From 20th Century Segregationists to 21st Century Evangelicals, Republicans Keep Finding Ways to Gain Political Power From Bigotry
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the death-by-assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The nation lost more than a champion of civil rights and inclusive, progressive economics that day. It lost one major political party to a reactionary agenda that still holds it hostage today. The two major political parties underwent a full party realignment – a phenomenon in which the demographics and ideologies switch place and parties redefine themselves around new organizing principles. There have only been a few realignments in our nation’s history and when it happens, the winner is the party that best utilizes chaos.
After seemingly securing his party’s nomination in California, Kennedy’s death in the Ambassador Hotel catalyzed a period of discord among the Democrats that led to Nixon’s first term in the White House. Nixon had already planned to exploit civil rights as a wedge issue among Democrats. Since before the Civil War, the Democrats had strongly held the South. After President Johnson supported urban renewal and the Civil Rights Act, Democratic Senators broke with their party and became what many called “Dixiecrats.” It was the only time in American history when a political party was founded to reduce civil rights.
At the vanguard of the Republicans’ Southern Strategy was a cadre of Southern Baptist and Pentecostal ministers who traded the racial panic of their white congregations for political influence.
Long before Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority escorted Reagan into the Oval Office a network of conservative Protestants in the South made bigotry advantageous. The Democrats went into disarray as another standard bearer lay dead and racism became a convenient electoral resource. The chaos that consumed the Democrats at their convention later that year was merely a byproduct of internal strife.
That informal network of segregationists and Evangelicals grew in number and influence in the subsequent decades turning the Deep South reliably red.
Trump’s most trenchant supporters remain conservative Evangelicals in the Bible Belt. His rhetoric against Muslims and Mexicans – among many others – is a 21st century replay of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. Rallying the rubes has since been more than a strategy; it’s a requirement for Republican Party nominees. Meaningful opposition to the religious right quickly earns the moniker of RINO and usually results in primary losses. The party that mobilizes bigotry in the wake of another civil rights icon loss still rallies around those same regressive precepts.
A major part of that strategy is the delegitimization of identities. Southern churches in the 1960s provided a patina of righteousness to cover racism.
Today, conservative Christians still shield unfair legal practices from criticism by characterizing them in terms of religious liberty and identity. Their argument is that Christians are the legitimate Americans because America is a Christian nation founded exclusively by Christians. It is not true, but it carries political power nonetheless.
This week’s Supreme Court Masterpiece Cakeshop decision demonstrates a contemporary version of this practice. Though written quite narrowly, the Court lent credence to the idea that civil rights may be violated as long as the excuse is religious, specifically Christian. It’s a very old game perfected by the Republicans and still wielded deftly by religious right activists today.
Gabriel S. Hudson, Ph.D. is a democratic theorist and professor. He teaches courses on American Government, The Judiciary, and The Constitution at George Mason University’s Graduate School of Education and The Schar School of Policy and Government. He has published numerous articles on democratic theory and liberty of conscience and is the author of Christodemocracy and the Alternative Democratic Theory of America’s Christian Right.
Image: LBJ Library photo by Yoichi R. Okamoto via Wikimedia