Listed as a series, the congressional impasses, conflicts, and imbroglios of the past five years resemble plot points for a dark television satire titled “Apocalypse As Usual.” The latest installment featured a pseudo-filibuster, a government shutdown, a Values Voter Summit, at which it was argued that Obamacare violates the Thirteenth Amendment, and, last Sunday, a rally at the Second World War memorial best described as “pitchfork optional.” The past few weeks, with scenes like the one where Ted Cruz, an apostle of the creed that government should do almost nothing, shouting into a bullhorn to demand that it get back to running parks and memorials, seem like the buildup to some spectacular season finale.
The Confederate flag was featured prominently in the raucous demonstrations in front of the memorial and the White House—a bit of iconography that at least did the public the favor of connecting the historical dots. The flag, defended by its stalwarts as an apolitical symbol of Southern pride, actually came to prominence not in the aftermath of the Civil War but eighty years later, in defiance of civil rights. The massive resistance campaigns that inspired the Southern Manifesto and shut down school districts rather than comply with Brown v. Board of Education were orchestrated under the banner of the Stars and Bars. The election that galvanized the brand of racialized acrimony and indignation we’re now seeing in the country was not the one that brought Barack Obama to office in 2008; it was the one in 1948, which brought us the Dixiecrats.
The rise of the Dixiecrat Party, like that of the Tea Party sixty years later, was ostensibly the result of one faction within a political party coming to believe its policy interests had been neglected. But on a more fundamental level, it was the product of demographic changes in national politics. The rebel Democrats wrote a defiant advocacy of racial segregation into their platform precisely because the national Democratic Party understood that its future lay with Northern black voters. Southern whites had formed the party’s base since the Civil War, but by the middle of the twentieth century, the great migration of blacks to Northern cities had thrown that alignment into flux. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is remembered today for guiding the nation through the Great Depression and the Second World War, but his greatest political achievement may have been holding together the irreconcilable Northern and Southern elements of the Democratic Party for as long as he did.
If we care to recall it, there is a direct and historical relationship between the ideological commitment to small government and the belief that the government’s priorities are skewed toward racial minorities. Federal intervention in the Little Rock desegregation crisis and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives hardened the conviction among some whites that government worked predominantly on behalf of minority communities. L.B.J. had envisioned the Great Society as an updated New Deal, but F.D.R. knew well that his reforms didn’t stand a chance unless Southern legislators believed their benefits went largely to white workers.
It’s also worth remembering that the Dixiecrats had few illusions that Strom Thurmond, their Presidential nominee, could win the election. But they did believe that by denying either party a majority in the South they could magnify their influence in national affairs and, in a best-case scenario, throw the Presidential election to the House of Representatives. In short, they hoped to leverage their influence as spoilers and obstructionists in national affairs.
Today’s Republican Party, like the Democrats six decades ago, has had to come to terms with a demographic shift—one in which Hispanic voters are a crucial new element. We would be naïve to believe that the opposition to comprehensive immigration reform that features so prominently in current Tea Party politics is incidental to its appeal. (A 2010 survey of Tea Party supporters conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that fifty-eight per cent believed the government “paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and minorities”; sixty-four percent said immigrants were “a burden” on the country.) The Tea Party–inspired eruptions that have recurred throughout Obama’s Presidency represent something more complicated than a reactionary backlash to the sight of a black President; they are a product of the way he so tidily represents the disparate strands of social history that brought us to this impasse. The problem isn’t that there’s a black President; it’s that the country has changed in ways that made Obama’s election possible.
A half century ago, the Republican Party looked with envy at the youthful energy of the mass movements aligning themselves with the Democratic Party—until the 1968 Democratic Convention conveyed the pitfalls of grassroots politics. Today, it finds itself in a similar bind, caught in the narrow straits between movement and mob. John Boehner is not a Franklin Roosevelt; he’s not even a Sam Rayburn, and it’s his unenviable charge to corral elements that are, in effect, raging against math. The country regards the shutdown as a sign of government dysfunction, but for the implacable members of Boehner’s caucus, shutdown may simply be the ultimate form of limited government. Sixty-five years ago, the Dixiecrats spearheaded a movement toward the G.O.P. The Tea Party is an echo of that same movement, save for one distinction: in 2013, the rebels have nowhere left to go.
Photograph by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post/Getty.
