It went something like this. The salient fact of American politics is there are 60 million voters who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook pigeons on an old curtain rod if someone would only guarantee that the black, Hispanic, gay, immigrant, librul, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t have a curtain rod or a pigeon to put on it.
That about sums it up.
Your Honor, I rest my case.
Please share widely!
Taken in the context and broad sweep of American history and its original sins: slavery, Jim Crow, and the ongoing ‘standing on the neck’ of black and brown people in the United States of America, I challenge anyone on this site to say that Fred is wrong, and that the reason for Trump’s election is some poppycock about Hillary or the minimum wage or the latest policy hobby horse.
Face it squarely in the eye, folks. The issue is racism.
Racism explains our failure to develop modern-state supports for the poor and working class such as exist in Europe (‘God forbid my tax dollars go to those lazy blacks’ – never mind that African slaves and their descendants actually built this country INCLUDING IN EARLY NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK.)
Racism explains the terrible coincidence of the election of America’s first black president with IMMEDIATE election of an out and out racist president as next in line.
Racism explains Americans’ willingness, as Fred so aptly illustrates, adopting LBJ’s famous quote, to suffer themselves and believe whatever they are told by the right wing, as long as those arrogant, pointy-headed liberals and those blacks, uppity women, and the rest of them are put back in their place.
Confronting racism head on as we are doing in the wake of George Floyd’s hideous murder is the key to all of the admirable and detailed policy goals so ably and regularly expounded upon here, from the environment, to education, to a foreign policy based on democracy and human rights.
Racism is the key to all of it.
Thank you Fred Rich LaRiccia.
The actual quote
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Your title implied as least to me, that LBJ made a racist remark. He did make an observation of the American public and a strategy that politicians in either party sometimes lower themselves to.
Obama made a mistake when he said “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them ” or when Hillary made the unforced error in looking down on Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables”.
Can an American politician win an national election by focusing only on common ground and not divisiveness? Maybe.
LBJ was that rare breed — a Southern liberal.
Molly Ivins summed it up this way : “I believe all Southern liberals come from the same starting point — race. Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything.”
Interesting remark by Ms Ivins. For me, as a former self described conservative, once I figured out they were lying about WMDs in Iraq, I started to question everything,
Honestly Trump would have Hoover levels of support at this point if we were not an electorate polarized along racial and gender lines. I really thought the forgotten white blue collar man was the ticket to Trumps upset in the Midwest, and it looks like those states are coming back to Biden with a vengeance. Yet those same voters did not come back to Bernie in the 2020 primary, confirming they voted against a woman instead of for a socialist.
Similar I’m convinced that the 40% or so ride or die Trumpers either actively hate minorities, deeply deny the pervasive racism in this country, or just are entirely apathetic to it and want their tax cuts. At the end of the day, it amounts to the same thing. I think those Goldilocks Obama-Trump voters have largely come home to Biden, who’s moderate, white, and male. The rest of them are truly deplorable, especially after this president condemned 150,000 Americans to die and has become even more overtly racist since George Floyd’s murder.
It appears that we’ve come to largely the same retrospective understanding of the 2016 election results.
My bottom line is that America was NOT ready for its first Black president.