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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The GOP needs to do a lot more than rebuke Trent Lott to make up for its legacy of pandering to white bigots and suppressing the black vote.
Dec 14, 2002 | I almost feel sorry for Trent Lott. Almost.
How could the Senate Majority Leader have known that his words of praise for Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign -- "We voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years" -- could possibly cost him his job? After all, Lott's been saying the same sorts of things for decades now, and on the rare occasion that they even make news, he's always escaped the same way: Insisting he wasn't endorsing racism even as he praised racist institutions, from Thurmond's Dixiecrat Party to Bob Jones University to myriad pro-Confederacy groups the Mississippi right-winger has allied himself with his entire career.
Four years ago, for instance, when Lott's long association with the Council of Conservative Citizens made headlines during President Clinton's impeachment trial, he insisted he had "no firsthand knowledge" of the group's well-known racist views. He got away with it even though his favorite uncle, who sat on the group's executive board, told the New York Times: "Trent is an honorary member. He's spoken at meetings." And even though the group's crackpot racism -- its opposition to interracial marriage, its admiration for French fascist Jean-Marie LePen, its attacks on Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln -- was available for the world to see on its Web site, which also featured a political column by none other than Trent Lott.
That time around, though, there was no rebuke from other Republican leaders, no New York Times editorial demanding he step down. The Times' editorialists were too consumed with bashing Clinton, presumably, and in fact most news organizations played the flap in the context of the impeachment battle. (It was Clinton defender Alan Dershowitz who was responsible for publicizing Lott's association with the Council, along with that of another leading Clinton critic, Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia.) For a while the story played out as a kind of "he said, she said" gotcha game, as though the two men's well-documented racist affiliations were mud being flung at them by desperate Clinton defenders. Unbelievably, Barr and Lott walked away unscathed.
That won't happen this time. Lott may survive as majority leader -- he issued his fourth apology Friday, calling segregation "wrong and immoral," and seems determined to tough it out -- but he'll be forever shadowed by this episode. (And he may be forced to walk the plank if the issue doesn't die.) But while the nation is sitting through its history lesson, however belatedly, let's make clear what this flap is really about. The Republican Party has prospered for almost 40 years by doing exactly what Lott did at Thurmond's 100th birthday party last week: Quietly appeasing its retrograde Southern base with coded symbols of solidarity, while disavowing overt racism for a national audience. Richard Nixon's "Southern strategy" -- rebuild the party by luring whites repelled by the Democrats' pro-civil rights stance -- didn't die with his presidency. And Lott's not the only one using it today.
Although President Bush rebuked the majority leader for his latest remarks and demanded a more convincing apology, Bush has played the game too. He never apologized for his visit to Bob Jones University during the 2000 campaign, despite its long history as a bastion for segregationists, anti-Semites and Catholic-haters, and its ban on interracial dating. And unlike Sen. John McCain, he never apologized for his refusal to criticize pro-Confederate groups that were protesting South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges' decision to move the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome. Nor did anyone at the White House complain when Republican candidates in South Carolina and Georgia used the flag issue last month to beat Hodges and Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes. In fact, Bush ally Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition leader turned Georgia GOP chair, was the force behind the state party's huge success last month, which was widely attributed to an unexpectedly high turnout by white, rural voters, and a dampened turnout among blacks.
And Bush has never disavowed the other key part of the GOP's current Southern strategy: the party's systematic support for efforts to dampen and discourage black voter turnout, mostly but not exclusively in the South. Gone are the days of the poll tax and the literacy test; now the GOP uses "ballot security measures" and voter-fraud crackdowns to keep black turnout low. It was Lott, by the way, who called for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the NAACP's tax status last year, after its voter education and turnout drives were credited with a massive pro-Democratic black turnout in the 2000 election. And in last month's midterm election, Democrats in dozens of states charged Republicans with using new and old strategies to discourage blacks from going to the polls. Almost 40 years after the Voting Rights Act, the GOP still relies far more than anyone will admit on strategies that pander to white racists and keep blacks away from the polls. "The difference is now they try to do it under the radar," says University of South Carolina history professor Dan Carter, an expert in voting rights history.
What Lott did last week is part of a time-honored GOP ritual: kiss the rings of hateful pro-Confederacy, Southern "traditionalists," and then deny supporting their racist views when challenged. Look at the parade of leaders who've sat down for an interview with Southern Partisan magazine, another bastion of opposition to miscegenation, school integration and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. (Its web site is either not working or no longer in existence, so you can't see for yourself.) It's been a rite of Republican passage to talk to Southern Partisan -- Lott, Barr, Attorney General John Ashcroft, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm -- all have graced its pages. (Even McCain employed an advisor, Richard Quinn, affiliated with the magazine.)
