It Didn't Start with Trump

A WHITE EVANGELICAL leader recently asked me how white supremacy shaped Republicanism. The truth is this: Belief in the supremacy of whiteness has shaped both parties and all facets of life in the United States.

The Grand Old Party wasn’t always synonymous with bold-faced bigotry. In fact, it wasn’t even synonymous with the South. The party of Lincoln was crafted in the North in 1854 to counter the expansion of Southern slavocracy into new territories.

As the only surviving party from the nation’s founding, Democrats—based in the South—were keepers of the status quo, maintaining the health of the nation’s nascent systems and structures. The two parties morphed into the two sides of the Civil War: the Union (Lincoln’s Republicans) and the Confederacy (Southern Democrats).

Lincoln’s GOP won and spent the first several post-war years reordering the landscape of power in the U.S.: They outlawed the 246-year-old American economic engine known as slavery, removed race as a determining factor of citizenship, and expanded the right to vote to all male citizens, regardless of race. Formerly enslaved Africans in the U.S. flourished. An estimated 2,000 were elected to public offices across the country—as high as lieutenant governor—and several won seats in the U.S. Senate. But their streak ended when federal troops were pulled out of the South.

Over the next couple of decades, Southern Democrats mounted a legal, social, and political civil war to re-establish white male supremacy in the South. Peonage laws filled former plantations with convict-leased workers by lowering bars of criminality and focusing enforcement on communities of color. Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 black bodies swung from trees across the South while white mobs rioted, massacring black men, women, and children with impunity in states across the Midwest and Upper Midwest.

Then there was a shift.

Hubert Humphrey stepped to the podium to offer the minority plank of the Democratic Party platform at the convention of 1948. Following the lead of activists such as Ida B. Wells and A. Philip Randolph and fueled by the global human rights movement in the wake of the Holocaust, Humphrey called for anti-lynching laws, an end to segregation and job discrimination, and a civil rights act to be included in the Democratic Party platform that year.

He won. All points from Humphrey’s minority plank were included in the Democratic platform that year.

Southern Democrats revolted. An estimated 36 of them formed their own party—the Dixiecrats—which promised to maintain white supremacy by preserving states’ rights to segregate and discriminate based on race. The Dixiecrats flailed and eventually rejoined the Democratic Party, but the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act was too much for them. Most Southern senators voted against it.

If 1964 was too much, then the 1965 Voting Rights Act was humiliation. White Southerners left the Democratic Party en masse.

Barry Goldwater, then Richard Nixon, spent the next decade courting dislocated Southern Democrats to the GOP. Dog-whistle politics replaced bullhorn bigotry. Calls for “law and order” promised protection from “lawbreaking” civil rights activism. Calls for states’ rights transformed into calls against busing—code for integration of schools. And the pictures of dusty-eyed white poverty, the ones that moved us to approve Johnson’s War on Poverty, were dissolved by images of welfare queens driving Cadillacs in urban ghettos.

By 1980, many white Southerners in the South and those who had migrated to the Midwest, West, and North had found their home in the Republican Party. They have been there ever since.

In the 1980s, evangelicals exchanged vows with Ronald Reagan, crafter of the welfare queen trope, and the Republican Party; since then, they have been in love with trickle-down economics and dog- whistle politics designed to protect and defend the assumed natural right of white men to rule the world.

The election of Donald Trump has not birthed something new in the Republican Party. It has only pushed the party’s late 20th century white supremacist agenda and its operatives to the fore, to lead us all.