Why LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society. That’s why progressives lionize LBJ even though they know what a vile scumbag he was.

In American Greatness, Dinesh D’Souza writes,

…Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in an otherwise positive biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, cites LBJ telling Senator Richard Russell during the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

This admission is telling not merely because of its use of the insulting reference to the “uppityness” of blacks, but also because it shows that LBJ’s support for civil rights legislation wasn’t the result of some moral awakening on his part; rather, it was part of a strategy. This notion is confirmed by what LBJ allegedly told two governors regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for 200 years.”

Some progressives—notably the “fact checking” site Snopes—have questioned this quotation, which appears in Ronald Kessler’s Inside the White House but not in any other source. Kessler attributes it to Air Force One steward Robert MacMillan, who claims to have heard LBJ say this. And as we can see the quotation is consistent with several others whose veracity is undoubted. My conclusion is that LBJ remained the vile bigoted Democrat he always was, and the notion that he underwent some sort of enlightened conversion is pure humbug.

…In the end, the horrific crimes of Hitler overthrew the doctrine of white supremacy. Once American troops entered the concentration camps, once people saw those ghostly emaciated figures emerge out of the camps, they could not longer subscribe to theories of Nordic superiority they might once have held. Those doctrines were now permanently discredited.

We can imagine that LBJ watched with horror the decline of racism in America, not simply because he was a nasty bigot himself—and bigotry loves company—but also because white supremacy had been the central political doctrine of the Democratic Party for at least a century. Once the Republicans ended slavery the Democrats turned swiftly to white supremacy which became the glue, both in the North and the South, holding the party together.

With racism dwindling fast, LBJ knew his party would lose voters whose allegiance to the Democrats had been based on the party’s support for racist policies. This was a serious problem. From the Democrats’ point of view, it meant that if racism could not be revived—and there was no way after Nazism to revive it—then the party would need new voters, and lots of them, in order to compensate for the losses in white racist voters who were regrettably losing their prejudices.

Where to look? There was only one place: black voters. And blacks in the 1950s and 1960s were voting in greater numbers than ever before. For the first half of the twentieth century, the Democrats had through racial intimidation and other means largely suppressed the black vote in the South, where the vast majority of blacks lived. But starting around World War I, a great migration occurred in which blacks over the next several decades literally got up and moved.

As Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns, some 6 million blacks—nearly half of the entire black population of the rural South—left the farms, plantations and cotton fields of that region and moved to cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia. Some moved to smaller cities like Milwaukee and Oakland. The great migration was, as Wilkerson puts it, “an unrecognized immigration within this country.”

In the cities, blacks could vote and did vote, so for the first time in American politics, the black vote became significant by the late 1940s and 1950s. The black vote was especially important in swing states like Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Fully aware of this, Republicans offered the most sweeping and forceful endorsement of civil rights for blacks to appear in any party platform since the nineteenth century. The party of Lincoln was making a bid for these new black voters.

Again, this was as major problem for LBJ and the Democrats. LBJ knew that in order to make up for the racist vote the Democrats must win not just some black votes, not just a majority of black votes, but virtually all the black votes. The Democrats needed blacks to be just as uniformly loyal to the Democratic Party as white racists previously had been. LBJ had to figure a way for blacks to vote for Democratic candidates automatically, habitually, regardless of the qualities or qualifications of the Democrat on the ticket.

…Here’s the bargain that LBJ offered African Americans. We Democrats are going to create a new plantation for you, this time in the towns and cities. On these new plantations, unlike on the old ones, you don’t have to work. In fact, we would prefer if you didn’t work. We are going to support you through an array of so-called poverty programs and race-based programs. Essentially we will provide you with lifetime support, just as in the days of slavery. Your job is simply to keep voting us in power so that we can continue to be your caretakers and providers.

…In sum, LBJ modified the progressive plantation so that blacks, for the first time, would be treated as constituents, much as the Irish were in the Tammany days. No longer would Democrats directly rip off the blacks by stealing their labor. Now blacks would become partners with Democrats in a scheme to steal from other Americans. Through a variety of taxes, regulations and mandates, those would be the guys paying for the Democratic plantation.

What made the scheme beautiful, from the Democrats’ point of view, is that through the state the Democrats could force even Republicans to pay for their new urban plantation. In fact, the very sufferings that Democrats historically had imposed on blacks would now supply the moral capital for demanding that “America” make blacks whole. Future arguments for reparations and affirmative action would emphasize not what the Democrats did but what “America” did. Now the American taxpayer would be on the hook for correcting the wrongs perpetrated by the Democrats.

…Blacks took the deal for the following reasons. First, having come out of the haunting experience of slavery and sharecropping, many of them were terrified of what African-American writer Shelby Steele terms the “shock of freedom.” Much as we would all feel in a similar situation, to them a meager security seemed preferable to the risk of not being able to survive. Second, some blacks had come to believe—as some do now—that because of past oppression, America owes them a living.

…That’s why LBJ “converted” from a racist Democrat who sought to keep blacks down on the old sharecropping plantation to a racist Democrat who sought to create a new type of plantation where blacks would now willingly vote for their Democratic providers. That’s why LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society. That’s why progressives lionize LBJ even though they know what a vile scumbag he was. He’s their guy; he is the creator of their urban plantation in its most modern and most recognizable form. And that’s why blacks have become, as a group, the lifetime servile dependents of the Democratic Party.

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