The push was evident in a Baltimore radio advertisement targeting African American listeners that was sponsored by the Washington-based National Black Republican Association. The ad identifies Martin Luther King Jr. as a Republican and pins the founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Democrats.

One woman says: “Democrats passed those black codes and Jim Crow laws. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan.”

“The Klan?” her friend replies. “White hoods and sheets?”

First woman: “Democrats fought all civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the 1960s. Democrats released those vicious dogs and fire hoses on blacks.” ~The Washington Post (9/21/06)

To its credit (and a good sign that Steele is fairly savvy), Michael Steele’s campaign denounced the ad.  Now the ad has the virtue of being mostly true, as far as it goes, and I suppose I can understand why black Republicans think this is a pretty withering indictment of the Democratic Party in the past.  It is presumably for reasons such as these that some relative few black people become Republicans today; it is certainly why the GOP had a great many more black supporters in the past.  And if the Democratic Party were anything like what it was before, say, the 1980s, there might be some point to bringing this up now.  Unlike the GOP, which continues its fine traditions of plutocracy, collaboration with corporations, executive abuses of power, wars of aggression and the consolidation of wealth and power, the Democrats of yore are no more, as some have mentioned recently.  Most of the voters became Republicans in the hope that there they would find some refuge from the radicalism that had swept over their party.  Obviously, it had everything to do with the civil rights revolution and the massive intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of the states and the people.  How did it become the government’s business how I conduct business at my firm, who I hire and fire and why?  Egalitarian claptrap and the use of coercion.  A different generation of conservatives, not necessarily all Republicans (and not representative of a lot of GOP politicians), saw this process as a great leap forward for the forces of consolidation and unconstitutional government, and opposed it at least for this reason. 

The move of these Democratic voters to the other side was a choice made almost out of necessity, and has not really had terribly happy results; instead of remaking the GOP into a more Jeffersonian and authentically decentralist-populist party, the GOP has absorbed these voters and made them into reliable supporters of their age-old commitments to consolidated nationalism, centralism, state capitalism and imperialism.  It has reeducated many of them to believe that conservatism is a doctrine that preaches egalitarianism against the “real racists” of the left. 

Of course, it should be noted, progressive and leftist racism has always existed, and many of the racial codes instituted in the late 19th and early 20th century were the fruits of progressives in the South and elsewhere; these codes, along with an enthusiasm for eugenics and sterilisation of the “unfit,” did catch on with the cutting-edge progressives of their day.  To the extent that they departed from a civilised and humane modus vivendi in the Era of Good Feelings, they represented a final revolutionary assault on the remnants of the Old South.  Jim Crow law were the products of progressivism and populism, and if there is one thing to take away from the story of Jim Crow it is that mass democracy and appeals to “the people” can, when unchecked by higher principles, lead to manifest injustices.  But throughout this period the Democrats remained far and away the conservative party of this country, which changed when the party leadership took the path of social engineering, centralised planning and rationalisation and often left their constituents’ interests behind.    

One can also make a credible argument that the Dems today exploit their black voters with a cynicism equalled only by the way the GOP exploits its Christian voters, and that it does not serve the real interests of black voters to be so fully committed to one party.  Perhaps black voters should heed those sorts of arguments.  But I, for one, find tiresome the frequent invocations of the KKK and Jim Crow by Republicans, black or white (especially in the context of foreign policy!).  Not a month goes by, it seems, that we are not treated to some gaseous windbag holding forth on the former KKK membership of Robert Byrd.  Okay, fine, we get it, we know all about it.  But this observation is usually recently made in the context of attacking Byrd for his denunciations of the war in Iraq or executive abuses of power; the “Byrd was a Klansman” meme has a high correlation to the defense of atrocious, unconstitutional policies that used to make these very same conservatives sick when Bubba was engaged in something similar.   

I am terribly weary of how elements in the GOP, including many in the leadership, seem to have taken pride that it used to be the progressive, left-wing party in this country.  (In this sense, the dalliance with conservatives over the last five decades has been the odd exception, the interlude between the main acts of progressivism.)  Besides the obvious two-faced nature of this hostility to the old Democratic South, whence comes an important part of their present political power and their most loyal voters (most of whose ancestors were the very Democrats being slammed in such attacks), it perpetuates the weird support for egalitarian politics that has become a virtual requirement in GOP politics over the last 20 years.  It is, of course, fun to hit affirmative action for being discriminatory (and there are perfectly good arguments as to why affirmative action mostly harms it alleged beneficiaries without ever needing to mention equality), as Republicans now do in criticisms of progressives, but historically conservatives have not been quick to attack structures of inequality because we fundamentally do not believe in equality as a guiding principle in politics.  That is basic.  (In truth, many conservatives today attack affirmative action because it works to the disadvantage of our constituencies and to the advantage of others; some may object to any kind of spoils system, but many object to being on the losing side, which is predictable.)  Not only do we assume that there will be, perhaps sometimes even should be, a certain degree of natural inequality in the world, but we are wary of the kinds of coercion and upheaval required to eradicate it if, indeed, it proves to be unjust. 

The shift towards a belief in equality has been marked, in my view, with the steady erosion and deterioration of conservative thought, as modern conservatives have been forced to do some deft maneuvering to make sense of their current egalitarianism in light of a tradition that has always been, almost by definition, anti-egalitarian.