it is plain that the South's attachment to the GOP since 1964, whatever its racial content, is much weaker than was the South's attachment to the Democrat Party until 1948, when there was no question that that attachment had a strong (perhaps dominant) racial component.Bruce Bartlett decisively slams the door on Krugman's case in "Whitewash: The racist history the Democratic Party wants you to forget"; for example:
[Paul] Krugman's condemnation [in The Conscience of a Liberal] of racial politics in a major political party [the GOP] comes 60 years too late, and it's aimed at the wrong party.
Case closed.
[I]f a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago [by Ronald Reagan] is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.Bartlett then gives many examples of racist statements by prominent Democrats, beginning with Thomas Jefferson (1787) and ending with Joseph Biden (2007), with several stops in between at the Democrats' platform and the pronouncements of prominent Democrats, including FDR, Hugo Black, Robert Byrd, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Chris Dodd.
As I say in my earlier post,
Krugman's real complaint... is that Republicans have been winning elections far too often to suit him. His case of Republican Derangement Syndrome is so severe that he can only pin the GOP's success on racism. I will refrain from references to Freud and Pinocchio and note only that Krugman's anti-GOP bias seems to have grown as his grasp of economics has shrunk.Amen.
