Abrams and Gillum: A Triumph for Race Relations in the Deep South
I read this headline in The Washington Post: "Election results in Florida and Georgia prompt soul-searching for African Americans".
Stacey Abrams barely lost the race for governor in Georgia. She is contesting the results. Andrew Gillum barely lost the race for governor in Florida. He conceded. But this race may also go to a recount.
Why should this lead to soul-searching by blacks in Georgia and Florida?
Let me tell you why they lost. They are liberal Democrats. Republicans organized well this year to defeat them.
Incumbent Florida Senator Bill Nelson (D) lost to Rick Scott. He is also contesting. He will demand a recount if the margin is not larger than 0.5%. By law, he is entitled to a recount. The fact that he ever won is remarkable.
The country is divided politically as never before in American history. The political division leading up to the Civil War was regional. Today's division is intra-state. Think of the Arizona Senate race, which is not yet decided. Neither is Mississippi's. Think of Nevada and Montana, where the races were close.
Abrams and Gillum won their nominations in Democratic Party primaries. More than half of Democrats thought they had a good shot at winning. This assessment was correct. Most of these Democrat voters were white.
American voters today are divided about rhetoric. The basic policies that both parties pursue are bipartisan. As I never stop saying, if you look at the federal budget, year-to-year, you see almost no change. Half of the budget goes to Social Security and Medicare. About 15% of the budget goes to the Pentagon. These days, almost 7.5% of the budget goes to payment on the debt. These are fixed expenses. They only go up. They are never cut. If anybody attempted to cut them in Congress, he would lose the next election. Furthermore, almost all federal agencies are guaranteed of continual funding. Nobody's going to shut down the Library of Congress. There are no congressmen calling for a shut down of the federal highway system. There are no calls for cutting any of the departments that have cabinet positions. The spending only goes up. So, all the rhetoric has to do with nickel and dime alterations of the budget. The Democrats want a little more spending than some of the Republicans, but the Republicans pretend that they want to hold the line on federal spending. It is all nonsense. The deficit today is over $1 trillion a year, and it is clearly a bipartisan deficit.
It's all about rhetoric. It's not about race. It's all about vague campaign promises. Abrams had hers; Gillum had his. The low-visibility Republicans who ran against them had theirs. (Note: I never saw a Kemp TV ad. I saw lots of Abrams' ads.) The public responds to 30-second TV ads. There aren't any specifics in these ads. Specifics drive away specific voters. It is safer to use vague generalities: feel-good statements.
THE SOLID SOUTH
In the fall of 1950, my family moved to Augusta, Georgia. My father was in training at what was then called Camp Gordon. He was trying to get back into the military. The Korean War was escalating.
We lived in a small rented apartment on the base. I then had my first experience with school busing. I had to get on the bus, and the bus traveled across town to our school. I hated it. I did whatever I could to cut school. I had always walked to my school before, which was just a few blocks away. I was content with that. I hated the busing. I sensed that it was uprooting me. I was in the fourth grade.
It was years later that my mother explained what was going on. The school we were being transported to was in a neighborhood whose racial composition was shifting from white to black. The whites in the neighborhood wanted to send their kids to a local elementary school. I cannot blame them. So, in an era of segregated schools, they had to find ways to get more white children into that school. The obvious target was Camp Gordon. There were families from all over the United States stationed at Camp Gordon. They were mostly white.
Over two decades before the racial busing in the Northeast, especially Boston, which brought white parents out in droves to protest school busses of blacks from across town, it was standard policy in Augusta, Georgia. It was done for the same reason: race. In Boston and the Northeast, it was to get black students into white schools. In Augusta, it was to get white children into white schools in order to keep the schools white.
In 1963, Bull Connor used fire hoses and German shepherds against black teenagers dressed in white shirts suitable for church. That was in Birmingham. Those days are gone. They are not coming back.
If today's black voters in Georgia and Florida are upset with the results, other than by the fact that Democrats lost their elections, they don't understand the changes that have taken place in the South since 1963. They have really short memories. It is not a good idea to get involved in politics if you have a short memory. You have to be able to compare then with now. You have to be able to assess whether you're making progress or not. When I say progress, I mean political progress.
Think of Republicans in the South prior to the voting rights act of 1964. Theirs was a life of futility. There was no way that their candidates were going to win. There was no more likelihood that a Republican was going to win than a black Democrat was going to win. The reason that Republicans couldn't win is the Democrats had memories that were too long. They should have broken with Roosevelt in 1936. They didn't. But the Dixiecrats were re-elected, and they got seniority positions on the major committees in Congress. They could block legislation. They blocked it until one of their own became president as a result of Kennedy's assassination. That was when the solid South remained the solid South. It had been solidly Democrat; it became solidly Republican. Lyndon Johnson knew this would happen, and he was right. He knew what effect the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act would have.
The solid South is no longer solid.
2018 IN HISTORY
I think 2018 will go down in history, at least as a footnote. This was the year that the Democrats nominated Blacks for governorships in Georgia and Florida. I can think of nothing that better represents the change that has taken place since the election of Obama in 2008. That was a symbolic victory for blacks, and it changed the minds of white Democrats in the South. They wanted to beat McCain; then they wanted to beat Romney. The only way they could beat those Republicans was by voting for a black Democrat. So, they did. That changed their voting behavior in-state.
Voting is mostly symbolic. It doesn't have to do much with substantive issues. Those issues are bipartisan. They don't change much. But rhetoric changes, and a big part of rhetoric is symbolism. Skin color has been politically symbolic. Obama's victory therefore had symbolic meaning. It made possible the campaigns of Abrams and Gillum.
The election of Sam Hayakawa to the U.S. Senate in 1976 was not heralded as a big change at the time. But it was astounding historically. In California, it was illegal in 1913 for Japanese immigrants to own land. There was a specific law passed in the state that mandated this restriction. Wikipedia reports:
It passed thirty-five to two in the Senate and seventy-two to three in the Assembly and was co-written by attorney Francis J. Heney and California state attorney general Ulysses S. Webb at the behest of Governor Hiram Johnson.
Johnson was a co-founder of the Progressive Party in 1912, and he was the Vice Presidential candidate with Teddy Roosevelt that year.
The law was reaffirmed in 1923. It was only in 1948 that the California state Supreme Court invalidated it as unconstitutional.
Today, Asians fill the state university system in California. They consistently are the highest-scoring students taking the SAT and ACT exams. There is no more discrimination against them. (At Harvard, there is plenty of discrimination against them. That's why Harvard is being sued.)
Things change. Sometimes, they change for the better.
CONCLUSION
I see the nominations of Abrams and Gillum as positive. I see their defeats electorally as positive. Their nominations were positive in terms of race relations. Their defeats electorally were positive in terms of rhetoric.
When black ghettos start electing black Republican conservatives, things will be even more positive.