Heart of Darkness--It Was Always About Race

            It was not about God.  Or guns. Or gays. Or gargantuan government.  It was not even about abortion.  It was all about race.

            That’s the conclusion a new, utterly persuasive and argument-ending  National Bureau of Economic Research working paper written by Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington reaches about the defection of conservative Democrats to the Republican party in the middle of the last century.          

            Lyndon Johnson’s apocryphal comment about losing the solid Democratic South when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law notwithstanding, Kuziemko and Washington show that the major impetus for the partisan realignment that began in the 1960s actually began in May of 1963 when President John F. Kennedy sent what eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to Congress. That, they demonstrate, sent “racially conservative” southern Democrats who couldn’t abide the idea of an African-American president running for the doors.  

            Though the authors provide a plethora of statistical tables and graphs, Figure 1 tells the story particularly well.  The gold area that rungs along the bottom of the graph shows the number of articles

           

Figure 1

published in the New York Times between January,1963 and October 1963 in which both President Kennedy and various terms relating to civil rights were mentioned.  A major, sustained spike in those articles occurs in the Spring of 1963 and continues until the month before Kennedy’s assassination.  The blue line shows Kennedy’s approval rating among non-southern whites while the red line shows Kennedy’s approval rating among southern whites. 

            Until January of 1962, there isn’t much difference between the way southerners and non-southerners thought of Kennedy.  Large majorities of both groups gave him high marks.  The patterns of support for Kennedy track each other pretty well between January, 1962 through April of 1963, with white southerners approving of Kennedy less than non-southerners. The green line, measured on the right axis, shows the difference in support between the two groups.

            The tracking stops in May of 1963 when Kennedy submits his civil rights proposal to Congress and the association of Kennedy with civil rights in news articles spikes.  Non-southern whites do not appear to be affected by the increasing linkage between Kennedy and civil rights, and, in fact, they approve of him slightly more.

            But for southerners, Kennedy’s approval rating tanks.  The difference between the way white southerners and non-southerners think of Kennedy reaches 50 percentage points, and it never recovers.

            Figure 2, also from the Kuziemko and Washington paper, shows the results of Gallup polls taken during 1963 about a hypothetical presidential contest between

Figure 2

Kennedy and civil rights opponent Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), who became the Republican presidential nominee in 1964.  Once again, we see that white southern support for Kennedy tracks white support elsewhere until April 1963, and then it take a nosedive from which it never recovers.  That is probably why Goldwater won electoral votes from the “solid south” and why every Republican presidential candidate thereafter has made a point of courting the region.

            What’s remarkable about the paper is that the authors use relatively simple but powerful statistical methods to rule out other explanations for the departure of southern whites from the Democratic party.  They found no systematic differences by region on “job guarantees, tax cuts, the appropriate influence of big business, labor unions and the regulation of housing and utilities . . . racially conservative views do not systematically predict economic views within either region nor . . .differentially across region.”  All in, their analysis finds that all of the variation in southern Democratic identification through 1980 and 75% of the variation after 1980 can be explained by race.

            Sadly, things have not changed since the early 1960s.  I have previously interpreted current polling information to show that Donald Trump, the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination, draws a large portion of his support from people who hold much more negative opinions of African-Americans than other voters. 

            And Sean McElwee, a research associate at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, has just shown that with respect to abortion policy, tax policy and spending policy, white working class people are somewhat more liberal than they think the Republican party is on both abortion and government spending.  But they think they are more conservative than former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was with respect to aid to blacks.

            McElwee argues that these perceptions are consistent with Martin Gilen’s theory that when Americans hate “welfare spending,” it is because they think it amounts to a transfer of wealth from whites to “undeserving blacks.  He also notes that non-white working class Americans prefer Democrats to Republicans by more than 50 percentage points, and so it is not likely that white working class Republican party identification depends on anything other than race.

            It’s time for the Republican party to return to its roots as Lincoln’s party of human dignity and equality by disassociating itself from the cynical political calculation that traded its birthright for a chance at electoral victory. Racism, in all its forms, must be expelled from both political parties and relegated to the fringes of American politics. Failure to do so prolongs governmental dysfunction and the struggle we have endured since the beginning of the Republic.