The Blaze‘s delusional host, Tomi Lahren, went on a rant on Wednesday, November 2, presumably because she would like all of us to forget that a whole lot happened between 1865 and today. Sorry, Tomi, but history class is in session.
Yes, The Democratic Party Was Pro-Slavery, But …
You’ve probably seen some internet troll or your right-wing Uncle Larry trot this old one out before. “But it was the Democrats who wanted slavery! Lincoln was a Republican! Democrats are the racists!”
Tomi Lahren regurgitated that old trope on her show on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze network, saying:
“Well it was Southern Democrats that fought for slavery. Oh, and the KKK, it was originally an arm of the Southern Democratic Party. The mission, to terrorize freed slaves and those who sympathize with them, which would be the radical Republicans.”
And you know what? She is 100 percent correct. All of that is true.
HOWEVER …
What Lahren — along with every idiot who goes there — neglects to mention is that a whole hell of a lot of changes took place between the Civil War and today.
Let’s sit down for a brief history class, shall we?
Democrats And Republicans Have Switched Places Over The Past 150-ish Years
The Republicans of the Civil War era were progressives. They were liberals. Remember that the Republicans of 1860 were so much in favor of a strong central government that they went to WAR to protect it. Contrast that with the Republicans of today, who favor states’ individual rights and autonomy over federal rule (do you see where this is going?).
The politicians of the Confederacy, on the other hand, were the conservatives. They were the offspring of the Jacksonian Democrats. They favored a small central government and were socially conservative.
During the post-war Reconstruction era, the party shift began, though it would not be in its late stages until 1936, and not fully complete until the late 1960s.
For this next bit, we’ll turn to Dr. Eric Rauchway, professor of American History at the University of California-Davis. Dr. Rauchway explains how the shifts took place over the course of decades, though he points to a few specific “landmark dates” when the changes really started to become apparent:
“One of them has to be the 1896 election, when the Democratic Party fused with the People’s Party, and the incumbent Grover Cleveland, a rather conservative Democrat, was displaced by the young and fiery William Jennings Bryan, whose rhetoric emphasized the importance of social justice in the priorities of the federal government … From Bryan onward, the Democratic Party looks much more like the modern Democratic Party than it does like the party of the 1870s.”
Dr. Rauchway does point out, though, that the Republican party did not immediately become the party of small government:
“It’s not until the 1920s, and the era of Coolidge especially, that the Republican Party begins to sound like the modern Republican Party, rhetorically devoted to smaller government. And that rhetorical tendency doesn’t really set in firmly until the early 1930s and the era of Republican opposition to the New Deal.”
So that’s when the original shift started to take place. Of course, I can hear the trolls banging the Civil Rights Act drum right about now, so let’s skip ahead on the timeline, shall we?
The Civil Rights Act And The Southern Strategy
Yes, more Republicans than Democrats voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Let’s just put that out there right away. However, it was the Southern Democrats who, unsurprisingly, were against it. And what became of those Southern Democrats?
The splinter there actually began in 1948, when Strom Thurmond ran for president as part of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, also known as the Dixiecrats. These were the conservative, segregationist Southern Democrats who were opposed to the leftward turn the Democratic Party was taking, and they were determined to keep the South. The Dixiecrat Party fizzled out after taking a few states in the South that year. However, the split had begun between the conservative Southern Democrats and the more liberal Democrats peppered throughout the rest of the country.
President Lyndon B. Johnson is rumored to have said, when he signed the Civil Rights Act, “There goes the South for a generation.”
He was right.
Richard Nixon and the Republicans jumped on this and enacted their “Southern Strategy,” which was their highly successful attempt to turn the South deep red. Kevin Phillips, aide to Nixon, famously told the New York Times in 1970 (emphasis mine):
“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that, but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
In fact, though the claim that the KKK was originally started by Southern Democrats is true, it’s ALSO true that they helped bring voters into the Republican Party. A 2014 study found that:
“… KKK activity played a significant role in shifting voters’ political party allegiance in the South in the 1960s — from Democratic to Republican — and it continued to influence voters’ activities 40 years later.”
Claiming Democrats Are The Party Of Racists Ignores History … And The Present
Which brings us back to Ms. Tomi Lahren. The revisionist version of events that she spouted on her show is commonplace among Republicans. They would like to make people think that their party is the “inclusive” one, despite decades of actions to the contrary.
In the 60s and 70s, the Republican Party not only welcomed the racist Southern white former Democrats into their party, they actively sought them out in the hopes that they would become Republicans.
And today, we have a Republican presidential nominee who is endorsed by the KKK and other white supremacist groups around the country.
Claiming that the modern Republican party bears even the slightest resemblance to the party of Abraham Lincoln is simply ignorant.
Watch Lahren’s idiotic rant here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFRsMLeu5sc
Featured Image via screenshot from YouTube video
