Why This Is So!

In my last column, entitled, “Things are worse than they seem,” I set forth my rather pessimistic views as to the state of the Democratic Party, (not Democrat Party) (more on this in a later essay) and the state of the progressive movement in general. I did not mention in that article two other disturbing factors which bear mention, namely that the percentage of the Latino and over 65 vote for Kerry, both declined from the percentages of the previous four years. I concluded my article with the promise that in my next analysis I will discuss why I think this is so and in a third installment I will discuss what I believe must be done to reverse the trend.

So here is why I think this is so! I believe that the seeds for demise of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement, which has its roots in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt early in the twentieth century, were sown during the Administration of Lyndon Johnson and in the Civil Rights movement. Until then the Democratic Party held its dominance based on a coalition of what used to be the Confederacy whose representatives, for the most part, were segregationists and anti-union factions, and the industrial states centered on the East and West coasts and around the Great Lakes. Franklin Roosevelt, held this coalition together by never touching what he saw as the third rail of politics, namely the plight of African-American’s in the South. 

Truman endangered this coalition to some extent, when he desegregated the military, but the South, which associated the Republican Party, with Lincoln and emancipation, could not bring itself to even consider any association with this old enemy. Johnson, who but for Vietnam, might have gone down in history as the greatest of twentieth century Presidents, totally shattered this image by pushing through a recalcitrant Congress the greatest change in racial relations since the Emancipation Proclamation. What Johnson did may in fact have done more to free the Black man than Lincoln because Lincoln legacy left the Black man in something equivalent to slavery, known as “share cropping.” 

While the South was not immediately lost to the Democrats (voting habits die hard) the South gradually fell away from the Democratic party and when Nixon took advantage of this with his “Southern strategy” the die was cast, particularly when it became apparent that the party of Lincoln was now embracing the most rabid of the segregationists and welcoming them into its bosom. Strum Thurmond, who ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket was only the most egregious of these. Not only was the South lost, but since then not a single Democratic candidate for president ever received a majority of the White, or more accurately, the Caucasian vote. 

Johnson did more than this. He enacted the programs of the Great Society, which with their great appeal to the poor and most of the middle class had the potential to overcome the loss of the segregationist vote. Johnson led a revolution, which in its scope dwarfed the achievements of the New Deal. Under his leadership, Congress enacted Medicare, Medicaid, Public Housing, and Aid to Dependent Children, to mention only the most important of his “War on Poverty.” Unfortunately, The Vietnam war not only tarnished his and the Democratic parties legacy but forced an underfunding of many of his programs, thus making many of them ineffective.