As Jamelle Bouie reminds us in this NY Times piece, we don't have to image an all new dystopian future or foreign country to see where Trump's America is headed. We know exactly where it's going, and it's going back to the pre-civil-rights era of the Jim Crow south and America's darkest chapters of authoritarian history.
Jim Crow did not emerge immediately after the Compromise of 1877 — in which Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in return for the presidency — and the end of Reconstruction. It arose, instead, as a response to a unique set of political and economic conditions in the 1890s.
By the start of the decade, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued in his influential 1955 book “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” opposition to “extreme racism” had relaxed to the point of permissiveness. External restraining forces — “Northern liberal opinion in the press, the courts, and the government” — were more concerned with reconciling the nation than securing Southern democracy. And within the South, conservative political and business elites had abandoned restraint in the face of a radical challenge from an agrarian mass movement.
Mickey notes how the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party “clashed with state and national Democratic parties on major economic issues, including debt relief for farmers and the regulation of business.” What’s more, “A Colored Farmers’ Alliance grew rapidly as well, and held out the possibility of biracial coalition-building.” This possibility became a reality in states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, where Populists joined with a majority-black southern Republican Party to support common lists of candidates in “fusion” agreements against an explicitly elitist and white supremacist Democratic Party. Populists and Republicans won their greatest victories in that era in North Carolina, where they captured the state legislature and governor’s mansion, as well as local and county offices.
Democrats, among them large landowners and “New South” industrialists, responded with violence. Democratic paramilitary organizations — called “Red Shirts” — attacked populist and Republican voters, suppressing the vote throughout the state. In Republican-controlled Wilmington, N.C., writes Mickey, “Democratic notables launched a wave of violence and killings of Republicans and their supporters, black and white, to take back the state’s largest city; hundreds fled for good.”
This basic pattern repeated itself throughout the South for the next decade. Working through the Democratic Party, conservative elites “repressed Populists, seized control of the state apparatus, and effectively ended credible partisan competition.” They rewrote state constitutions to end the vote for blacks as well as substantially restrict it for most whites. They gerrymandered states to secure the political power of large landowners, converted local elective offices into appointed positions controlled at the state level, “and further insulated state judiciaries from popular input.” This could have been stopped, but the North was tired of sectional conflict, and the courts had no interest in the rights of blacks or anyone else under the boot of the Democracy.
The southern Democratic Party didn’t just control all offices and effectively staff the state bureaucracy. It was gatekeeper to all political participation. An aspiring politician could not run for office, much less win and participate in government, without having it behind him. “What is the state?” asked one prominent lawyer during Louisiana’s 1898 Jim Crow constitutional convention, aptly capturing the dynamic at work, “It is the Democratic Party.” Statehood was conflated with party, writes Mickey, “and party disloyalty with state treason.”
Southern conservatives beat back Populism and biracial democracy to build a one-party state and ensure cheap labor, low taxes, white supremacy and a starkly unequal distribution of wealth. It took two decades of disruption — the Great Depression, the Great Migration and the Second World War — to even make change possible, and then another decade of fierce struggle to bring democracy back to the South.
It’s not that we can’t learn from the experiences of other countries, but that our past offers an especially powerful point of comparison. Many of the same elements are in play, from the potent influence of a reactionary business elite to a major political party convinced of its singular legitimacy. A party that has already weakened our democracy to protect its power, and which shows every sign of going further should the need arise. A party that stands beside a lawless president, shielding him from accountability while he makes the government an extension of his personal will.
The comparisons are apt. From the 1890's through the 1960's, America was a sham democracy where the veneer of polite systemic racism was the shiny cover that bound the country together, a country where anyone who wasn't white was a second-class citizen at best. We're rocketing backwards to that era again.
Civil rights in this country is a relatively recent development in US history, and a very fragile one.
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