It was 1968. I was over at my friend Lorraine’s apartment in
lower Manhattan when two old friends of hers arrived, a couple,
blowing through the door with the dust of the road and the chill of
winter clinging to them, the very image of the thirsty boots
radical travelers of the era. They slumped wearily to the floor and
gratefully accepted a joint and beer.
“So how was it?” Lorraine asked them. The couple had just come
from a national conference of student politicos, some “New Mobe”
convocation or other.
“They’re Communists,” the young man sighed. “They’re all
Communists.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
It was 1968. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead, the
march on Washington seemed long ago in the past. Nixon had won
election, and a folk singer in Greenwich Village got laughs by
intoning a dirge with the words, “The Cap-ri-corns are tak-ing
ov-er…” It was 1968, the year — we are now being told — of
Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to capture the votes of white
racists in the South, the roots of the modern Republican Party, the
Republican Party that has just had “its covers pulled,” in the
words of Slate’s Will Saletan, speaking on NPR’s “The
Connection” — had its covers pulled, that is, by Trent Lott’s
stupid remarks at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party. The Republicans
always appealed to racists.
“He just embarrassed (the Republicans) by saying in Washington
what they do on the back roads every day,” said the old maestro
race-monger himself, Bill Clinton, last week. “How do they think
they got a majority in the South anyway?” he said. “They try to
suppress black voting, they ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia
and South Carolina, and from top to bottom the Republicans
supported it.”
Eleanor Clift wrote, in Newsweek online, “With one
stupid and thoughtless attempt at humor, Lott stripped away the
carefully constructed facade the Bush team erected at the GOP
convention in 2000 and revealed the party’s true colors.”
Jim Hoagland, writing in the Washington Post, put it
this way: “Lott has unlocked the door to the attic that contains a
family secret no one is ever supposed to acknowledge. The priority
for many of the Republicans calling for Lott’s leadership scalp is
to get that door locked again, and fast.…The roots and
electoral core of the highly successful post-1960 Republican Party
lie in the South’s country-club mix of soft racism and
self-enrichment.”
One wonders what is wrong with getting rich, but never mind.
This is now the party line. Let us remember. Let us remember why
Democrats are so eternally comfortable with a party line.
It was 1968. Remember that, unsparingly. Washington, D.C. was
consumed by a riot that torched 1,000 buildings and killed 12
people — a riot instigated by Stokely Carmichael. Downtown Trenton
was destroyed in racial violence. The Democratic convention
exploded in street violence, deliberately planned and provoked. The
country was being overrun with long-haired dope-smoking
maggot-infested hippies (to quote Rush Limbaugh, and I was one of
them, so I ought to know), and if the characterization was not
exactly spot-on, that’s the way it looked to most of America. The
French student riots took place in Paris the same year, and the war
in Vietnam had reached a peak of violence with the Tet
Offensive.
The year 1968 may mark the beginning of the shift of Southern
voters to the Republican Party, but it marks as well the roots of
the modern Democratic Party. The radicals of 1968 sought
deliberately to cloak themselves in the saintliness of the civil
rights movement, a movement that was largely over by that time (the
Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act having passed in 1964 and
1965). But look at those radicals the way most of the country saw
them at the time. They had blown the last normal Democrat, Hubert
Humphrey, out of the water. (Even at that, 1968 was a close
Presidential election.) All that was left was smoke and
destruction, and the ugly face of a movement that looked like it
wanted to destroy America.
It looked that way because that’s what it was. The modern
Democratic Party was born in blood, profanity, filth, riot, and
flame. If a narrow majority of the country, including much of the
South, began to vote more regularly for Republicans starting in
1968, it had less to do with race than with the widely held, and
accurate, perception that Democrats had allied themselves with a
vicious fringe movement that hated the country. And, as my thirsty
boots acquaintances had found out to their disillusionment, that
fringe movement had been thoroughly infiltrated by Communists —
something known not only to the FBI, but by every local police
department that had had to deal with the strident street warriors
of the era.
That was 1968. In that year, the ruffians were still outside the
tents. By 1972, they had taken over the party of Jefferson, Jackson
and FDR. The voters repudiated them 49 states to one. But the
Democrats have embraced the nihilism of the sixties ever since, one
way or the other.
Unfortunately, you can’t destroy a culture without somebody
paying for it. Who pays when the Democrats smash up equal
opportunity and replace it with a racial spoils system?
African-Americans do.
Yes, Trent Lott had to resign as majority leader. We Republicans
were the first to say so, not because we want to bury racial
issues, but because we want to confront them We own the moral high
ground here. It is we, not Democrats, who truly remember the legacy
of 1968. That year marked the beginning, not of a Southern
strategy, but of a subversive one.
