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The 1860 Project
You may have heard of the thing called The 1619 Project, a series of essays shilled by the New York Times, and loved by woke progressives, that purports to demonstrate that America is a country built on and inextricably bound to slavery. It argues that racism infuses every aspect of our culture, is the unifying ideological foundation of our nation and should be seen as the beating heart and evil soul of America.
It’s widely regarded by real historians as tripe, as faulty and incompetent history, shot through with error and toxic reimagining of the past. I share that view.
However, for those who simply must believe that the spirit of that peculiar institution has survived into the modern era and that the bloody hand of the slave owner still guides our affairs, let me offer an alternative.
In 1860 the Democratic Party, then barely 30 years old, divided over the issue of slavery. Make no mistake, the Party was pro-slavery: the great division was over whether or not a man who owned slaves should be free to take those slaves with him if he moved into the western territories. That he should be allowed to own other men was not a point of contention, but rather Democratic Party gospel.
I’m not going to claim that the modern Democratic Party is a party of slavery, though I do think its policies are terribly destructive to a great many Americans of minority demographic groups and have been for about as long as the Party has existed. Rather, I’m going to suggest that, if one must have a racist bogeyman lingering from antiquity and still working its mischief, one can find much more compelling evidence that that bogeyman is, not America as The 1619 Project argues, but rather the Democratic Party itself, the last great institutional defender of slavery in America.
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Of course. Why do the descendants of slaves not see that and reject the Democrats?
Most people aren’t political, and tend to go with the dominant narrative. Given that our opinion-shaping elite tilt left, that’s a left-tilting narrative.
The Democrats’ use of slaves a chattel didn’t end in 1865… or 1964. Just listen to the current Democrats’ language when a black person says something at odds with the party line. According to the Dems, blacks are only allowed on point of view — that prescribed by the party leaders.
Democrats don’t want to put blacks BACK ON the plantation, because as far as the Democrats are concerned, they never left.
Of course, the Democrats (admittedly only a portion of the party) are also entirely responsible for the close to a century long system of racial segregation and discrimination known as Jim Crow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/when-did-black-americans-start-voting-so-heavily-democratic/
From which:
Weren’t the 1960s civil rights/voting rights acts, supported in Congress more by Republicans than Democrats?
Were they? I’m curious, because Black support for the Dems grows after they passed. What is that about?
A couple thoughts on this Zafar. First, please note that until the mid-1960’s, the overwhelming percentage of Blacks who voted were outside of the south. Second, Blacks began moving to the Democrats long before the 1960’s civil rights laws. They began voting for FDR in the 1930’s mainly because they supported the New Deal despite the fact that southern blacks were still being discriminated against by white Democrats.
According to this Guardian article:
Once you control for region, it turns out that Democrats were actually more likely to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
So southern Democrats in 1964-65 don’t count as Democrats? This is pure sophistry.
Maybe like many Jews seem to give all the credit to Harry Truman, blacks give all the credit to LBJ who signed the law (while apparently preferring not to, it sounds like) when it was actually Republicans in Congress who got it through over the opposition of Democrats like Al Gore Sr. and Bill Clinton’s “mentor” William Fulbright.
Yes, I think it’s over-reach on their part. The regional explanation makes more sense and also explains (?) how things shake out today.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was delayed by filibuster for almost two months. The filibuster was conducted by 18 Democratic senators and one Republican senator.
I suppose you could parse partisan support for the bill based on a variety of criteria: the Congressman’s height, hair color, age, or golf handicap, for example. But if you just want to go by the numbers it breaks down like this:
There were four votes, the original House bill, the cloture vote in the Senate, the Senate vote, and then the final House vote after passage in the Senate. The vote tallies were (%for/%against):
First House Passage:
Democrats 61/39 (that’s 61% for, 39% against)
Republicans: 80/20
Senate Cloture:
D: 66/34
R: 82/18
Senate Passage:
D: 69/31
R: 82/18
Final House Passage:
D: 63/37
R: 80/20
So spin that any way you like, but the fact is that the Republicans never gave less than 80% support, and the Democrats never gave as much as 70% support.
But this is all missing the point. As we learned during the recent presidential campaign, black Americans vote 100% for Democrats. This is true because, as Mr. Biden informed us, and I quote, if you aren’t sure that you’re voting for a Democrat, “you ain’t black.”
That was what I was referring to. And the Democrat opposition was let by such luminaries as Al Gore Sr, and William Fulbright.
Thanks for the numbers.
I don’t understand why Rs don’t link Ds to slavery and racism every chance they get: refer to them as The Party of Slavery and The Party of the KKK, The Jim Crow Party. Talk in terms of Rs dying to free the slaves from the Ds, etc. These statements aren’t unqualifiedly true, but as general statements, they are accurate. There is a saying in politics that if you are explaining you are losing. Make the Ds defend their party’s history on every front. If the roles were reversed, they would be doing so to the Rs. In fact, they are lying and doing it to the Rs anyway. Maybe the more moderate of them will dig through some history to defend their side and stumble across the truth.
Ah, the optimist. :-)
You’re parsing it Democrat:Republican (which is fair enough).
If you parse it Old Union:Confederacy you get a more extreme difference.
(Dem/GOP. House 95%/85% : 9%/0%; Senate 98%/ 84% : 5%/ 0%). If the Guardian #sare accurate.
Given that the former Confederate States now break Republican, isn’t that a significant data point wrt why Blacks break Democrat?
Not really, but what else is there? We fight or we surrender.
Zafar, as I said, you can parse it any way you like — and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, if you must embrace tenuous positions based on historical racism that you pretend is alive today, there’s better evidence with which to demonize the Democratic Party on that basis than to smear the nation as a whole.
I don’t think we should do that at all. I think we should acknowledge that we ended slavery and transformed our institutions, and that today America is a self-consciously non-racist country. And we should understand that focusing attention on the color of a man’s skin, and making moral and ethical judgments about him and about how he should be treated based on that assessment, is wrong, and will lead to disaster.
We can resolve as a people to agree that the color of a man’s skin is irrelevant, and that everyone should be treated the same without regard to such trivial details as pigmentation.
Or we can decide that the color of a man’s skin is significant and a legitimate consideration in how we treat each other, in which case we will eventually and inevitably divide ourselves into groups based on our looks, and ally in opposition to those who are different from us.
That’s it. It’s a fantasy to imagine that we will simultaneously accept the view that color matters while choosing to ignore the consequences of holding that view. It isn’t consistent with human nature to do that. We feel affinity for our own groups above other groups, and if we choose to group ourselves based on color then that will become a basis for our loyalty and concern.
The anti-white movement is reawakening a demon we struggled for a century to successfully subdue. The bullies of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory and all the other woke bigots are fools, and must be called out and opposed.
Hear, hear!
I’m not sure this would be helpful. It’s a nice talking point when you’re dealing with someone who’s full of pride in their party. But, while the legacies and ideological histories of the parties is an interesting topic to some, but for most people, it’s irrelevant because so much has changed and they’re not tied to the party name. The vast majority of people are looking at current policies and current controversies and seeing where the parties fit into that. It’s a little condescending to suggest they are blindly tied to historical party affiliation.
It’s similar to (but not exactly like) the left’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas Argument?” which, for good reason, has gotten them nowhere. The number of African Americans who would hear this about the history of the Dem. party and say “What??? I had no idea! I’m a Republican now!” is approximately zero. The number who would say, “Don’t insult my intelligence. I’m well aware of this history, and I’m also well aware that the resistance to the Civil Rights Act came primarily from southern whites. Which party today is most popular among southern whites?” is somewhat higher. So you may end up making things worse.
Not that that would be fair of anyone to automatically associate southern whites today with segregation, Jim Crow, etc…. It wouldn’t at all. But why open the door to that discussion? You just end up fighting the battle on their ground.
D.A., agreed. And the point of the post wasn’t to encourage people to smear the Democrats, but rather to suggest that, if folks on the left want to make bad historical arguments, they can start closer to home.
America isn’t a racist country — yet.
I agree with that Henry.
I’d go a step further and suggest that while believing that skin colour has nothing to do with character it is reasonable to say that it did have a significant concrete impact on lives, and the aftermath of that continues to play out.
But I think there’s more going on, and it’s not ruled by reason.
It seems as if Racism is the ultimate Evil, responsibility for which must be assigned to the other side. The need to claim complete freedom from it for oneself is the other side of that coin. The ‘woke’ do this to Conservatives. In some ways the rest of the country has done it to the South. And now, weirdly, Republican are doing it by trying to make it a Democrat thing.
Two things which strike me:
Cultures are not like that. We all hold a share in the monster in the cupboard at midnight. And in America’s case – no, that doesn’t make everybody is intrinsically racist, it just means that nobody’s perception is so un-racist that they really don’t even see it. (Also: America is far from unique – every society has the equivalent, and we all have this tendency to try and assign responsibility for it to someone else.)
This seems to be more about the claimed content of (mostly white) people’s character than it is about the lives of Black people in America. Iow it’s gone from concrete actions to self reflection/loathing/aggrandisement. Again, let me assure you, that’s not unique. All people trend that way. It is not a ‘white thing’.
Just how I’m seeing it atm. Next week will be different, I’m sure.
I disagree that it’s condescending to tell the truth, but perhaps you’re right. In any case, I’ve been coming across a whole lot of Youtube videos put up by those who cite learning the truth about the anti-historical lies they’ve been fed as the genesis of their moving to the Right. The phrase that keeps coming up is: I started wondering what else they were lying about.
The GOP is very bad at marketing.
I don’t consider telling the truth to counter the lies a smear. If you want to start from the premise that folks on the left are making bad historical arguments, you’ve got to begin by showing that they are bad. They aren’t going to stop lying about history unless it comes at a cost.
Hank, I think that this is partially correct, but a bit oversimplified. The issue of slavery split both of the major parties in the 1850s.
I think that you are correct that the modern Democratic Party was basically the party of Jackson, emerging in the late 1820s, with the Whigs emerging as the opposing party shortly thereafter. These parties were not clearly split on the issue of slavery.
Henry Clay was a leading Whig (from Kentucky), and as far as I can tell, he favored compromise on the issue, while being a slaveholder himself and yet objecting to slavery as a moral matter. Daniel Webster, another leading Whig (from Massachusetts), also promoted compromise on the issue, though he seems to have both opposed slavery morally and favored its abolition (in a gradual and unspecified way).
It’s interesting to look at the results of some of the Presidential elections at the time. There is no clear north-south divide between the Democrats and the Whigs.
The situation was quite complex, involving the Compromise of 1850, the Dred Scott decision, the emergence of new parties (and not just the Republicans, though others were short-lived), and the whole Bleeding Kansas mess. Leading, of course, to the Civil War, the biggest mess that we’ve faced thus far.
I would also point out that if America an never recover from being a slave nation, that the stain of slavery is so deep that even now no redemption is possible, then the Democratic Party can never be redeemed for their support of Slavery.