Can they run out? Please?

This post owes a considerable debt to Dave Neiwert.

I don't write about politics. It's not that I find it boring. I just made a post that in part dissects an episode of seaQuest for points on political philosophy. I'm not indifferent; I care. But it's not the most cheerful stuff. Often it's very depressing and caring can be very exhausting. This post isn't exactly about politics, but it's related.

You know, Pat Robertson's getting old. Also his real name is Marion. Falwell's gone. Is the end of an era coming? Could be we out of holy-rolling bigots? That would be nice. I'm not saying that they should all be done away with or anything like that, but they're old men. They're not going to live forever and it would be nice to think that we're getting them out of our national system like we got out the slaveholders and the segregationists. But it's not that easy.

Back in the bad old days, the Democrats were the party of white power. The newcomer Republicans were the anti-slavery, pro-civil rights party. We had a slight disagreement over the direction the nation ought to go in vis-a-vis this question, which was won by the Republicans. But they got tired of it and a few years later cut a deal to more or less drop the racial equality business in exchange for a presidency. They got rid of slavery, but its replacement with Jim Crow and sharecropping was an incremental improvement. Those slaveholders and their sympathizers that lived through the war rarely changed their minds about the issues under contention, with the possible exception of James Longstreet.

By the way Lee's ambivalence about slavery is a little bit overstated. He inherited some slaves he was allowed by the terms of the will to work for some years before setting them free. Lee could have let them go right then, but he decided to keep them for pretty much every day he could get before he was legally required to let them go. The man was not a stealth abolitionist.

Anyway, these slaveholders didn't stop thinking they ought to own slaves. They didn't get over losing the war. The vast majority of them probably went to their graves thinking slavery right and proper and abolitionism a profound evil. Their descendants grew up thinking the same thing about segregation. Now we're up to a century after the fact and these third-generation segregationists are promising massive resistance and segregation forever.

In between here, something happens in the US political system. The Republicans, thanks to Lincoln and Grant, are the soundly preferred party of black people. Both parties have their more liberal and more conservative wings. The Republicans were the conspicuous reformers of the Progressive Era, but over time came to gravitate more towards the big business, conservative end of the spectrum. At the same time, the Democrats were out of power for more than a decade while the GOP put Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover into the White House.

FDR started a healthy movement of black voters over to the Democrats. The New Deal was partly about alleviating the plight of the poor and while the Democrats were still the party of the Sold (read: white, racist) South, poor blacks could rightly note that they were getting a lot more help from the New Deal than from Hoover's program to float loans to rich people. Incidentally, whites noticed that too. Southern whites were skeptical of the power of the federal government, relating back to that slight disagreement in the 1860s. (They did not, despite claims otherwise, have all that much problem with it prior to 1860.) Some of them even noticed that, while they received some benefit from New Deal programs, their black neighbors were getting the same. Maybe more. Maybe too much more for their liking.

FDR was not a great progressive on racial issues. He repeatedly blew off civil rights leaders that visited him, waving away their concerns. He was much more concerned with keeping the support of the Solid South, where advancing civil rights would serve to aggravate some of his more balky supporters.

FDR gets a terrific headache (Those were his last words.) and dies in 1945. This leaves us with Harry S Truman (no middle name, just the initial). Truman thought about joining the Klan back in his Missouri days and was generally to the right of FDR. He was way to the right of FDR's previous VP, Henry Wallace. But Truman heard about what happened in the Battle of the Bulge, where black soldiers were consigned to driving supply trucks and other menial tasks and forbidden combat positions. Woodrow Wilson had segregated the US government a while previous. Early in the Bulge, it looked like the Germans might achieve their breakthrough and perhaps make lasting gains just as the war was looking to be going our way. This was one of those any-warm-body situations and a large number of black soldiers on hand volunteered for combat duty and the loss of rank that would go with it. Truman considered that given they were prepared to do this, how could an armed force be justifiably segregated?

That kind of thinking is trouble for the Solid South, which is ultimately a single-issue block concerned with maintaining white supremacy. When a civil rights plank is voted into the party platform in 1948, Strom Thurmond led a contingent out of the party and ran on his own "states rights" platform as a Dixiecrat. Dewey did not defeat Truman, but lines were drawn. Truman desegregated the military through executive order, something Bill Clinton could not be bothered to do in a similar situation, and that was that.

Except for a few years later when the civil rights movement really gets going. Strom is still around and he's still got his supporters. In the Fifities, Thurmond launched the single longest filibuster in Senate history against a civil rights bill. The Solid South was promising massive resistance and turning fire hoses on peaceful protestors, when it didn't just kill them. Strom and his buddies didn't change their minds, they changed their parties.

Barry Goldwater, the founding father of modern American conservativism, ran on a pro-segregation platform. He observed, infamously, that the GOP was not going to be the party of black people in his lifetime so it should hunt where there are ducks. This was his way of saying that the white racist vote, now alienated from the Democrats, ought to be picked up. Over the Seventies and into the Eighties, the Solid South flipped its party of choice. Politicians changed parties or retired. Over time, appeals to explicit racism were phased out but the subtext never left.

My point isn't that modern conservatives are a bunch of Klansmen, or cops with fire hoses. I don't think that young conservatives are necessarily as racist as their ancestors. My point is that these guys never shrugged and changed their minds. The vast majority of the racists died as racists. They didn't reconsider. They didn't have changes of heart. They just grumbled, listened for the code words, and voted accordingly. Their children undoubtedly learned some racism at home, but also had to deal with a culture becoming less permissive of it. Their attitudes are not as extreme or ingrained. Provided things don't turn the other way, the same can be said of their children. As long as the pressure is kept on, one can expect prejudice to decline in a generational fashion. Most people will not make radical changes in their positions. They might shift a little, but their children will shift more.

So too with the antigay lobby. Falwell's dead and, as Chris Hitchens noted, for lack of an enema could have been buried in a matchbox. The leaders are aging, but they are not gone. Attitudes have been changing very rapidly about this sort of thing, perhaps more aggressively and rapidly than they changed about race. Unless you were a member of a multiracial family, in which case your racial prejudices are bound to be a bit subdued already, or one of your loved ones brought home a partner of different heritage, it was pretty hard to end up with one of those scary minority people in your family or any kind of intimate association.

By contrast, it's pretty easy to end up with a gay person in your family. I saw reports of a study a few years ago that listed knowing one as the chief factor in changing someone's opinions about gay people. It's pretty hard to segregate yourself away when your son, or sibling, or cousin, or whatever might turn out to be one of those scary minority people. I still think the prejudice is pervasive and very strong, but it seems brittle. It's very hard to maintain a harsh bias against a group that turns out to include a loved one, and doing so has personal costs more immediate than might be the case with skin color prejudice.

I don't know. Maybe when their leaders are gone the homophobes will go home and stop bothering everybody, gay and straight, bisexual and asexual, with their nonsense. There are certainly indicators that this prejudice may go away more easily, but I wouldn't want excess optimism to lead us into complacency. There aren't enough non-heterosexuals around to embed one in every family and conservative Christians in the US do very well at forming their own tightly-sealed little worlds. Self-segregation will inhibit the spread of tolerance. But still the fact that even the leading haters for Jesus are worried about their replacements not appearing is good news. (Generally speaking, anything they worry about is probably good news.) If their network of propaganda fails, then the machinery of tolerance has one less hindrance. It would be nice.