The Real GOP Base
The party is the same today as it was in 1964 - fearful, xenophobic, often hateful and full of disgust for civil rights and people not like them
The white nationalism - call it racism, if you prefer - of the modern conservative movement is the central feature of Trumpism.
Dress it up in any way you like, but that is the essence - a white nationalist homeland for white folks.
As they say, when they tell you who they are, believe them. Donald Trump has been telling us for years and years.
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A Republican Champion of Civil Rights
In the 1960’s the Republican leader of the United States Senate, was a rumpled, honey voiced political pro from downstate Illinois by the name of Everett Dirksen, as interesting and complex a character post-war American politics ever produced.
Dirksen was a dyed in the wool conservative, had been a staunch supporter of Joseph McCarthy and a full on anti-communist believer who considered Soviet Russia the “evil empire” long before Ronald Reagan used that terminology.
Dirksen was also a skilled deal maker, an old school legislator who could swap a few stories and drink a little bourbon with Lyndon Johnson and come away with a commitment that LBJ would appoint a Dirksen man to the Federal Trade Commission or fund a water project Dirksen cared about. In turn, Johnson, who understood human nature as well as any man who ever sat in the Oval Office, would flatter and cajole Dirksen, referring to him as the “man from the Land of Lincoln.”
In 1964, Johnson, looking toward that year’s presidential election, was determined to outdo the martyred John F. Kennedy and actually pass a serious civil rights bill. He had to rely on Dirksen to get it done.
And Idea Whose Time Has Come
Imagine this happening in today’s Republican Party.
The Republican party’s leader in the Senate, the top conservative leader in the country - Ev Dirksen - supported the civil rights legislation advanced by a Democratic president.
Dirksen rallied fellow Republicans (in an election year) to force the end of a Senate filibuster, the longest filibuster in Senate history, allowing passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Twenty-seven of the Senate’s thirty-three Republicans supported ending the filibuster and eventually supported final passage in the landmark legislation in the Senate.
Dirksen directly and publicly broke with his party’s presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who opposed civil rights legislation and voted against the bill that became a truly historic legislative accomplishment.
I wrote a book about Senate leadership in the 1960’s called Mansfield and Dirksen, and here is some of what I said about Dirksen:
Whether motivated by political necessity, ego, a genuine desire to place his stamp on a historic piece of legislation, or perhaps by all three, Dirksen’s bipartisan political calculation in the spring of 1964 was astounding for one overridingly important reason. As the titular leader of the GOP, Dirksen’s embrace and essential leadership on civil rights placed him squarely at odds with the man almost certain to be the Republican presidential candidate in the fall, and at the same time Dirksen was providing an enormous political boost to Barry Goldwater’s opponent – Lyndon Johnson.
From the first moment of Senate consideration of the civil rights bill, Goldwater, armed with the legal analysis of a Yale Law School professor by the name of Robert Bork, had been among the most outspoken critics of the bill. The public accommodation section, Goldwater said, “would force you to admit drunks, a known murderer or an insane person into your place of business.” And to Goldwater, fair employment opportunities meant hiring “incompetent” workers. Dirksen would eventually plead with Goldwater to reconsider his opposition—“you just can’t do it,” Dirksen argued, “not only for yourself, but you can’t do it for the party”—but to no avail. Dirksen’s willingness to oppose the presidential candidate of his own party on the highest-profile issue in the country remains a remarkable statement about the minority leader’s conviction that the time had come for the Senate to address civil rights.
Hubert Humphrey, a Democratic senator from Minnesota in 1964 and later Johnson’s vice president and the party’s presidential nominee in 1968, played a huge role in passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. He would later write that the civil rights legislation was “a legislative edifice that would last forever.”
Humphrey clearly could not imagine the modern Republican Party.
Very Badly Treated
From the New York Times:
President Trump said in an interview that he believed civil rights-era protections resulted in white people being “very badly treated,” his strongest indication that the concept of “reverse discrimination” is driving his aggressive crusade against diversity policies.
Speaking to The New York Times … Mr. Trump echoed grievances amplified by Vice President JD Vance and other top officials who in recent weeks have urged white men to file federal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
When asked whether protections that began in the 1960s, spurred by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, had resulted in discrimination against white men, Mr. Trump said he believed “a lot of people were very badly treated.”
“White people were very badly treated, where they did extremely well and they were not invited to go into a university to college,” he said, an apparent reference to affirmative action in college admissions. “So I would say in that way, I think it was unfair in certain cases.”
White people were very badly treated.
That’s it. That’s the central feature of Trumpism.
This is what the anti-woke, anti-DEI attacks are all about. This is why the Smithsonian is under attack for correctly portraying the complicated history of this multi-ethnic nation. This is behind the unhinged attacks on the teaching of history, while celebrating the losing side in our Civil War. This is why Trump calls them “shit hole countries” and muses why more Norwegians don’t want to immigrate. This is why the U.S. is now welcoming white South Africans, but no one else. This is the source of outrageous attacks on Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ICE targeting of people of color.
You’ll notice that Trump and the conservative right never - ever - talk about the multi-racial nature of modern America. They don’t believe in that country.
And here is just one other example of how this is playing out.
From States News Service:
Tribal leaders in the Dakotas are urging their citizens to carry tribal IDs and other forms of identification amid reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining Native Americans in Minnesota.
At least five tribal citizens were reportedly detained by ICE last week in Minneapolis, reported ICT, an Indigenous news organization. Four are citizens of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and the fifth is a descendant of the Red Lake Nation, the news organization reported.
Reports of Indigenous people being targeted by ICE agents prompted Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chair Steve Sitting Bear to issue a public safety alert on social media Friday.
And here is David Frum’s analysis of why Vice President JD Vance went so far to defend the actions of masked, uniform thugs in Minneapolis, went so far that he lied about Haitian refuges eating pets in Ohio, so far that he blatantly lied about the death of Renee Nicole Good:
For MAGA America, ICE is an instrument for cleansing violence. Visit ICE social-media accounts and you’ll see, again and again, videos of armed force against unarmed individuals, against a soundtrack of pumping music. There’s a montage of aggressive arrests in Minnesota of unarmed, nonwhite men, many of them thrown to the ground and cuffed, set to the 1977 hit “Cold as Ice”: “Someday you’ll pay the price.” A dozen heavily armed and armored agents round up a single unarmed woman in a T-shirt and two similarly defenseless men in California. In Indiana, armored agents throw handcuffs and ankle chains on a big haul of men and shove them in a cell, where they can be seen pacing, weeping, or with their heads plunged in their hands.
Rarely do these videos present a situation that couldn’t be managed with a couple of plainclothes officers bearing holstered sidearms. The point is to prove that the fearsome power of the American state is being wielded by righteous MAGA hands against despised MAGA targets.
And the vast majority of these “despised MAGA targets” are people of color and those attempting to protect them.
The 40% Solution
It may just be a coincidence - long-time readers know I don’t believe in such things - but in the recent Quinnipiac University Poll I note that 40% of those surveyed expressed support for ICE and its tactics. That number was overwhelmingly made up of Republicans - 84% of whom support ICE, even after the tragic shooting of a 37-year old mother on a residential street in Minneapolis.
Forty percent is also the absolute Trump base. His approval rating hovers, and always has, right at that number.
That’s the MAGA base and these folks whole heartedly approve of ICE, the targeting of people of color and the steadily expanding white nationalism coming from the administration.
It’s The White Nationalism, Stupid
NPR, now officially defunded by the Trump Administration, did a piece last summer about the use of this kind of imagery.
I recommend the piece to help understand the psychology behind the Trump/MAGA push for white nationalism. Here’s a taste:
The White House’s X account, as well as that of the Department of Homeland Security, have for months been posting a steady stream of content celebrating the administration, especially its aggressive immigration crackdown, often framed as ironic comedy. The posts illustrate the Trump administration’s project of redefining who belongs in the United States, and promote its policies.
In recent weeks, many posts have highlighted DHS’s push to hire more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, as well as the agency’s vision of the homeland. They range from World War II-style recruitment posters to artwork evoking nostalgic versions of America’s past, such as an 1872 painting that positively depicts white settlers displacing Native Americans.
The Arc of Conservative History
Anti-communism was the glue that held the conservative movement together in the 1950’s, but after Goldwater’s disastrous presidential campaign, and particularly after passage of the Civil Rights Act, fixations about race came more and more to dominate Republican politics. Democrats, sometimes correctly, are assailed for practicing “identity politics,” but the American right has been grasping for a sort of reverse identity politics for a long, long time.
Richard Nixon’s so called “southern strategy” in 1968 was designed to bring disenchanted white Democrats in the south to the Republican Party by playing off, among other racial stereotypes, concerns about crime - law and order in Nixon’s telling - to great political effect.
Ronald Reagan took the not so subtle racial dog whistles in a new direction with his many references to “welfare queens” in the 1970’s and later, including his oft repeated story about a Chicago woman who really was a welfare cheat, but also conveniently served as a symbol of Reagan’s real message that welfare fraud - by people of color - was rampant.
Trump now uses the real issue of fraud in Minnesota to demonize an entire group of people - Somali refuges.
Jonathan Cohn writes in The Bulwark that Somali immigrants have become the new welfare queens:
Animus toward Somalis is nothing new for Trump and his supporters. The uptick in just the last week is almost certainly linked to the administration’s desperation to justify the killing of Good, a native-born, white U.S. citizen. But something else is going on here too. What you’re seeing and hearing is the fusing of two parts of the Trump administration’s agenda.
One is its war on immigration, which every day seems less like an attempt to control the border and more like an effort to minimize—and bully—America’s non-native, non-white population. The other is Trump’s war on the welfare state, which feels less like an effort to cut waste and more like an attempt to gut core programs that provide health care, childcare, and other critical services to many millions of Americans.
And it’s not only Somali refugees. There are many reports now of ICE agents going door-to-door asking residents where Hmong or Asian people live.
It’s Correct to Say Landmark
Most historians would agree, I think, that the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960’s were among the very greatest bipartisan legislative accomplishments in American history. After 1965, federal law was positioned fully on the side of ending racial discrimination and making sure every American could vote.
But the political right never fully accepted those accomplishments as fixed, as Hubert Humphrey predicted they would be.
A conservative Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts has gutted much of the Voting Rights Act - also a product of Republican Everett Dirksen’s legislative handiwork - and almost surely will do more gutting very soon.
Barry Goldwater’s view that the Civil Rights Act was government overreach seems almost quaint now considering what many on the right are saying and believing, including the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
This from the CBC:
At a December 2023 political conference hosted by his Turning Points USA group, Wired magazine reported that Kirk decried not only Martin Luther King Jr., calling the civil rights leader “awful” and “not a good person,” but also the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex and national origin, and prohibited segregation.
“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
Kirk argued the statute had brought about what he said was a “permanent” bureaucracy meant to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
The Backlash Goes Way Back
The anti-civil rights message from the political right has remained remarkably consistent over the 60 years since a bipartisan Congress passed and Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
Montana Senator Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, was in many ways the architect of the political strategy to get civil rights legislation through the Senate in 1964 and 1965. Mansfield never wavered on his commitment to the legislation, but he did contend with some heated pushback from some of his Montana constituents.
Mansfield’s papers at the University of Montana library are a fascinating time capsule from that period. For example a Eureka, Montana, constituent wrote to Mansfield:
“It is my firm conviction that the Civil Rights Bill is a radical, unconstitutional and thoroughly unacceptable proposal, in that it will destroy the basic rights of all individuals through federal intervention.”
A couple from Billings told Mansfield:
“Individual freedoms cannot be removed, either collectively or one at a time, without leading us along the road to socialism which will enslave us all, black and white alike.”
In what was clearly a coordinated lobbying effort, several letters to Mansfield in early 1964 used the same language: “The Civil Rights Bill before the Senate now, is 10% civil rights and 90% take-over of all activities of life.”
Make no mistake - this is all about - and has long been all about - amplifying long standing and deep seated racial animosity, even hatred, a sad fixture of American culture.
The demonization we are seeing works in service to the cultural and political beliefs of the 40% of Americans who embrace Trump and what he is doing.
After Barack Obama’s election in 2008 there was much talk of the country having arrived at a “post racial” moment. That was pure wishful thinking, fiction.
We haven’t even arrived at a “post Civil Rights Act” moment, and Donald Trump is trying his worst to make sure the old hatreds, fears and violence are recycled anew.
Nixon had his law and order, Reagan his welfare cheats. Trump has conflated the two issues, while deploying much harsher language than either of his Republican predecessors ever used, and he now has a thuggish, murderous national police that is taking the country to a darker, more hateful, more violent and much more fearful place.
In a nutshell: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. The Voting Rights Act enacted the following year - significantly after Congressional action was galvanized following violent attacks on voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama - outlaws racial discrimination in voting and empowers the Justice Department to bring actions to enforce the law.
Thedistinction between Dirksen's willingness to break with Goldwater on civil rights versus today's GOP lockstep is really stark. The part about ICE tactics and the 40% base overlap is something I hadn't connected before but makes total sence when you see how enforcement becomes performative rather than functional.
You speak of a time I dearly miss, when morality or citizenship were the driving forces that guided us. I miss that time. Here's a definition of citizenship I wish were mine, but I stole it from Allen Levi's book, "The Last Sweet Mile".
"What is citizenship but the unheroic call to dwell in a fallen world with an awareness that every small, infinitesimal life, lived with integrity or not, has potential bearing on every other small, infinitesimal life in the body politic? What is it but the call to work ethically in the marketplace and on the land, to be wise and generous stewards of whatever wealth God entrusts to us, and to live with kindness, compassion, and integrity toward others?"