Racist Roots of GOP War on Obama
Exclusive: Right-wing Republicans in Congress are plotting to cripple the U.S.
government if Barack Obama, the first African-American president, doesn’t submit
to their demands. The battle pretends to be over the size of government but it
echoes the whips, chains and epithets of America’s racist past, writes Robert
Parry.
By Robert Parry
The United States finds itself at a crossroad, with a choice of moving toward a
multicultural future behind a more activist federal government or veering down a
well-worn path that has marked various tragic moments of American history when
white racists have teamed up with “small government” extremists.
Despite losing Election 2012 both in the presidential vote (by five million) and
the overall tally for Congress (by one million) the Republicans are determined
to use their gerrymandered House “majority” and their filibuster-happy Senate
minority to slash programs that are viewed as giving “stuff” (in Mitt Romney’s
word) to poorer Americans and especially minorities.
Republicans are gearing up to force a series of fiscal crises this fall,
threatening to shut down the federal government and even default on the national
debt, if they don’t get their way. Besides sabotaging President Barack Obama’s
health reform law, the Republicans want to devastate funding for food stamps,
environmental advancements, transportation, education assistance and other
domestic programs.
“These are tough bills,” Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, who heads the House
Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times. “His priorities are going
nowhere.”
A key point is to slash help to what the Right sees as “undeserving” Americans,
especially people of color. The ugly side of this crypto-racist behavior also
surfaced in the gloating by right-wing pundits over the acquittal of George
Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Fox News
pundits, in particular, have mocked the outrage over the verdict from America’s
black community and Obama’s personal expression of sympathy.
It is now clear that Obama’s election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a “postracial” America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their
forces to “take back America.” The fact that the modern Republican Party has
become almost exclusively white and the nation’s minorities have turned more and
more to the Democratic Party has untethered the GOP from any sense of racial
tolerance.
There is now a white-supremacist nihilism emerging in the Republican strategy, a
visceral contempt for even the idea of a multi-racial democracy that favors a
more vigorous federal government. Some of these extremists seem to prefer
sinking the world’s economy via a U.S. debt default than compromising with
President Obama on his economic and social agenda.
Though the mainstream media avoids the white supremacist framing for the
political story preferring to discuss the upcoming clash as a philosophical
dispute over big versus small government, — the reality is that the United
States is lurching into a nasty struggle over the preservation of white
political dominance. The size-of-government narrative is just a euphemistic way
of avoiding the underlying issue of race, a dodge that is as old as the
Republic.
The Jeffersonian Myth
Even many liberals have fallen for the myth of the dashing Thomas Jefferson as
the great defender of America’s Founding Principles when he was really a great
hypocrite who served mostly as the pleasing political front man for the South’s
chief industry, human slavery.
The popular history, perpetuated by authors such as Jon Meacham, downplays how
Virginia’s plantation owners and other investors in slavery served as
Jefferson’s political “base” helping to fund his propaganda battle and then his
political war against George Washington’s Federalists who were the real
designers of the Constitution with its dramatic concentration of power in the
federal government. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Made-Up
Constitution.”]
Prominent Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry and George Mason,
were alarmed that the Constitution’s overturning of the states’ rights-oriented
Articles of Confederation would inexorably lead to Northern domination and the
eventual eradication of slavery.
After ratification, many of these Southern agrarian interests grew even more
alarmed when the Federalists began using the expansive federal powers in the
Constitution to begin creating the framework for a modern financial system, such
as Alexander Hamilton’s national bank, and promoting a potent federal role in
the nation’s development, such as George Washington’s interest in canals and
roads.
With every move toward a more assertive national government, the Southern
slaveholders saw a growing threat toward their economic interest in human
bondage. After all, slavery was not just a cultural institution in the South; it
was the region’s biggest capital investment.
Though Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was written in 1787 and
ratified in 1788, his return in 1789 marked an important political moment in
early U.S. history. The Anti-Federalists, stung by their bitter defeat at the
hands of Washington’s Federalists over the Constitution, finally had a
charismatic leader to rally behind.
Jefferson, who was a critic of the Constitution but not an outright opponent,
retained an outsized reputation from the American Revolution as the principal
author of the Declaration of Independence. He was also a star intellect and a
crafty political operative who, perhaps more than anyone else, personified the
hypocrisy of the slave-owning Founders.
Though he had famously declared, as “self-evident” truth, that “all men are
created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he also was one of
Virginia’s major slaveholders. And he engaged in the pseudo-science of racial
supremacy, measuring the skulls of his African-American slaves to “prove” their
inferiority.
Known as a harsh “master” when having runaway slaves punished, Jefferson lived
in deathly fear that his slaves would rise up violently against him and his
fellow plantation owners, much as the slaves of St. Domingue (today’s Haiti) did
against their French plantation owners in the 1790s.
So, like Patrick Henry and George Mason, Jefferson wanted a strong statecontrolled militia in Virginia to put down slave revolts while opposing a
professional federal military which white Southerners saw as a potential threat
to the future of slavery.
Rose-Colored Glasses
Despite Jefferson’s interest in maintaining slavery and his racist
pronouncements, many modern writers have bought into the Jeffersonian version of
early American history. In part, that may be because Jefferson was among the
most handsome, most complex and most intellectual of the Founders. But that
modern fascination with Jefferson frequently involves averting one’s gaze from
the dark and racist underbelly of Jefferson’s personal beliefs and his political
movement.
For instance, Meacham’s best-selling Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power says
almost nothing about Jefferson’s real source of power, the South’s plantation
structure. Instead, Jefferson’s advocacy for “farmers” and a “small-government”
interpretation of the Constitution is taken at face value. Plus, few questions
are asked about the fairness of his vituperative attacks on the Federalists,
especially Hamilton and Adams. Those assaults are seen as simply an expression
of Jefferson’s sincere republican spirit.
Meacham’s writing is instructive, too, on the Jefferson-slavery issues. Meacham
focuses mostly on Jefferson’s taking a teenage slave girl, Sally Hemings, as his
concubine, what could be regarded as rape, pedophilia or both. While Jefferson’s
sexual exploitation of a vulnerable girl is certainly noteworthy in evaluating
Jefferson’s character, the liaison is less significant historically than
Jefferson’s role in defending slavery by revising the original (Federalist)
interpretation of the Constitution.
The Federalists, who included the document’s principal drafters, understood that
the Constitution granted very broad powers to the federal government to act in
the national interest and on behalf of the general welfare. That was also the
interpretation held by Anti-Federalists, explaining the intensity of the battle
against ratification. So, by substituting a revisionist interpretation,
stressing “states’ rights” and a tightly constrained federal government,
Jefferson negated much of what the Framers had sought to do with the
Constitution. He also set the country on course for the Civil War.
Before becoming President, Jefferson secretly conspired with some political
forces in Kentucky on possible secession, and he helped devise the theory of
nullification, the supposed right of the states to nullify federal law, which
became a driving force in the South’s belief that it could secede from the
Union.
Jefferson was one of the eight early presidents who owned slaves while in office
(another four owned slaves while not in office). But Jefferson was one of the
most unapologetic, insisting that blacks could never live as freed citizens in
the United States and refusing to liberate his own slaves after his death
(except for a few relatives of Sally Hemings).
When I visited Monticello some years ago, the tour guide pointed out the
beautifully manicured Jefferson family cemetery, which was for white members of
the household. When I asked where the slave cemetery was, I was told that no one
knew. By contrast, Washington’s Mount Vernon has a respectfully maintained slave
cemetery.
More Hypocrisy
Meacham and other Jeffersonian apologists also miss many other layers of
hypocrisy surrounding their hero, such as his near-hysterical condemnations of
the Federalists as they struggled with the herculean task of building a
functioning government under an untested constitutional framework, amid
extraordinary international pressures and threats.
It is surely true that Washington, Hamilton and Adams made missteps in their
efforts to pioneer this new form of government and thus left themselves open to
political attack from Jefferson’s paid propagandists but historians who buy into
Jefferson’s narrative ignore the unprecedented challenges that the Federalists
faced.
The Federalists also were the ones, particularly Hamilton and Adams, who
demonstrated sympathy and support for Haiti’s black freedom-fighters, while
Jefferson did all he could to undermine their success. But Jefferson is the
Founder who is praised for his open-mindedness. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Rethinking Thomas Jefferson.”]
Though Jefferson skillfully exploited examples of the Federalists’ elitism and
overreach to win the presidency in 1800, President Jefferson proved to be
hypocritical, too, regarding his insistence on “limited government” narrowly
defined by the Constitution’s “enumerated powers” as well as his supposed
respect for freewheeling dissent and his love for freedom of the press.
After undermining President Adams over his signing of the Alien and Sedition
Acts a wartime measure meant to suppress alleged foreign influence seeking to
induce the young Republic to take sides in a European conflict Jefferson
expressed his own sympathy for harsh measures against dissidents.
For instance, in 1803, President Jefferson endorsed the idea of prosecuting
critical newspaper editors, writing: “I have long thought that a few
prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in
restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that
would look like persecution: but a selected one,” as cited by Meacham’s largely
pro-Jeffersonian book.
On a similar note, after leaving the White House, Jefferson advised his
successor and ally James Madison on what to do with Federalists who objected to
going to war with Great Britain in 1812. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy
Isenberg write in Madison and Jefferson, “Jefferson called for different
measures in different parts of the country: ‘A barrel of tar to each state South
of the Potomac will keep all in order,’ he ventured in August [1812]. ‘To the
North they will give you more trouble. You may have to apply the rougher drastic
of hemp and confiscation’ by which he meant the hangman’s noose and the
confiscation of property.”
In other words, Jefferson, who has gone down in school history books as a great
defender of freedom of speech, urged the sitting President of the United States
to “tar” war dissenters in the South and to hang and dispossess dissenters in
the North.
Jefferson was similarly hypocritical when it came to his views on “limited
government.” He arguably was the first imperial president, dispatching the Navy
to battle the Barbary pirates before seeking congressional approval and then
negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territories despite the absence of any
“enumerated” power to that effect in the Constitution.
As even an admirer like Meacham was forced to acknowledge, Jefferson “believed
in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a
more expansive one.” So, Jefferson’s opposition to the Federalists’ view of the
Constitution was less philosophical than political. He, like them, adopted a
pragmatic approach, accepting that the Constitution did not anticipate all
challenges that might confront the country.
While one might commend Jefferson’s flexibility even though he decried similar
actions by the Federalists the public impression of Jeffersonian “small
government” principles became more absolute and dangerous. As the nation’s early
decades progressed, Southern slaveholders seized on Jefferson’s constitutional
positions in defending the South’s investment in slavery and its expansion to
new states.
Jefferson had put a powerful stamp on the young country through his own two-term
presidency and those of his Virginia colleagues James Madison and James Monroe.
By end of this so-called Virginia Dynasty in 1825, the permanence of slavery had
been burnt deeply into the flesh of not only the original Southern states but
new ones to the west.
In the ensuing decades, as the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the
South escalated its resistance to federal activism, opposing even noncontroversial matters like disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian
Brian Balogh noted in his book, A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted
an extreme version of states’ rights in the period from 1840 to 1860 that
included preventing aid to disaster victims.
Balogh wrote that the South feared that “extending federal power” even to help
fellow Americans in desperate need “might establish a precedent for national
intervention in the slavery question,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne
noted in a May 22 column.
The intensity of the South’s hatred toward a reformist federal government
exploded into warfare once an anti-slavery candidate, Republican Abraham
Lincoln, won the presidency. The South rekindled Jefferson’s old flirtations
with nullification and secession, even though Lincoln was willing to continue
tolerating slavery to save the Union.
But Southern politicians saw the handwriting on the wall what Patrick Henry and
George Mason had warned about the inevitability of Northern dominance and the
eventual demise of slavery.
The bloody Civil War ended slavery but it also stoked the bitterness of white
Southerners who reacted to federal amendments granting citizenship rights to
blacks by engaging in the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and broad resistance
against Reconstruction. Finally, the North’s determination to reshape the South
as a place of racial equality dissipated and Union troops were withdrawn in
1877. A near century of Jim Crow laws, lynching of blacks and racial segregation
ensued.
When the federal government finally moved to outlaw the South’s apartheid system
in the 1950s and 1960s, white racists mounted a new political resistance, this
time by forsaking the Democratic Party, which had spearheaded the major civil
rights laws of the era, and migrating in droves to the new Republican Party,
which used racial code words to make white racists feel welcome.
The key subliminal message was opposition to “big guv-mit,” an allusion that
white racists understood to mean less interference with their suppression of
black votes and black rights.
Second Reconstruction
Just as the civil rights victories of the 1960s were viewed as a resumption of
America’s march toward racial equality that was begun a century earlier with the
Civil War, so too the petering out of this so-called Second Reconstruction
paralleled the original Reconstruction, which ended also about century earlier.
With the emergence of right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s, the
white racist resistance to civil rights found another charismatic front man, who
like Jefferson pushed the message of “small government” and “states’ rights.”
The Reagan era marked a reversal of the strides that America had taken after
World War II to open mainstream society to black citizens. But it also signaled
a retreat on other federal initiatives, including regulation of Wall Street and
other industries.
So, besides worsening the financial standing of many blacks and other
minorities, Reaganomics returned to a boom-and-bust economy of an earlier
capitalism. The Great American Middle Class, which had emerged with the help of
federal laws after World War II, began to shrink, though many whites, especially
in the South, stuck with the Republicans because of the party’s hostility to
helping blacks.
But there was still a national push-and-pull over whether to resume a march
toward a more equitable society or to embrace Jim Crow II, a more subtle and
sophisticated arrangement for disenfranchising black and brown Americans.
Some political observers believed the election of Barack Obama as the first
African-American president was a point of no return toward a multi-cultural
America. However, instead of heralding a day of greater racial tolerance,
Obama’s presidency intensified the determination of right-wing whites to do
whatever is necessary to make his presidency fail.
That battle appears likely to get even uglier this fall as the House Republican
“majority” plots to shut down the federal government and even default on the
nation’s debt if the African-American president doesn’t surrender to their
political demands.
Pundits are sure to frame this donnybrook as an ideological fight over the
principles of “small government,” but behind that will be a replay of the
South’s historic insistence on maintaining white supremacy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com). For a limited time, you also can order Robert Parry’s
trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives
for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.