When the key votes in the House and the Senate came, Republicans of varying ideological tendencies (and, in those days, the party had liberal, moderate and conservative wings) were significantly more supportive of the Civil Rights Act than were Democrats. The measure passed the House on a 290–130 vote, with support from 61 percent of House Democrats (152 in favor, 96 opposed). But Republican lawmakers gave it 80 percent backing (138 in support, just 34 against).
The critical test came in the Senate in June 1964. Republicans aligned with northern Democrats to break the segregationist filibuster. Then, 82 percent of Republican senators backed the final passage of the measure, as opposed to two-thirds of Senate Democrats.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, he is said to have told an aide: “We [Democrats] have lost the South for a generation.” But that statement did not just apply to the Democrats. Republicans represented the other part of the change equation. The question: Would Republicans remain the party of Lincoln or would they make a play for disenchanted Democrats in the south?
Two months later, the answer came. A key Democratic foe of civil rights, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, switched his party affiliation. Instead of refusing Thurmond, a crude segregationist who had sought the presidency as a defender of the “states rights” doctrines invoked by dead-enders from pre–Civil War days to the present, Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan welcomed the man into their Grand Old Party (GOP) who literally a year before had been smearing the name of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Thurmond began working to remake the Republican Party so that it could appeal to the southern white voters who, as Johnson predicted, quickly lost faith in their Democratic Party. Thurmond’s influence on Nixon, who developed a so-called southern strategy to realize the South Carolina senator’s vision of a transformed political map, was immense. It extended deep into the thirty-sixth president’s decision-making process for the selections of cabinet members and Supreme Court nominees. And it was embraced for one reason and one reason only: it worked.
There were Republicans who objected to tossing aside their party’s sheet anchor and abandoning the ark of justice that Frederick Douglass described. But they were hounded from its fold by a new breed of hyper-partisan professionals—some elected, others operating behind the scenes—who had no interest in “moral force” politics. They pursued victory at any cost; they relished nothing so much as the personal power that extends from being on the winning side.
Those who embraced a genuine “Party of Lincoln” ethic were removed from positions of authority, and their elected posts. House minority leader Charles Halleck, the Indiana Republican who worked closely with the Johnson administration to pass muscular civil rights protections, was deposed the following January by his own caucus. John Lindsay, who was rejected in his own party’s 1969 New York City mayoral primary (winning instead on the Liberal Party line), became a Democrat in 1971. Lindsay’s ally in the 1963 civil rights push, Charles “Mac” Mathias, was so unsettled by the GOP’s move to the right that he threatened to run for the presidency in 1976 as a progressive independent. Other champions of civil rights, such as California senator Thomas Kuchel (the Republican floor manager in the fights to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965), New Jersey senator Clifford Case and New York senator Jacob Javits, would eventually lose primaries to challengers who accepted the Republican Party’s new politics.
The senators who were rejected did not lose merely because of their civil rights advocacy but because of their Lincolnesque vision of a progressive Republican Party that, in Kuchel’s words, “brought to politics the philosophy of governing for the many.”
That philosophy was replaced by a more rigid and divisive politics, which exploited not just racial resentment but the whole host of furies and angers that has come to define a “conservatism” that has little to do with ideology and much to do with manufactured bitterness and electoral exploitation. “The Republican Party that had been ceased to be sometime in the 1980s, and the modern party—the radical conservative party—not only has little or no interest in honoring its history, it is actively hostile to it,” explained Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of the brilliant 2012 book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party from Eisenhower to the Tea Party.
For a time in the 1950s and 1960s, enlightened Democrats and Republicans competed to be the party of civil rights. And the Republicans were in the lead through much of the period, inspiring Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, the first African American elected to the Senate in the modern era, to observe that the Republican Party “was, I believe, much more progressive than the Democratic Party.”
The tragedy of the Democratic Party through much of its history was an unwillingness to stand strong against its southern wing and to clearly align itself with the cause of social and economic progress. It rejected principles in favor of a dumb-beast partisanship that said winning elections, and accumulating the power that extends from those victories, mattered more than morality.
The tragedy of the Republican Party is that, when Democrats began finally to do the right thing, key figures in the GOP welcomed Thurmond and other segregationist Democrats into its fold and began to do the wrong thing. They crafted not just a “southern strategy” but a politics of reaction. There were plenty of Republicans who resisted the trend at the time, and there have been plenty of Republicans since (notably former congressman Jack Kemp and former secretary of state Colin Powell) who have sought to broaden the party’s focus and appeal.
But as one of the great Republican advocates of civil rights, John Lindsay, noted when he left the GOP in 1971: “Today the Republican Party has moved so far from what I perceive as necessary policies . . . that I can no longer try to work within it.”
There are no John Lindsays or Edward Brookes left in today’s Republican Party because, as the Reverend Jesse Jackson has noted: “Republicans—beginning with Richard Nixon’s southern strategy and continuing with Ronald Reagan and beyond—used racial dog-whistle politics to consolidate their party in the white South. The Grand Old Party (GOP) became the party of Jefferson Davis.”
John Avlon, the longtime speechwriter for New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has since become a prominent advocate for centrist projects such as the “No Labels” movement, observed several years ago that “the Republican Party was right on civil rights for the first one-hundred years of its existence. It was right when the Democratic Party was wrong. Its future strength and survival will depend on rediscovering that legacy of individual freedom amid America’s essential diversity. To win in the 21st century, the Party of Lincoln needs to start looking like the Party of Lincoln again.”
But that is not going to happen anytime soon.
The Republican Party is now the “Party of Trump,” not Lincoln. And certainly not Frederick Douglass—the man whose rich legacy is so neglected by the party that he defended to his death in 1895 now generates headlines like the one on a February 2017 Dana Milbank column for the Washington Post: “In which Trump discovers some guy named Frederick Douglass.”
There are surely racists in the contemporary Republican Party: alt-right extremists, neoconfederates and old segregationists who climbed into the shell of the GOP with Thurmond. But there are many more practitioners of an insidiously warped version of the “benign neglect” Daniel Patrick Moynihan discussed during the period when the southern strategies of Thurmond and Nixon and Reagan were taking hold. They mouth pieties and attend their “Lincoln Day Dinners,” they may even show up for Martin Luther King Day celebrations. But they practice a politics that denies and dissembles everything that was ever noble or necessary about the Republican Party.
They are not Republicans in any historical sense. They are the contemporary embodiments of the dictionary.com definition of political hacks: “a professional who renounces or surrenders individual independence, integrit
y, belief, etc. in return for money or other reward in the performance of a task normally thought of as involving a strong personal commitment.” They are the political tricksters and fraudulent partisans “whose mad ambition,” Frederick Douglass warned in his day, “would imperil the success of the Republican party.”
These political hacks have no qualms about abandoning the “Party of Lincoln” for the “Party of Trump.” In so doing, they have made possible not just a Trump presidency but Trumpism, and all the threats to the republic that extend from a moment when principles are abandoned.
These political parasites attached themselves to the Grand Old Party because it was their meal ticket. They are no different from the crudest ward heelers of the old urban machines that once sustained the Democratic Party. Just as Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s most harmful henchmen may once have reflected kindly on the liberal ideals of a Franklin Roosevelt or a Harry Truman, so contemporary Republican hacks profess admiration for the cultured conservatism of a William F. Buckley or a Jack Kemp. But the contemporary conservatism of the Republican Party is a thing of theory rather than practice. It is rightly noted that even a Barry Goldwater or a Ronald Reagan would be unacceptable to the Republicans of today. Despite their own unfortunate compromises against historic Republican principles, Goldwater and Reagan would be too traditional in their inclinations for today’s lot.
What matters to the Republican establishment of this time is not even conservatism, as was made evident by the 2016 campaign, in which party leaders embraced Trump’s all-over-the-place politics. It is the power that is afforded those who identify with the once good name of the Republican Party, no matter how onerous its leadership may become, no matter how unsettling current manifestations of Republicanism may grow. That power is amplified by media outlets that celebrate hackery as evidence of a seriousness of purpose and pragmatic intent, while dismissing idealism and steadfast commitment as nonsense that has no place in our politics. It is further amplified by a donor class that sees every campaign contribution as an “investment.”
It was the willingness of the Republican Party that once was to reject a compromised politics—saying no to the sins of human bondage, no to the moral compromises of the slave economy, no to anti-immigrant hysteria, no to an uneven distribution of the land that discriminated against the urban poor—that made Frederick Douglass a Republican.
In April of 1889, an aging Douglass addressed an audience in Washington, DC, shortly after Republican Benjamin Harrison had assumed the presidency following four years of governance by Democrat Grover Cleveland. “Well, now,” the great orator declared, “the American people have returned the Republican Party to power; and the question is, what will it do?”
Douglass titled his address “The Nation’s Problem.” It was a prescient description for our times, as the nation’s problem today is not merely a President Donald Trump but a Republican Party that is made up of the hacks who enable Trump in the name of their own mad ambition and the empty promise of a Republican Party that is no more. It is clear that Trump knows nothing about who Frederick Douglass was. It is equally clear that Trump’s fellow Republicans know nothing about what Frederick Douglass, or Abraham Lincoln, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower stood for.
— 18 —
SECRETARIAT STUMBLING
Reince Priebus
White House Chief of Staff
Reince Priebus was choking. Literally and figuratively. He was swallowing hard, again and again, trying to cough up the words that would explain away the firing of a national security advisor for lying to the vice president about cozying up to the Russians who had reportedly engaged in a massive attempt to deliver the 2016 election to his boss. But what really had him gagging was the task of justifying a presidential rant about how the practitioners of the constitutionally defined exercise of journalism were “enemies of the people.”
It was February 19, 2017, and the permanent fixture in contemporary Republican politics was appearing on the favorite cable news channel of Republican elites, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Network. He was talking to a host he had appeared with many, many times before. This was supposed to be easy.
But it wasn’t working for the man who traded his title as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) to take over as the chief of staff for a Republican president. What should have been a comfortable conversation was degenerating into another discussion of what Priebus referred to as “basically, you know, some treasonous type of accusations” that transpired on a daily basis after Donald J. Trump assumed the presidency. For a political hack who just wanted to be where the action was, this was a nightmare scenario.
“Joining us now from Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach is White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus,” Chris Wallace began. “Reince, I want to start with President Trump’s tweet on Friday afternoon. This is what he wrote: ‘The fake news media (failing New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people.’ Reince, the president believes that a free and independent press is a threat to the country?”
Priebus was rattled. His initial response skirted along the thin ice of incoherence. “No, I think—I think for the most part—and I understand where he’s coming from—is that there are certain things that are happening in the news that just aren’t honest. And we’re not talking about everyone, Chris. We’re not talking about all news, but we’re talking about something that I guess he’s termed as fake news.” Then Priebus finally remembered his talking points.
The liberal New York Times was “inaccurate.” “Grossly overstated.” “Wrong.” “Nothing to it.” The conservative Wall Street Journal was “untrue.” “Totally inaccurate.” Reince was raving now. Everything the press was saying about his new boss’s apologies for the sort of Russian autocrats who Republicans once abhorred, about Russian ties to disgraced Trump aides, about the linkages and relationships that Priebus would have decried as treasonous in a Democratic administration, everything that was being said about the Trump team was just, you know, “complete garbage.”
But Wallace wasn’t buying the spin this time.
“Here’s the problem. Reince, wait a minute, here’s the problem,” the Fox man interrupted. “I don’t have any problem with you complaining about an individual story. We sometimes got it wrong, you guys sometimes got it wrong. I don’t have any problem with you complaining about bias. But you went a lot further than that, or the president went a lot further than that. He said that the fake media, not certain stories, the fake media are an enemy to the country. We don’t have a state-run media in the country. That’s what they have in dictatorships.”
Priebus sputtered that “it’s not just two stories. Then, it’s followed up by twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, of other cable stations, not necessarily Fox, that all day long, on every chyron, every seven minutes, they’re talking about Russian spies, talking about the intelligence community, talking about how me and Steve Bannon don’t like each other, and what’s Kellyanne doing? All this is just total garbage.”
Wallace did his best to prevent the great unraveling. “Here’s the problem, when the president says we’re the enemy of the American people, it makes it sound like if you are going against him, you are going against the country,” explained the host.
“Here is the problem, Chris,” the White House chief of staff announced, “the problem is you’re right.” Priebus was just going to keep unraveling, to keep losing it, right there, on Sunday morning, on national television. He was going to keep swallowing hard claiming that there was some kind of plan buried amid the chaos, a plan that was constantly obscured by a pattern of media coverage that failed to recognize how great things were going. Yes, yes, the networks might cover an awkward handshake with the Japanese prime minister, or an awkward handshake with the Canadian prime minister, or an awkward call with the Australian prime minister, or an awkward call with the Mexican president. “But then as soon as it was over,” Prieb
us griped, “the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies.”
“But you don’t get to tell us what to do, Reince,” said the host of the morning talk show on the network that was supposed to “get” the whole Trump thing.
“Nothing is happening,” growled Reince. “Give me a break!”
Finally, everyone took a deep breath.
Priebus regained his composure.
“All right,” said Wallace. “I need to ask you another question about Russia.”
Reince Priebus, who during the 2016 campaign had so frequently hailed Fox as “fair” while ripping its competitors, was swallowing hard again, and grumbling and griping and groping for words—any words—that might get him through the ordeal.
“I don’t know why you are so—I mean, it’s fine that you’re so going bananas here, Chris.”
But it was Priebus who was going bananas.
In a media appearance that was supposed to position him as “the adult in the room” at the White House, or Mar-a-Lago, or wherever else the Trump circus was performing, Priebus came off as the bumbling clown who tries without success to distract attention from the wreck that everyone just witnessed.
When Donald Trump claimed the presidency early on the morning of November 9, at a chaotic and seemingly unplanned victory party, the president-elect of the United States called Reince Priebus to the stage at the New York Hilton. “Let me tell you about Reince… Reince is a superstar,” said Trump. “But, I said, they can’t call you a superstar, Reince, unless we win. Because you can’t be called a superstar, like Secretariat. If Secretariat came in second, Secretariat wouldn’t have that big beautiful bronze bust at the track… Reince, come up here. Where is Reince? Come up here, Reince. Boy oh boy, oh boy.”