Just days after sharing an article titled “America Needs a White Republican President”, Joe the Plumber, is once again stirring up controversy with his inflammatory ideas. On Friday, Joe the Plumber tweeted:
I will not let the “left” set the narrative! Democrats have a history of lynching Black Americans
Accompanying his tweet was a photograph meme spelling out the word Democrat, with a burning cross creating the “T” in the word Democrat. Above the meme, the words “Now we know what the ‘T’ stands for!” appear.
When asked to comment on the tweet, Joe the Plumber told Talking Points Memo:
I know the media doesn’t want to talk about it, but racism is/was/always will be part of the Democrat party. I have heard more racist thing (sic) out of liberal progressives then I have out of conservatives. I’m tired of the media giving them a pass. Myself and a few other conservatives will not allow the left to continue setting the narrative. Racism is wrong on so many levels and when political parties use it as a weapon they aren’t fighting racism they are encouraging it.
The irony of Joe the Plumber speaking out against racism is palpable and a bit too much to swallow, given his own history of blatant bigotry. Remember, this is the guy who demands we elect a white president and thinks we should just shoot Mexicans near the border to deal with the illegal immigration issue.
Of course what Joe The Plumber is trying to do is deflect the narrative away from his racism and that of the GOP, and instead put attention on the racism of the Democrats. This is not a new strategy. For quite some time, conservative personalities have tried to assign the blame for our nation’s history of racial injustice to the Democrats and they have tried to portray the Republicans as champions of civil rights. However, their facile analysis conflates historical Southern “Democrats” with modern liberal Democrats as if the two are one and the same. Yes, Lincoln, a Republican, signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves, and yes the Democratic Party in the late 19th and early 20th Century was a haven for Southern racist Democrats who opposed civil rights.
The KKK, which was so powerful a century ago, had many Democrats within its ranks, but it was a fundamentally conservative organization that stood for racial hierarchy, “Christian family values”, and opposition to immigration. While many Southern and Midwestern white racists, xenophobes, and Dixiecrats found a home in the KKK, liberals and minorities were not welcome. Joe the Plumber and his ilk like to overlook that fact that in 1964 it was the Democratic President Lyndon Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act while Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate, ran on a plank that opposed civil rights, thus turning the Deep South into a Republican stronghold for years to come. In 1960, Republican Richard Nixon still managed to capture 32 percent of the black vote. In 1956, Eisenhower won 39 percent of black voters. However, when the Republican Party opted to support Barry Goldwater and his anti-civil rights plank, the Republican share of the black vote dropped to 6 percent and it has never gone above 15 percent for a Republican presidential candidate since then.
Minority voters are not stupid. They voted heavily Republican in the late 1800s and early part of the twentieth century, because of progressive Republican leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. They continued to deliver a large number of votes to the moderate Dwight Eisenhower. However, when the GOP embraced Dixiecrat racism and welcomed Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and other racists into their camp, they sealed their fate with minority voters. Joe the Plumber and other right-wingers can try to spin racism as a liberal malady, but minority voters are not buying the lie.
Edited/Published by: JL
