It's Our Party. We'll Try Harder 'Cause We Have To

The struggle for the soul of the Democratic party is nothing new. It's been contested for over forty years. Eric Rauchway in The New Republic debunks a notion recently put forward by Tom Brokaw on a History Channel program that the FDR coalition and by extension, the Democratic Party, was broken by supporters of left-wing causes and hippes protesting the Vietnam war. He explains that the real split in the Democratic Party was over race.

In other words, it is a moral certainty that race, and not the hippies, broke up the New Deal coalition. And not old, Jim Crow racism like keeping blacks from whites in public and private places alike, segregating buses, and banning interracial marriages--but new racial attitudes, like blaming African Americans for the growth of government and for the increase of lawlessness in America's streets. On best estimates, a bit over thirty percent of the wealth transferred to poverty-struck Americans in the 1960s went to blacks--a sum that, if poor and middling whites kept it, might have increased their disposable income by under half of one percent. But the numbers didn't matter--the symbols did, and the nonwhite poor were a startlingly effective target of white resentment. As Nixon noted privately: "It's all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there."  Moreover, as time has passed, those new attitudes blaming the black poor for the country's troubles have increased in the South, and are closely tied with Republican voting.

We continue to punish blacks for being black in this country. They are four times more likely to receive a death sentence in a capital case, there are currently more black adult men in prison than in college, conspiracy laws are used to criminalize entire black families, including mothers and young children, as drug-dealing, criminal enterprises for the misdeeds of one of its members.

So when people accuse the Dems of being fence-sitters and non-committal to what are perceived as Democratic positions, please remind them that George Wallace was a Democrat...Strom Thurmond was a Democrat most of his life...that FDR got the New Deal through the Congress by agreeing to allow the states to administer most of the programs so that they could continue to reward their supporters and prevent minorities from benfitting from them.

Most importantly, remind them that if they want the Democratic Party to reflect their values, they need to stand up, get invloved and do the hard work to take up the reins from those that are less inclined to take the principled stands that they are demanding of their politicians. They need to make it easier for them to support progressive positions by influencing public opinion by canvassing their neighbors, writing to editors, and holding their elected officials accountable. And, if they will not come around, work even harder to replace them with people who will. But, you'll need to be in a position of power yourself to effectively fight them.

Be the change to you want to see - Mahatma Ghandi