movements in serious trouble, I hope that people hear the truth.