Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 01:27:13 -0800 (PST)
Subject: An article by Jesse Jackson Jr.


The Nation (www.thenation.com)
January 22, 2001

George Bush's Democrats
by JESSE JACKSON JR*.  


 Following Vice President Al Gore's concession,
President-elect Bush announced: "I was not elected to
serve one party, but to serve one nation. The
President of the United States is the President of
every single American, of every race and every
background." It was an appropriate speech delivered
from the Democratic-controlled Texas House chambers.
Referring to the Texas House as "a home to bipartisan
cooperation," Bush added, "Republicans and Democrats
have worked together to do what is right for the
people we represent." 

   
But who are George Bush's bipartisan Democrats? 

Texas State Representative Paul Sadler, a Democrat,
told the New York Times that Bush "didn't invent
bipartisanship in Texas." It "kind of developed over
the years because of the nature of the system." Nature
of the system? What system? Essentially it is the same
"system" around which the rest of the Southern
Democratic Party developed. 

The Southern Democratic Party was the party of
slavery. Conservative Democrats were the Confederates
during the Civil War. Democrats either were, or
cooperated with, the KKK in resisting Reconstruction.
Following Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), conservative
Democrats practiced Jim Crow--separate and unequal.
And after Brown v. Board of Education (1954),
conservative Southern Democrats were the prime
resisters of desegregation. 

After Brown and the civil rights evolution of the
1960s, and the application of Goldwater's 1964 and
Nixon's 1968 "Southern strategy," Southern white males
especially began to leave the national Democratic
Party in significant numbers. Republicans began to
appeal to them with a series of racial themes and code
words: "conservatism" during the civil rights
struggles in 1964, "law and order" after the riots of
1967-68, "antibusing" in 1972, "welfare queen" in
1980, "Willie Horton" in 1988 and "compassionate
conservatism" in 2000. Democrats also played this
game: Carter's "ethnic purity" misstep in 1976 almost
got him into serious trouble with the party's base;
Bill Clinton used "Sister Souljah," and Al Gore
emphasized crime ("blanket America in
blue")--Democratic Southerners all. And all,
Republicans and Democrats alike, are from the same
system. Clinton redefined the Democratic Party away
from the "special interests" of blacks--symbolized by
Jesse L. Jackson Sr.--by politically manipulating a
rapper. Because of Jackson's tireless pursuit of
racial justice, and because he's a strong and highly
visible Democrat, Republicans are now attempting to
define and identify him as the symbol of the
Democratic Party. 

Taking a page from ultraconservative Ronald
Reagan--who often referred favorably to the liberal
FDR--Bush quoted the ideological founder of the
Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson, a
Virginian, was also the author of a Kentucky
resolution and conservative theory of Southern
resistance called "nullification," and his Democratic
partner, James Madison, developed the theory of
"interposition." Both concepts were forms of Southern
resistance--first, resistance to ending slavery, and
later to ending Jim Crow segregation. Jefferson also
provided the ideological foundation for the concept of
"local control"--the stepchild of "states' rights."
Bull Connor, Jim Clark, Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus
and George Wallace were all the products of this
"system" and were Democratic advocates of states'
rights, local control and an antifederal ideology of
less government, lower taxes and a strong military. 

It is this legacy of conservative Southern Democrats
that created the "bipartisan system" that State
Representative Paul Sadler referred to. It is this
legacy of conservative Southern Democrats in Congress
with which President-elect Bush intends to work. But
the President-elect's problem of governing all of the
people cannot be satisfied merely by building bridges
to essentially conservative Southern Blue Dog, Yellow
Dog, New Dog or DLC Dog Democrats. These conservative
dogs already support him. His problem will be in
reaching out and building bridges to liberals and
progressives who feel like they've been treated like
dogs, who represent the dogs who have been left out in
the cold and put in the doghouse by a bipartisan
coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats.
Indeed, this is the bipartisan pack that consistently
bites us. 


 
This conservative bipartisan coalition is generally
for denying a woman's right to choose, supports
charitable choice and violates the Constitution's
mandate of church and state separation by attempting
to put parochial prayers and the Ten Commandments in
public schools. Out of this bipartisan "system" comes
the privatization movement--public vouchers for
private schools, privatizing all or part of Social
Security, privatizing healthcare through medical
savings accounts and much more. 

It is this conservative bipartisan coalition that
allows Ralph Nader to say that we have one corporate
party with two different names. If Democrats go down
this bipartisan path it will only strengthen Nader and
the Greens for 2002 and 2004. The move down that path
has already been aided by Democrats: In 1992 a
conservative Democrat, Bill Clinton, selected an even
more conservative running mate, Al Gore, who in 2000
selected an even more conservative running mate,
Joseph Lieberman. By helping to shift the Democratic
Party and the country further right, a very
conservative George W. Bush could select an
ultraconservative Dick Cheney as his running mate--and
win. 

 The heart and soul of this conservative bipartisan
coalition is the South, though by no means do all
white Southerners regard themselves as part of it.
Most Southern Democratic elected officials would be
Republicans above the Mason-Dixon line, and Republican
Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, for example, could not
be elected south of the Mason-Dixon line in either
party. She would be seen as too liberal, and her views
would be considered traitorous to Southern heritage,
traditions and values. 

 More than half of all African-Americans still live in
the former Confederacy, and nationally they voted 92
percent for Gore. Yet the entire body of Democratic
leadership in the House and Senate are all white men.
While Bush got only 8 percent of the African-American
vote, Democrats have no visible elected
African-American Congressional leaders who compare to
the Republican exceptions of Colin Powell, Condoleezza
Rice or Representative J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. 

This system is what President Lyndon Johnson
understood on August 6, 1965, when he signed the
Voting Rights Act and afterward said privately that
national Democrats had probably lost the South for at
least a quarter-century. He understood the system that
produced Southern politics and the bipartisan white
coalition that drove it. His insight has now come home
to roost big-time in the 2000 election. Bush won the
old Confederacy and the rural states of the West,
which have a similar political philosophy--plus
Indiana, Ohio and New Hampshire. Gore won the old
Union states of the North and Northeast, plus New
Mexico, California, Oregon and Washington, which are
more in harmony with national Democratic policies. 

 
This system of bipartisan cooperation, social and
economic conservatism, and individualistic,
personalistic and pietistic religion is rooted in a
region that imposes the highest number of death
penalties and has the highest crime in the country,
the poorest schools, the worst healthcare and housing,
the greatest environmental degradation and the
greatest poverty--and this conservative Southern
system sustains it and is increasingly leading and
influencing the nation. As State Representative Garnet
Coleman, a Houston Democrat, said, "Even if something
is bipartisan, it still often doesn't solve the
problems of certain groups of people in Texas. They
would be people who don't have health insurance,
working families, the vulnerable in our society." 

The South, and America, need a progressive bipartisan
economic coalition to fight for better jobs and job
training, healthcare, affordable housing and a good
educational system--for all Americans. However, that
is not the agenda of Bush and his Democrats.





*Congressman Jesse L. Jackson Jr. represents
Illinois's 2nd District. He and Frank E. Watkins are
co-authors of A More Perfect Union (Welcome Rain), to
be published in mid-2001. 



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