Republicans Would Chisel the Anger Out of Dr. King’s Face

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive loss of White Southern support for the Democrats. And the Southern Strategy was perfected by Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney – two Jews and a Black – were murdered by domestic terrorists in 1964.

The Southern Strategy has had a long run in American politics, and it may very well fail miserably in the midst of an Obama candidacy. And yet, this is the last idea the Republicans have left, aside from permanent war, tax cuts, and ending abortion and gay marriage.

McCain, the GOP standard bearer, has the unenviable task of attempting to distance himself from the most unpopular president in American history, a president whose policies are in line with his own. His party, like America’s two-party system as a whole, is a dinosaur. And it faces well-deserved extinction by clinging to anti-immigrant fervor at a time of changing demographics; anti-Muslim sentiment when the U.S. needs to reach out to the rest of the world; robber baron economics which is exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; the elimination of civil liberties ostensibly to make us free, and an unjust and immoral war in Iraq which is bankrupting the nation and sucking the life out of essential social programs.