Republicans stopped being the party of Lincoln long before Donald Trump's ascendancy
Appealing to racial intolerance has a long history in the Republican Party
It was a small thing, but it said much.
Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan deliberately solicited a question from a Washington Post reporter Thursday precisely because Donald Trump will not.
The sulky Trump has taken away the Post's campaign credentials and Ryan wanted the signal of his disapproval on the record.
June has become a pivotal month in the U.S. presidential race. Republicans are in unconcealed distress about their presumptive nominee, who has lately begun threatening party leaders that if they don't fall into line behind him he'll "go it alone" — whatever that means.
Some of his senior advisers say publicly that Trump's critics in the party should "just shut the hell up." But that doesn't always work. When Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, do shut up —as they did when refusing to answer questions about their nominee this week — it only underlines that they know all too well the trouble they're in.
There are even some who seriously question whether Trump genuinely wants to be president, or whether he's saying controversial things because, consciously or subconsciously, he's looking for a way out.
A Bloomberg survey this week had Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by 12 percentage points. No other poll has had him quite so far back — yet. But on average Trump is still about six points behind and trending down.
Journalists who are chastened by how badly they underestimated Trump during primary season might be overcompensating now, but the truth is that Republicans are at a watershed moment in their history. And not in a good way.
One month to the nomination
In one month they will officially nominate as their candidate for president someone who is manifestly uninformed about almost every area of public policy, apparently unacquainted with diplomacy, temperamentally volatile and, at the least, a "racial opportunist," as CNN political commentator Van Jones says, if not a genuine racist.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's Spring Intelligence Report — The Year in Hate and Extremism — has Trump on its cover.
If this were a Gilbert Gottfried shock routine, the punchline would be a long, drawn-out "and they call themselves the party of Lincoln."
But it's not a joke and they really do think of themselves as still the party of Lincoln. Emphatically so.
CNN's paid Trump spinner, Jeffrey Lord, for example, regularly invokes the 16th president — the Great Emancipator — as evidence the Republican's presumptive nominee couldn't possibly be a racist.
Lord has argued that Trump is a kind of an anti-racism warrior — racially colour-blind — fighting against the political correctness of liberal identity politics.
But of course it's Trump who speaks of whites as "us" and "we" while saying such things as, "We're going to have great relations with Hispanics" or "If you look at African-Americans, they want jobs." Hardly sounds like racial colour-blindness.
As confused and twisted as Lord's argument seems — incoherent and disingenuous, say some of his CNN co-panellists — it always circles back to the same, simple, triumphant assertion that "Trump can't be racist because this is the party of Lincoln!"
It's no surprise Republicans want to preserve the Lincoln brand. What party wouldn't?
Abraham Lincoln holds a uniquely revered place in American history — routinely ranked first or second among all presidents — because he took the northern states to war against the South, first to preserve the union and then ultimately to end slavery — and it cost him his life.
After the Civil War, the Republican Party evolved, becoming the pro-business party, and many blacks remained loyal to it because it was the party that had waged a bloody war for their freedom.
That was the party of Lincoln.
Lincoln's lost legacy
Even into the 20th century, bitter white southern voters — today's staunchest Republicans — still considered the Republican Party their enemy. Their home was in the Democratic Party for a while, and then among the Dixiecrats.
- Trump's war on political correctness redefining U.S. race
- Trump riding the monster the Republicans created
The precise moment of political realignment in the South is often dated to July 2, 1964 — the day a southern Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, committed to doing something for "the ni'gra," betrayed his roots and signed the Civil Rights Act he'd championed.
The story that Johnson then put down his pen and said, "We have lost the South for a generation" is probably apocryphal, but the analysis was correct and has turned out to be an understatement.
The Republican presidential candidate in 1964, Barry Goldwater, was the first to court white southerners away from the Democratic Party by appealing to their racism and anger about the new Civil Rights Act.
It would become known as "the southern strategy" and be a feature of Republican campaigns for years afterward — because it worked.
Even in the Democratic landslide of 1964, Goldwater nevertheless carried Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana for Republicans. Deep South states the Republicans hadn't won for nearly 100 years had suddenly flocked to Goldwater and the Republicans.
That was the break in the so-called Solid South and the beginning of the end of the party of Lincoln.
In later years, Richard Nixon would embrace the southern strategy to compete for the white vote against the independent racist George Wallace, whose rallying cry had once been, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!"
Dog-whistle politics
In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his official presidential campaign just outside Philadelphia, Miss., a small town best known for its proximity to the murders of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s.
In that speech Reagan said, "I believe in states' rights."
Later, Reagan's notorious operative Lee Atwater inelegantly decoded "states' rights" as one of the dog whistles of the southern strategy:
"You start out in 1964 by saying 'N--ger, n--ger, n--ger.' By 1968 you can't say 'n--ger' — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites."
Atwater would later get behind a TV ad exploiting the crimes of a black man convicted of rape and murder, Willie Horton, to provoke fear among white voters in the 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush.
Rattling the racial insecurities
The success of decades spent rattling the racial insecurities of white voters in national elections has been to corral much of the Republican caucus into the states of the old Confederacy.
The South is the strongest bloc in their base now. It holds the greatest sway over their political culture.
And though it has evolved somewhat from its wickedly racist past, the South is still a place that fights to fly the Confederate battle flag atop public buildings and where streets are named for those who concocted their vile intellectual defences of slavery. It is still the place that went to war against the party of Lincoln.
Trump, a Manhattan billionaire, wouldn't normally be a good fit for Republicans in the South, but somehow he won 10 out of 11 of the old Confederate states in this year's primaries.
Whatever he told those voters, it probably wasn't that he was from the party of Lincoln.
And whatever Republicans might think of their nominee now, they laid the groundwork for his rise long ago.
It is the party of Trump now.
Clarifications
- An original version attributed a quote to Donald Trump as "just shut up," when in fact it was "just shut the hell up."Jun 17, 2016 12:56 AM ET
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