Republicans Need To Reclaim Civil Rights
I’m not a Republican, though I have moved to the conservative side in my latter years. Officially I register as “Independent”, unless I want to vote in a primary. In my earlier years I was officially a Socialist. My dad (who had a top-level security clearance to work for Los Alamos, then for Convair on the Atlas and space program) feared I was a Communist. My Uncle nearly had a heart attack when he saw my Che banner hanging over our mantle (my parents had no idea who it was, just liked the red in the Christmas decor). I ran with SNCC and CORE in the mid 60s, getting my bona fides for Civil Rights with a summer in Mississippi in ‘65. Got arrested in a march and spent two weeks in a Jackson jail (one week in the county fairgrounds, suffering strep throat). And I had a learning moment from Stokely Carmichael before that march, when he told me how much he disliked/distrusted “liberals”. “The Mississippi whites (mostly Democrats then, I expect), are at least civil and polite to your face, and you know where they are coming from. I never know about liberals.”, he told me. I was thoroughly surprised at that. This was Stokely, radical leader of Black student politics and their “power to the people” movement, and my sponsor. He who often scorned Martin Luther King, saying that his Gandhian style would be useless were it not for SNCC and CORE scaring the whites so that they clung to King as the lesser of evils, he actually trusted the Southern white politicians more than Northern liberals! I never forgot it. And I took about 20 years to understand it. Today, it is so plain, I am embarrassed to admit I missed the obvious.
In the 60s, the South was owned by Democrats. Even today, some of the most senior Democrats (think Byrd) are still from that old South that really fought against civil rights (Byrd was once high in the KKK). In the 60s, the Republicans were the “Freedom Choice”. And it was them who really passed the Civil Rights Act. Nowadays Lyndon Johnson gets credit for it. And maybe deserves it considering how far he went, much farther than the liberal icon JFK ever considered going. But the power behind civil rights was Republicans! Most Dems were opposed to Civil Rights. Get that? The Civil Rights Act was a Republican, a “Conservatives” accomplishment!
That fact has been totally lost in the 40 plus years since. The Democrat’s championing of “losers” and the glory of “losing” has obscured the fact that Republicans once did their best to free the downtrodden African Americans (best known, then, as “Negroes” or “Colored”, and now as “Blacks”) and give them EQUAL OPPORTUNITY! Just like the rest of Americans. Somehow (well, I know how, actually - Democrats remain today the best at BS, propoganda, urban legend creation, and exploitation) that story of history has been lost. Worse than lost, it’s been totally obscured and reversed in the popular political culture. Democrats have managed to sell themselves as the champions of minorities and downtrodden and disenfranchised people in America. They are good at obfuscation. They pick a party line (or myth) and SELL IT. (If you doubt, look at how Obama is increasingly following Bush’s footsteps, doing the very things the Dems - and Obama - originally vilified Bush for and rode the Republicans out of town on a rail for, but gets away with it!)
So how do they sell it so well? Mostly by following Stalin’s old moral. Stalin once advised, “First, pick a chicken clean. Pluck all its feathers out. Then feed it. It will follow you forever after!” That’s what’s now known as the “Stockholm Syndrome”, a label/diagnosis of why so many Jews became the Nazi’s faithful helpers in the concentration camps. In the modern scenario: welfare, affirmative action, bilingual education, loans to home buyers who have no qualifications, minimum (starvation) wages, free abortion (mostly eliminating black babies and encouraging black freedom from real family life!) … the list just goes on and on. Everything sold as “compassion”, and “help” is actually more a “buyout”, buying the loyalty of a minority community sold on “victimization” and “You just can’t do it on your own” - and pretty much insuring they never will develop the means and attitudes of success. I remember being asked by a reporter, back in days when I was a political actor (in Oregon) about what I thought of bilingual education. I said then, I was opposed because it merely assured second class citizenship, that the lack of English skills almost guarantees never reaching the top in the US. So it has proven. And those same people who back bilingual education also back just more and more money to lousy schools and teachers and kill charters and vouchers that would liberate those same students!
And my point? If the Republicans ever want to regain the ground they (deservedly, in my opinion) lost the last two election cycles, ought to go about reclaiming those lost bonafides. They should use whatever means available. Write some book. Get some memoirs of the Civil Rights history out there. Get the party line and talking points focussed on it. Start some “branding” advertising that recalls their glory days. And some ads that point out exactly how all this welfare (especially THIS moment in time) coopts, weakens, almost enslaves the plucked chickens - who are certainly no longer just the people of color. The Obama-Democrat run to the socialist-welfare state (remember, I KNOW all about it!!!) is hoping to turn us (well, not themselves, of course, not the power elite) into plucked but grateful chickens! And they’re in a hurry, wanting to get it done before any of us realizes what hit us. I hope, not because I’m a Republican (I’m NOT!), but because I’ve seen it coming from early on in the Obama campaign (I walked the same walk, talked the same talk, knew the same people and thought the same thoughts) they fail. I don’t want to go there any more.
