The Party of Lincoln is Dead and Buried and Cremated
The words of this edition of Lateral Thinking is not mine – they are the words of Keith Boykin on an instagram post https://www.instagram.com/reel/C69CxA8voAw/?igsh=Z3RocHFqYW82MnNs that I have felt compelled to share word for word as the words are critically important at time when Democracy is under serious threat in the USA and globally.
Keith has outlined in his post why the Party of Lincoln is long dead – I have taken the liberty to add buried and cremated.
So without much ado here are the words of the instagram post. I would recommend everyone reading this article, also view Keith’s post as the visual imagery provides more context.
Keith Boykin
Republicans are the party of Lincoln, but Black people are stuck on the Democratic plantation. Please stop saying this. Every time someone makes this argument, an angel in heaven loses brain cells.
It’s 2024, and Virginia school board members had voted to put the names of Confederate leaders on two public schools.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Republican Governor Tate Reeves declared April to be Confederate Heritage Month.
In Florida, Republicans are trying to punish local officials who remove Confederate monuments.
And here in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has invoked the Confederate theory of succession to justify violating federal law.
After lecturing Black people to move on and stop talking about the legacy of slavery, white Republicans just can’t stop celebrating the racist traitors who lost the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.
That’s one of the many reasons why Republicans are no longer the party of Lincoln.
Republican Abraham Lincoln served as president from 1861 until he was assassinated in 1865. For the next 12 years, Republicans led the fight for Reconstruction. Then it all ended.
The Republican Party itself effectively abandoned Black people with the Compromise of 1877 that allowed Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes to take office in exchange for the removal of federal troops that protected African Americans here in the South.
In the decades that followed, Republican politicians and judges would enable racist Democrats to terrorize Black communities in the South, to drive out Black elected officials, and to impose an oppressive new racial caste system called Jim Crow segregation.
In fact, for most of the 20th century, both parties were openly racist. It took a hundred years after the end of the Civil War for the parties to switch roles.
So when Republicans today claim to be the party of Lincoln, they want you to focus on what their party did way back in the 1860s and 1870s, but to ignore what the same party has done since the 1960s and 1970s.
Some even quote Malcolm X, who rightly condemned both political parties for their racism in the famous 1964 speech called The Ballot or The Bullet.
Malcolm X
I’m not a Republican nor a Democrat.
Keith Boykin:
But history didn’t end in April 1964 when Malcolm X gave that speech. In the years that followed, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson went on to sign the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act in 1968, and to appoint the first Black Supreme Court justice.
But what have Democrats done for Black people lately? Well, in the past few decades, the Democratic Party delivered the first Black president, the first Black vice president, the first Black woman on the Supreme Court, and the first Black party chairman in American history.
Democrat Barack Obama signed a federal hate crimes law in 2009 after a Black man named James Byrd was murdered by three white supremacists in Texas. And the last major civil rights bill, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president, Joe Biden, in 2022.
That’s how far the party has moved from its racist history, and that’s why no Democratic candidate for President has won the white vote since 1964, not Jimmy Carter, not Bill Clinton, not Barack Obama, and not Joe Biden.
At the same time, the Republican Party has moved the other direction, adopting a notorious Southern strategy that evolved from loudly using the N-word to quietly deploying tax cuts to appeal to white racial resentment.
Today’s Republicans love to brag that the Voting Rights Act was passed by a bipartisan majority, but it was a Republican Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
And since that time, Republicans have been blocking every effort to renew the very law they love to take credit for.
How else do we know the party switched roles? Because Republicans love the racist Southern Democrats of yesterday.
50 years after Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party to run for president as a Segregationist, Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott openly embraced him.
Trent Lott
When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.
Keith Boykin
And when Obama tried to remove racist Southern Democrat Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill, it was Donald Trump who reversed him. In fact, two of Donald Trump’s first official acts as president were to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office and to visit Jackson’s Tennessee slave plantation.
Why would a 21st century Republican president show so much love for 19th century racist Democrat?
It’s the same reason why Trump vetoed a national defense bill so he could preserve a Confederate general’s name on ta military base in North Carolina.
Trump:
Because I think that Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, all of these forts that have been named that way for a long time, decades and decades-
Fox News Host:
But the military says they’re for this.
Trump:
Excuse me. Excuse me. I don’t care what the military says.
Keith Boykin:
And why Republicans in 2023 fought to protect a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The party of Abraham Lincoln, who once appealed to the better angels of our nature and fought the Civil War to preserve the American Union, is dead.
The party of Donald Trump, who appeals to the worst demons of our dispositions and seeks to destroy the union, is alive and kicking.
Thank you Keith Boykin for laying it out clearly.
#Democracy