By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have frequently wondered what Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s listeners say to themselves when they see how ineffective these radio hosts are when they point out how out-of-step modern Democrats are from the Democratic Party’s leaders of the past. It seems to make no difference, for example, when Sean and Rush quote from Martin Luther King about “judging people by the content of their character,” rather than calling for racial quotas — and then emphatically add the line: “He would be a Republican if he were alive today!”
Limbaugh and Hannity are also ineffective when they apply reverse spin, demonstrating that leading Democrats of the past, such as the late Senators Robert Byrd and William Fulbright, were segregationists. Hannity never tires of calling Byrd “Robert KKK Byrd” and “Sheets Byrd” in reference to his past membership in the Ku Klux Klan. The response from modern Democrats? Ho-hum.
There may be some Democrats somewhere in the country who have heard Limbaugh and Hannity go through this litany, and smacked themselves on the forehead and exclaimed, “That’s it! I can’t remain a Democrat any longer! Where can I sign up as a Republican?” But if there are, I have never met them. Nor have I have ever heard of surveys indicating a mass exodus from the Democratic Party because of the party’s segregationist past. The historical record doesn’t seem to matter in this context.
What about the Reagan Democrats and Trump Democrats? It strikes me that they vote Republican because of the charisma of the candidate and the issues of a particular election season. You won’t hear Reagan Democrats and Trump Democrats explaining how their change of mind was brought on because of what they read about a Democratic politician in the past.
I’ll give you another example: a column by Larry Elder that makes clear the vast divide between John F. Kennedy and modern Democrats. Elder did his homework. He quotes Kennedy on racial quotas in hiring and college admissions: “I don’t think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to begin to assign quotas on the basis of religion or race or color, or nationality.” What Kennedy recommended was that we “make sure we are giving everyone a fair chance.”
Elder also points to Kennedy’s tax policy. It is not a reach to call Kennedy a supply-sider: He said in a 1962 speech, “It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy, which can bring a budget surplus.”
Kennedy had something to say about abortion, as well. He described Japan’s legalization of abortion as a policy “which I think would be repugnant to all Americans.”
The bottom line, writes Elder, is that “on guns, taxes, racial preferences, foreign policy, and abortion, John F. Kennedy would not be comfortable in today’s Democratic Party. He was, after all, a Kennedy Democrat.”
I submit that the reaction from modern Democratic voters to Elder’s column will be: nothing.
Do I have a theory about why modern Democrats react this way? I do. It is that voters understand that times change. What concerns them are the views of the current crop of political candidates. African-Americans know that the Democrats were once the party of segregationists in the South. They know that the Republicans were the champions of abolition in the years before the Civil War. But what matters to them is which political party will advance what they see as their interests at the current time.
It seems to me that, if confronted by the observation that Martin Luther King never pushed for affirmative action programs and racial quotas and that John Kennedy favored cutting taxes to promote economic growth, modern Democrats could simply respond, “So what?” They might also that King and Kennedy would have changed their views if they had lived longer, just as their associates changed theirs.
Check the record: Jesse Jackson was part of Martin Luther King’s movement. He changed and became a proponent of affirmative action. Why should we think that King would not have done the same if he had not been assassinated? Ted Kennedy argued against Ronald Reagan’s tax policies. Why wouldn’t his brother John, if he had lived, been on his brother’s side? There is no way to disprove this proposition.
It is the same phenomenon in play when white Southerners changed their position on the Democratic Party. They deserted the party in droves in the last quarter of the 20th century when they saw that it had become the party of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Hannity and Limbaugh would make short work of any modern Democrats who tried to convince white Southerners to stay loyal Democrats in memory of the “solid South” of old. That is not how liberal Southern Democrats such as James Carville seek to sell the party these days. Quite the contrary.
Is my point that Limbaugh and Hannity should give up on their attempts to make people aware of the Democrats’ past as a segregationist party? And that conservative Republicans should no longer point out that John Kennedy’s positions were closer to those of modern Republicans than to modern Democrats?
No. The truth is the truth, and it deserves to be pointed out. If nothing else, bringing to light the Democratic Party’s past gives modern conservatives and Republicans a “so’s yer old man” comeback that can be used when liberal Democrats trot out the claim that conservatives and Republicans have a track record of racism and regressive tax policies designed to benefit the “rich.”
There are Democratic Party opinion makers who make a concerted effort to implant bumper-sticker-like slogans in the minds of average Americans who do not follow politics closely. There is nothing wrong with putting into circulation some quips and one-liners to rebut them, as long as we realize that it will have a limited effect.
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