THE NEW “PARTY OF LINCOLN” NO LONGER OPPOSES SLAVERY

…Abraham Lincoln would be ashamed of today’s “Party of Lincoln”.

People today don't realize that the Democrats were the original Southern racists.

A well-known conservative pundit that shall remain anonymous decided to speak the truth and wrote the following:  “For decades now, the Republican establishment has played the faith-based voters for fools, but now it is they who are looking increasingly foolish in their desperate search for faith. They have no one to blame but themselves. For decades, they have played to racism, misogyny, bigotry, and thuggishness, and having now loosed the American id, it’s now theirs to live with, untamed, unfettered, and out in the open where they never wanted it to be. He’s a monster of their own making. As Mitt Romney might say: They built that.”

 

We all know that the Republican Party of Lincoln was originally founded for opposing slavery, but in a You-gov Poll last January, over 20% of the Republicans polled said they now think that Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves was a bad idea.  We have seen Trump himself openly laugh at the extreme racism that some of his followers openly embrace.  And the party’s ignoring of this fact is the complete fault of the Republican Party establishment.

 

Trump has continued to show that he fully enjoys and believes in his own bombastic personal history, but all he is really doing is making the Republicans actually see themselves for what they have become.  The history is all there and Trump is what he is. His followers are what they are and the Republican establishment has done what it has done.  Is this the inevitable end of a process that has been evolving for decades? Many Republicans still like to pretend they are the Party of Lincoln, but that was more than 150 years ago and that was an entirely different political universe.

 

For today’s “Boomers”, most do not really realize the true history of the Democrats as being the original party of racists.   As one historian wrote “For generations Southern bigots remained Democrats because they wanted nothing to do with the 'Party of Lincoln'.  They remained Democrats precisely because they couldn't forgive even the increasingly conservative Republican Party for their sins of its past.  Sins such as having won the Civil War.”

 

The change for the Democrats as the party of Civil Rights began in earnest after WWII at the 1948 Democratic Convention.  A platform that year calling for passage of a Civil Rights Act tore the party apart. The turning point, both for the plank and the party, was an electrifying speech by the then Minneapolis mayor and Senate candidate Hubert Humphrey.

 

The speech included the following statement by Humphrey: “My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.”

 

The Civil Rights platform was approved and some Southern Democratic delegates walked out of the convention.

 

Years later, when President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he later told his aides that they had just lost the Southern state's vote for at least a full generation, and he was more than correct.

 

Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign with his historic “Southern Strategy”, was designed to capitalize on the evolving loyalties of the strong Southern racists.  The Southern segregationist Democrat George Wallace then left the party and ran under the banner of the American Independent Party and he won five deep Southern states in that election.

 

The movement of the racists into the Republican Party still lagged until 1980.  That was when the Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan, cynically launched his general election campaign in the racist deep south zone of Philadelphia, Mississippi.  The people he wanted to impress were appropriately impressed and he then became the US president for two full terms. Later, in 1988, the kinder, gentler, George H.W. Bush proceeded to use Reagan’s support for his presidential victory.  But he was no Ronald Reagan, and he only lasted for one term..

 

It was the Bill Clinton presidency that finally completed the switching of the two party’s realignment. Some may not remember this, but the modern Republican Senators Phil Gramm and Richard Shelby, they first went to Washington as Democrats. They actually should have been in the then new, modern Republican Party.  However, until they saw the writing on the wall about the new Democratic party, they had remained Democratic holdouts.  By the time the minority-friendly southerner, Bill Clinton was elected, these two had already moved over to the GOP.

 

The reality is that today’s increased polarization of the two political parties has been a long time in coming.  But in some ways, it was a natural realignment in what became each party’s ideological lines. 

 

Today’s obvious racist undercurrent of modern Republican politics, and the right-wing media, should not be a big surprise to anyone. Racism is not incidental to the modern conservative movement as it has been one of its defining characteristics now for decades.

 

Based on that fact, support for a Donald Trump is nothing new, but it is new for a GOP presidential candidate being so open about his racism..

 

Let’s face it, many conservatives have courted some of the darkest instincts of any Americans, and now they have to own them. With Donald Trump as their standard bearer, misogyny, Islamophobia, support for torture, none of this is new to the Republican Party.  None of it is unique to this presidential candidate. It is what the new Party of Lincoln has become.  It is how the modern Republican Party has courted and catered to its current modern base of voters.  Especially those with a minimum of formal education.

 

The simple truth is that Donald J. Trump personifies everything that much of the modern Republican Party has become.

 

Sorry folks, but this is the latest real history to be told of the GOP, the conservatives and the new Party of Lincoln. 

 

If I’m wrong, please someone, show me some proof.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016