It looks like the clown car is rolling over at the NC GOP headquarters. Ricky Diaz is fighting the Moral Monday movement with as much snark and ridicule as he can muster and Chairman Hasan Harnett is trying to compare Hillary Clinton to the Ku Klux Klan. Moral Monday is not on the ballot and Mr. Harnett needs a history lesson.
Diaz and the Republicans are following the same path of Democrats who wage war against the Koch brothers instead of candidates. Both are fighting controversial third parties that aren’t on the ballot. Diaz can demonize Rev. Barber all he wants but the voters who decide elections aren’t going to assume Democrats are automatically aligned with Moral Monday. Diaz and company may understand polling and tactics, but they don’t seem to understand how people, also known as voters, think.
As for Hasan, he is correct that Democrats were the party that opposed Reconstruction and allied with Ku Klux Klan following the Civil War. Democrats were also the party that established the one-party South, disenfranchising black people and establishing Jim Crow. The Ku Klux Klan, which had died down in the late 1800s, made a resurgence in alliance with the Democrats.
However, history does funny things. In the wake of the New Deal, national Democrats began pushing for more racial integration and justice. In 1948, Strom Thurmond and a group of Southern Democrats established the Dixiecrat Party to protest that movement. By the 1960s, Democrats, working with northeastern Republicans, pushed for Civil Rights legislation that would end Jim Crow once and for all. The conservative, segregationist Democrats of the time howled in protest.
In 1968, Richard Nixon and the GOP invited the racist wing of the Democratic Party into the Republican fold. The party of Lincoln began pandering to the racist element by opposing policies beneficial to minorities. By the 1980s, they had pushed African-Americans out of their party almost completely.
Today, in North Carolina, the Republican Party holds overwhelming majorities in both houses of the legislature but not one of those elected is African-American. As other Southern states have begun to acknowledge and confront their history in the wake of the Charleston tragedy, North Carolina Republicans are more worried about alienating their racist flank than confronting our ugly history. They won’t pull Confederate flags from license plates and they’re protecting Confederate monuments and memorials.
So, Mr. Harnett, learn your history. I realize you’re relatively new to politics and you may have come to the Republican Party because of deeply held beliefs. But don’t let silliness take over. By comparing Hillary Clinton to the Ku Klux Klan, you just remind everyone that it’s your party that defending the banner of the Klan, not the Democrats. As a rule of thumb, never compare your opponents to the Ku Klux Klan or Hitler or Stalin. When you do, you’re the one that comes off looking stupid, not them.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Thomas, this is a classic.
Very nicely put…Mr Mills and a great history lesson for us all!
Good advice and a fine short summation of remembered decades.
I would enjoy your view of Nixon’s firing of his cabinet after his firing of J. Edgar Hoover. Nixon also fired members of his cabinet.
I believe Barbara Tuchman took from the firing of the Presidential cabinet that it was time to give Cabinet members Portfolios that isolated them from too much presidential power. She reached the conclusion it was time to convert to a Parliamentary system.
We keep hearing that “States Rights” allow for fine experiments that lead the Union forward. This is true for the states that are in the Union, but not those of the C.S.A.
C.S.A. States got Jim Crow, and less dollars in their paycheck.
This NC government is Confederate. It is time that those of the working classes, black and white labor, unite to demand the benefits of membership in the Union. That this administration judges the Federal Government to be the same as some foreign nation is clear in its machinations regarding the ACA, and Medicaid.
Flawed accounting and then there is a surplus? Who should care that the debt to ourselves, as citizens of the US government, is repaid? Working people suffer more from the denial of proper use of our money.
It is time the citizens of NC demand that their taxes pay for the infrastructure. Those signers of the Pledge to Norquist Nation can buy Irish bonds far as I care, we’ll be taxed all the same to pay for the Bond.
The superhighway connection of Morehead City to I 40 and 95 is long overdue. Far as the rest of the Purdue developed Transportation plan now called “Connect”, and desirable to those who get to buy bonds, the whole thing can be put on the back burner excepting that.
I’ll not go on, but say simply I compliment you for your summery of history, and your advice to politicians.
“All politics end in failure.” Is something I keep in mind, while wishing I could remember who said it.
I KNOW Ricky Diaz will step up for the good of NC and contest the NC legislators who left town during budget negotiations and went to the ALEC convention (and are now seeking reimbursement for it) and who receive out of state funding in 4….3….2…
LOL LOL LOL THAT WAS FUNNY GEOFFREY.
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of Barry Goldwater’s campaign in ’63/’64, during which he rejected calls for the the civil rights act and coalesced racist elements of the Democratic Party and knuckle-staggers in the Republican Party into the new, Old Party.
Exactly. Nixon’s “southern strategy” was actually Barry Goldwater’s. Nixon just built on it.