The controversy surrounding recent events in Jena, La., and the criminal charges against the Jena Six, stems in part from the shocking qualities of the story. Most decent people across the country look at the systemic and ugly bigotry, and wonder how these conditions can still exist in the 21st century.
Paul Krugman makes the case today that racial tensions, especially in the South, haven’t improved as much as most of us would like to believe, and in politics, race remains “one of the defining factors.”
Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.
And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”
The national Republican Party is acutely aware of all of this — as it has been for decades — and acts accordingly. In 1980, this meant Ronald Reagan making one of his first presidential campaign appearances just outside Philadelphia, Miss., to endorse states’ rights.
In 2007, GOP leaders aren’t nearly as blatant, but they’re no more progressive, either.
And all four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have turned down an invitation to a debate on minority issues scheduled to air on PBS this week.
Yet if the marchers at Jena reminded us that America still hasn’t fully purged itself of the poisonous legacy of slavery, it would be wrong to suggest that the nation has made no progress. Racism, though not gone, is greatly diminished: both opinion polls and daily experience suggest that we are truly becoming a more tolerant, open society.
And the cynicism of the “Southern strategy” introduced by Richard Nixon, which delivered decades of political victories to Republicans, is now starting to look like a trap for the G.O.P.
One of the truly remarkable things about the contest for the Republican nomination is the way the contenders have snubbed not just blacks — who, given the G.O.P.’s modern history, probably won’t vote for a Republican in significant numbers no matter what — but Hispanics. In July, all the major contenders refused invitations to address the National Council of La Raza, which Mr. Bush addressed in 2000. Univision, the Spanish-language TV network, had to cancel a debate scheduled for Sept. 16 because only John McCain was willing to come.
I can’t help but think that the GOP is regressing on race. In 2000, when he wasn’t campaigning at Bob Jones University, George W. Bush at least pretended to respect racial diversity. He engaged the NAACP and Latino groups. He spoke his version of Spanish in the Southwest, and in 2004, Bush’s campaign even quietly distributed an ad to Hispanic supporters featuring the president waving a Mexican flag.
Even though the outreach wasn’t a smashing success — minority voters continued to support Dems in large numbers — Bush’s efforts at least managed to impress some white moderates.
But it appears those efforts are over. For today’s GOP, the investment wasn’t paying off, the hard-right base didn’t approve of the outreach, so it’s back to the drawing board. If that means Republicans are going to limit their support to conservative white guys, so be it.