Note: This is part 2 of a two part commentary. Click here for part 1.

Black political struggle in America has never been simply about the right to vote because black people are the only Americans who have had that right to vote given - and taken away time and time again. Our struggle for citizenship since slavery has, thus, always been in the hands of white power to do with as it pleased. Moreover, the expropriation of black political rights has been the principal means of empowering one political party over another from the time of the slaveowning party of Thomas Jefferson and its subsequent evolution into a Democratic party with a southern Dixiecrat base.

In the 1950’s, however, the Republican party set its sights on these states of the Old Confederacy in order to deprive the Democrats of the majority of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president. This “southern strategy” triumphed in the 1968 campaign of Richard Nixon; since 1964, no Democratic party presidential nominee has won a majority of the white vote. But impeded by the Watergate scandal, Nixon was forced to resign in l974, to avoid impeachment.

The Democrats tried to offset this Republican challenge in the South by nominating Jimmy Carter of Georgia in l976 and Bill Clinton of Arkansas in 2002.But it was too little, too late. Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, George Bush senior, Phil Gramm, Tom Delay, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al, have ushered in an era of Republican political dominance which has reshaped American political discourse and culture, given hegemonic influence to the institutions, agencies, and media of the Right, and cowed the Democratic party into imitative obeisance.

Obama’s election in 2008 was supposed to be a turning point away from the Right’s three decade strategy of racially manipulative politics to a supposedly “post-racial society.” But Obama seems not to have learned the most valuable lesson of black people’s sojourn in America; the biblical injunction I would modernize as...” For we wrestle not [only] against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians6;12

So who are the Republicans?

The Right’s Shadow Government -

In 2002, David Brock, who some may remember as the right-wing centurion who wrote the hatchet-job article on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas’s chief detractor, provided a disturbing look inside the secret world of the Republican party in his book, Blinded By The Right: The Conscience of An Ex-Conservative, which is worth quoting at length:

“Like the American and other western communist parties in their heyday, the American conservative movement has created a kind of alternative universe, a set of institutions parallel to and modeled on the institutions of mainstream society, and dedicated to the single purpose of advancing a predetermined political agenda...

There is a kind of Inner Movement, consisting of a few hundred funders, senior organization leaders, lawyers, and prominent media personalities...and an Outer Movement, consisting of a few thousand staff people, grunt workers, and lower level operatives of one kind or another.

The Movement has its own newspapers...its own magazines...its own broadcasting operations, its own publishing houses...its own quasi-academic research institutions...AND EVEN ITS OWN POPULAR FRONT,THE REPUBLICAN PARTY,IMPORTANT ELEMENTS OF WHICH IT HAS SUCCESFULLY COMMANDERED.”(emphasis mine)

But this erstwhile shadow government has now come in from the cold; transforming America’s political and economic landscape from a racially flawed democracy to a corporate kleptocracy while re-costuming social culture as well...

Now corporations and government devalue the Humanities and Fine Arts while funding science and business research at universities. Sports stadiums (usually built with taxpayers’ money) are auctioned off to the highest corporate bidder as with the deceased Enron Field in Houston, and the new stadiums in New York, while copyright law expands to control music, books, bio-engineered food - and even facts themselves; reducing all human value to “the bottom line.”

Thus one of Obama’s and the Democrats’ great errors lies in not recognizing that any movement for social change must be not only political but also cultural; must be a fight not only against individuals and organizations, but also against mindsets that want to turn universities into vocational schools and give American children only so much education as they can pay for. Mindsets that want to gag doctors so they cannot inform patients of “costly” medical procedures that may save their lives. Mindsets that close down public hospitals and build prisons instead. Mindsets that only authorize organ transplants for “the right people” and restrict life-saving cancer drugs to those who can afford their multi-thousand cost.

This infectious right-wing mindset has deeply wounded morality and humanity in America; turning it into an indifferent nation, oblivious to class-driven wrong as its attention is directed only to the sanctioned scapegoats: black “criminals,” “suspected terrorists,” “Islamo-fascists” - and now that he is in office - “the socialist, communist, fascist, Kenyan-born, Muslim, Barack Obama....”

So what we are fighting, as any movement veteran will tell you, is a SYSTEM. And it doesn’t compromise.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, William L. (Bill) Strickland, teaches political science in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is also the Director of the Du Bois Papers Collection. The Du Bois Papers are housed at the University of Massachusetts library, which is named in honor of this prominent African American intellectual and Massachusetts native. Professor Strickland is a founding member of the independent black think tank: Institute of the Black World (IBW), headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Strickland was a consultant to both series of the prize-winning documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (PBS Mini Series Boxed Set), and the senior consultant on the PBS documentary, The American Experience: Malcolm X: Make It Plain.  He also wrote the companion book Malcolm X: Make It Plain. Most recently, Professor Strickland was a consultant on the Louis Massiah film on W.E.B. Du Bois - W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices. Click here to contact Professor Strickland.