"Party of Civil Rights"

The problems with Bruce Bartlett’s pseudo-historical WSJ piece are almost too numerous to contemplate. For starters, it’s laughable for him to suggest — as he evidently does in the subtitle to his book — that the varieties of racism that guided segments of the Democratic party during the pre-civil rights era have somehow been “buried,” unless by “buried” one means “discussed prominently and uncontroversially by every credible political and social historian since the Great Depression.” But perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference, so I won’t belabor the point.

The piece contains the predictable, and highly deceptive, claim that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Act passed as a result of “Republican” support. This argument only works by avoiding any discussion of the actual Congressional vote on the bill, which reveals a sectional rather than a party divide
over the question of black civil rights.

House bill:
Southern Democrats: 7-87
Southern Republicans: 0-10
Northern Democrats: 145-9
Northern Republicans: 138-24

Senate bill:
Southern Democrats: 1-20
Southern Republicans: 0-1
Northern Democrats: 45-1
Northern Republicans: 27-5

Bartlett’s great howler, of course, rests in the condescending argument that black voters should entertain the thought of voting for McCain as a gesture of appreciation for Calvin Coolidge’s opposition to lynching. The notion that political parties retain some kind of essential, stable (and nationally uniform) character over time — and that these hypothetical lineages should have any determining effect on contemporary voter preference — is dishonest and idiotic. If party histories carried the effects Bartlett believes they should, Sun Belt blacks, at least, would abstain from voting altogether. Which is of course precisely what Sun Belt Republicans — hailing from states like, say, Arizona — would have preferred in the first place.