"Bill Moyers – one of those liberals who knows things and isn’t shy about showing it – remembers that when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he was “euphoric.” Later that evening, Moyers found him in a “melancholy mood,” and asked him “what was troubling him.” The president answered, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time.”
The Voting Rights Act later aggravated white voters to the point of mania, but so did Johnson’s War on Poverty, and not because of bromides about “big government.” White voters in the decades leading up to the Great Society initiative had no objection to generous social programs of assistance for the poor, disabled and illiterate. The Homestead Act, the GI Bill, Social Security, the rural electrification policies of the New Deal, and other public aid programs were uncontroversial – popular with the white working class, because they were the sole beneficiaries of government largesse. It was not until the federal government started spending white tax dollars on anti-poverty relief for spics and niggers that low-income white voters went into hysterics about the evils of dependency. Up until the Great Society, most government programs were, like Southern hotels and diners, white only.
At one point, Rensin refers to the “evangelical revival” as one possible explanation for the rise of the right-wing white voter, but demonstrates no awareness of the hideous racial politics at the center of Christian Conservatism.
Randall Balmer, in his excellent biography of President Jimmy Carter,Redeemer, documents and describes how white evangelicals were largely apathetic and apolitical prior to the 1976 presidential election. They swarmed the polls in high numbers to help usher one of their own into office. Carter’s faith and testimony seemed genuine, and white evangelicals supported him for cultural and theological reasons, rather than anything having to do with politics or public policy. By 1980, those same voters were carrying placards for the “Reagan revolution.” As Balmer explains, “Although homosexuality and, eventually, abortion, would figure into their (white evangelicals) critique, the real catalyst for their disaffection was race, especially the issue of desegregation.”
Recommended read from Salon.com: We must shame dumb Trump fans: The white working class are not victims
No comments:
Post a Comment