1980: Ronald Reagan and Philadelphia MS
As every informed liberal knows, Ronald Reagan started his 1980 campaign with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. notorious as the site of the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Though there were federal prosecutions under Civil Rights laws, there were no state prosecutions of the murderers. So what was a theme of Reagan’s speech? State’s Rights — including the unspoken right to let racist murderers go free.
Anything about Civil Rights? Of course not.
Conservatives have engaged in a forty-year project to sanitize Reagan’s racism, despite lots of other evidence, including, but not limited to, his “young bucks” and “welfare queens” rhetoric. A major player in the project is David Brooks, who in 2007, wrote a column, History and Calumny, a weak attempt to exonerate Reagan from racist motives in his Philadelphia Ms. speech.* Of course Brooks was full of crap, as he is about everything. Though Nixon peeled off enough Southern whites to get elected in 1968, the desertion of Northern whites from the Democratic Party occurred massively under Reagan, as I showed in my diary Like Everything, the Boomer Story is about Race, OK? Sadly, this was led by my fellow white Boomers, the “Reagan Democrats.” HW Bush did not shrink from racism either, as Willie Horton could have told you, and this happened to the Democratic Party from 1980-1992:
In 1980, the age groups including boomers (18-29 and 30-44) were D+17 and D+13 respectively. Fast forward to 1992: after 12 years of Reagan and Bush I, the Boomers were down to only D+ 1 (30-44) and D+ 4 (45-59), an erosion of 14 and 9 points respectively from 1980.
The rebellion against the scary government was just another dog whistle — Don’t let the government give my tax money to those people. Republicans rode this for forty years. — forty years of stalling and retrenchment from the New Deal and Great Society. Forty years of Republicans, under cover of race, driving up inequality, both economic and racial.
2020: Donald Trump and Tulsa, OK
We’re undergoing a political sea change now, as a confluence of events have shocked Americans into finally seeing the reality of racsism and blind hatred of government. Donald Trump and his base army in Congress and the electorate have no place to go but down; from gassing citizens to justifying assaults on the elderly to obscenely using George Floyd in a phony speech about jobs.
And now, scheduling his first new inflammatory rally on Juneteenth, a date symbolic with racial freedom, but also in Tulsa, a place symbolic of racist death and destruction, Trump gives a middle finger to the cataclysmic events all around him, hoping he can mobilize his dwindling racist army to eke out a victory in November.
Let this obscene event in Tulsa be a bookend.
A self-hammered nail in the coffin of using race to oppress African-Americans and immigrants and gull the naive into supporting the party that doesn’t care if they live or die, the party that throws a beer party after trying to rob them of their health care. A bookend to an era of militarized police given license to terrorize; an end to the era of children in cages and indifference to disease.
But it’s only a bookend if we make it so, dedicating ourselves to electing Democrats on every level of government, donating, phone-banking, writing letters and postcards, protecting voters.
Let us make Philadelphia, MS and Tulsa, OK be bookends symbolizing the rise and fall of an era marked by injustice, and the beginning of a new time of hope.
*The link is to a Slate piece by Tim Noah, commenting onTimes internecine, but unspoken op-ed warfare between columnists. I won’t link the staggeringly overrated and dishonest Brooks.