How Did We Get Here

Matthew 23:15 – “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, for you travel over sea and land to make one convert. And when you make one, you make them twice the child of Gehenna as you.”

Buckle up, because we’ve got several weeks of “woes” coming at us, which is good. It helps me get out my anger over this administration’s actions. This passage points to the evolution of the Republican Party. Many people say 45 is an anomaly, that this is not who Republicans are. Not so, 45 embodies and enacts their legislative agenda. Bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia. That’s what Republicans are. All out there for the rest of us to see. How did we get here?

Going back to the founding of our nation, all 13 states had to agree to join and fight the British if necessary. The slave-owning states would not do so unless the slaves were counted as population for voting purposes. We needed them to win the war, so the three-fifths compromise, which stated that for census purposes Black people were worth three-fifths of a white person, was born. Of course, they were not citizens. (I’m not 100% sure of these details, just that the Southern states were in love with slavery.) The mentality (a newish one) that Black people were not as good as ‘white’ people was both established and affirmed. Some people have never seen a reason to change their minds.

Jumping to the Civil War, which was called the War Between the States in the South, the South seceded out of fear that Lincoln, a Republican, would free the slaves. Slavery was an integral part of the constitution of the CSA. States could not join unless they agreed to make slavery legal. The war was not about states’ rights in general, but rather the right of states to make slavery legal in particular.

But, you just said Lincoln was a Republican. He was a good guy. What gives?

In 1877, President Hayes withdrew the last of the federal troops deployed throughout the south to keep the peace. The ‘white’ people did what you might expect and began to take over statehouses and make sure Black people couldn’t vote. In the Jim Crow era, ‘white’ men and women went even further, working to end integration in schools, restaurants, water fountains, parks, housing, work, night clubs and other areas. The lie of ‘separate, but equal’ became the norm. The KKK began terrorizing Black people. Republicans were still the good guys; it was Democrats who were the rabid racists.

When FDR passed the New Deal, many Democrats left the party and became Republicans. When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the transformation, the philosophical switch of the two parties, was mostly complete. The Democrats became the party of inclusion and the Republicans became the party of rabid racists, and they remain so today. Their entire focus all those years was on ‘white’ supremacy and segregation.

They went underground by developing "dog whistles," because it was no longer possible to be racist in public without some backlash. Dog whistles, named after the whistle that dogs can hear but humans cannot, are terms that sound innocent or even positive, but which mask a racist meaning. Urban for Black is common. Law and Order, implying that Black people are criminals is also common. Reagan’s “welfare queen,” was a successful attempt to keep the idea of Black people as sub-human alive while pretending to crack down on virtually non-existent welfare fraud. Reagan emboldened Republican racism.

When Barack Obama was elected – unthinkable! – ‘white’ Republicans lost their collective sh - er, minds. Especially, Mitch McConnell, who famously orchestrated the entire strategy of saying no to anything President Obama proposed. In so doing, they elected leaders that don’t know how to govern or that good governance requires listening to the other side and compromising where necessary.

We now have a Senate and House of Representatives full of people who have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing now that we have a Republican president. They were elected to say no, but only to Democrats. They are happy as clams to say yes to 45. These Republicans are the proselytes who are twice as bad as their forbears. Our current leadership and 45 himself are not anomalies. There were inevitable.

I wish I had paid attention sooner. I wish I had begun protesting sooner. Not because I could have fixed or avoided anything, but because I betrayed my Black and Latinx brothers and sisters by not speaking up and working for equality. I’m speaking up now. The time to act is always now, because these ideas will never completely disappear. They have been with us from the beginning and we need to recognize that they’ll be with us forever. The best we can do is contain them. Justice for all requires vigilance.