After courageously signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson famously quipped that the Democratic Party may “have lost the South for a generation.”
The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an act of political courage because Johnson was aware that the landmark legislation would include a political cost.
It might be that 2023 is the year that the cyclical nature of American politics returns knocking on the door of the Republican Party with a similar proposal: The time has come to do the courageous thing for the country, but it will be accompanied by a short-term political price.
What, pray tell, is the courageous thing that Republicans must do? They must extricate themselves from the type of divisiveness that initially brought political gold, but has morphed into a mean-spirited, strident, aggrieved white party that plays on fear.
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I am not simply referring to the 2015 rise of Donald J. Trump as president and the peevish “Trumpist” doctrine he championed. To hold this view is to believe that removing the 45th president from the GOP stage will return the party to normalcy. It’s a convenient remedy, but hardly a practicable solution. It’s tantamount to believing the bandage would serve as an effective tourniquet in the theater of war.
The Republican Party has long been on the march toward becoming a fear-based conglomerate, void of policy ideas, that appeals largely to white voters. There are many historical data points that have led to this development. Ironically, it was Alabama’s Democratic Gov. George Wallace who established this macabre playbook.
Wallace, who proclaimed at his 1963 inauguration, “I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,” stoking the fears of many white voters in the South as he sought to make Alabama the citadel for Jim Crow segregation.
In 1963, Wallace offered a cynical reflection: “The South is going to decide who the next president is; whoever the South votes for will be the president. You can’t win without the South. You’re going to see that the South is going to be against some folks.”
Wallace’s not-so-subtle observation did not deafen Americans to the dogwhistle of race and what would ultimately be the Southern Strategy. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many disaffected white voters, one-time Democrats, found a new home in the Republican Party.
In 1980, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, Ronald Reagan, made his first campaign appearance after receiving the nomination, in Philadelphia, Miss., near the location of the three murdered civil rights workers in 1964 — to say to the all-white crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.” With this tacit remark, Reagan sought to appeal to Southern white voters, which he did, and those supporters, not just in the South, but elsewhere would become known as “Reagan Democrats.”
It became part of a winning strategy that fostered GOP political dominance in the 1980s. But the return on investment is diminishing. To counter the obvious decline in support, some Republicans tout conspiracy theories of voter fraud. Some Republican state legislatures have attempted to make voting more difficult.
For nearly six decades, the Republican Party has pinned a portion of its political fortunes on divisive politics based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. But with 20% of the 21st century already in the rearview mirror, how will this playbook that originated in the mid-20th century work going forward?
Trump is definitely the contemporary face of the problem, but isn’t Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with his “critical race theory” and shipping Texas migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, offering himself as a younger version?
When a portion of the Republican platform is committed to fear and divisiveness, going in a different direction could mean a loss of support in the short term. Would that be preferred over potentially hemorrhaging support for a generation?
By signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Democratic Party became persona non grata in the South. Johnson understood that, but he was willing to take that chance because it made the nation better.
The time has come for the Republican Party to follow suit. Does it possess the requisite courage? I was heartened that 12 Republican senators, including North Carolina’s Richard Burr and Thom Tillis, voted to protect gay marriage, but it will take more than that to extricate the party from the political hinterlands to which it seems destined.
Williams
The Rev. Byron Williams (byron@publicmorality.org), a writer and the host of “The Public Morality” on WSNC 90.5, lives in Winston-Salem.
