The really ugly event was yet another example of deadly racist hatred in America. The really beautiful one was an historic expansion of equal rights by the U.S. Supreme Court granting same-sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples.
The reaction to such events tells a lot about an all-but-declared presidential candidate like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is not widely known but suddenly finds himself thrust into the national spotlight.
Sadly, Walker’s reaction to both demonstrated the careful political calculations he and other Republican presidential candidates make to try to attract votes from virulent racists and other opponents of equality in our society.
Walker probably doesn’t consider himself a racist despite the racist tinge to many of his extreme right-wing policies.
There’s no reason to think that when Walker heard nine African Americans in a Charleston, S.C., prayer meeting were murdered by a vicious racist philosophically wrapped in the Confederate flag that he wasn’t as sickened and appalled as every other decent human being.
But one reason such sickening and appalling events keep happening in America is that the first reaction of Republican politicians running for national office isn’t to express their heartfelt horror over such deadly racism.
Instead, Walker carefully calculated exactly what he should say to distance himself from a racist murder without alienating vicious, white racists who continue to be attracted to the Republican Party today because of its subtle and not-so-subtle appeals to racism and bigotry.
Exploiting bigotry for votes has become so common among Republicans today it’s easy to forget what a complete betrayal that is of the history of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wis., in the mid-1800s by abolitionists opposed to the extension of Southern slavery into the Northern border states of Kansas and Nebraska.
And, of course, the first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, whose opposition to slavery led to an armed rebellion by Southern states. The Confederacy fought a war against the United States of America under the same blood-stained flag that continues to be used as a symbol of racial hatred today.
For nearly 100 years after that war until the 1960s, it was Southern Democrats, not Republicans, who fought most viciously against equal rights for African Americans.
Racist Southern Democrats on the floor of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives publicly vilified blacks as animals as they filibustered civil rights legislation and callously voted down anti-lynching laws, openly sanctioning terrorism and murder of African Americans.
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Nixon’s Southern Strategy Lives On
The man who changed that was President Lyndon Johnson, a former Southern Democratic senator who reversed his own history of voting against equal rights to embrace the civil rights revolution as his legacy, passing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
And the man who changed the Republican Party was Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon. Nixon abandoned the principles of the party of Lincoln to win the presidency through what he called his “Southern strategy,” attracting the votes of white racists in the South and elsewhere who felt alienated by Democratic support for civil rights.
The South has been solidly Republican ever since. Racist Southern Democrats switched parties to become racist Southern Republicans.
That’s been the Republican election strategy ever since. Walker was following it when he refused to take a stand on South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from its capitol grounds after mass murderer Dylann Roof proudly used it as his battle flag for his own Charleston race war.
Walker’s ducking the issue stood out as glaring political cowardice when Southern leaders including South Carolina’s governor, U.S. senators and even the son of its late notoriously racist Sen. Strom Thurmond quickly stepped forward to call for taking down the flag.
Walker panders to haters even on issues such as marriage equality, where his position is a little better than many of his Republican competitors.
Walker correctly said it was an issue for the courts to decide. Members of Walker’s immediate family participated in the same-sex wedding of a relative and Walker attended the reception.
Yet when the U.S. Supreme Court extended marriage rights to same-sex couples in its landmark decision, Walker joined every other Republican presidential candidate in denouncing the decision.
Walker raised the nonsensical specter of government forcing those opposed to marriage equality “to participate in activities that violate their deeply held religious beliefs. No one wants to live in a country where government coerces people to act in opposition to their conscience.”
It’s absurd to think the court could somehow coerce those who oppose gay marriage into marrying someone of the same sex against their will.
It’s not so absurd, though, to think this country could move much more quickly to end hatred and violence based on race or sexual orientation if Republicans returned to their party’s founding principles and stopped exploiting racism and bigotry for votes.
