I’ve heard it said from time to time on various blogs, that the republicans are re-fighting the battles of the 1960s.  The sense is that they’ve never gotten over their resentment toward all the dirty hippies who fought against the war and got Nixon impeached.  But the upheaval in American politics back in the 1960s and early 70s wasn’t about the Vietnam war and it wasn’t about the hippies.  And we’re about to see if America has grown enough in the time since, to start putting that past behind us and heal the wounds.

Over at Pam’s House Blend, Pam writes about Michaelangelo Signorile’s bad day on the radio yesterday, fielding callers who were adamant that they would rather vote for McCain the Obama…

This whole call needs to be transcribed and circulated because we seriously need to have a discussion about the underlying issues here that are hitting on the third rail. Mike challenges the caller to explain these positions, given the huge political gulf between McCain and Obama on nearly every issue. The caller ends up admitting that his decision to vote for McCain is not based on logic.

Caller: My arguments aren’t logical…this is what my gut is telling me; I don’t consider myself a racist or bigoted…there’s just something about the man I don’t like and I’m not going to vote for him."

Mike: It’s funny that you say your gut is telling you this and then you go on to say that you’re not a racist, funny how that works, right? Because maybe your gut is telling you something that you’re not wanting to admit…but listen, but you should be voting based on logic, based on rationality. What Republicans want is for you to vote on emotion. And you are a perfect example of how they get votes from people who are voting against their own self interest.

Just so.  And it started with Nixon and the so-called "southern strategy".  There are liberals and democrats who blame the Reagan years for the undoing of the vibrant middle and working class economy we had in America since the New Deal.  I can remember a time when your basic retail and service workers made a living wage.  They had affordable health care and they had pensions to retire on.  No more.  And it was Nixon and his gang who put the machinery in motion to undo all that.  Goldwater ran on his principals, and as conservative as his view of government was, he was a principled man and he campaigned straightforwardly.  Nixon always played from the gutter while posing as a respectable cloth coat republican.  He was a man of the people, standing up for the silent majority, surrounding himself with gutter crawling thugs like himself.  And the weak point where they found they could drive a wedge right through Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition wasn’t the war, it wasn’t religion and it wasn’t anger toward all the dirty hippies…

I’m pinching this from Brad DeLong…

Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now:

The Meaning of Box 722 | OurFuture.org: art of the narrative. They’d never really been examined in-depth before, but by my reckoning they were the crucial hinge that formed the ideological alignment we live in now. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson—and, apparently, liberalism—achieved such a gigantic landslide victory that it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if they ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again. Two years later, most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ’s coattails—the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more—was swept out on a tide of popular reaction. That reaction, I hope I demonstrate effectively in NIXONLAND, rested on two pillars: terror at the wave of urban rioting that began in the Watts district of Los Angeles; and terror at the prospect of the 1966 civil rights bill passing, which, by imposing an ironclad federal ban on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing—known as "open housing"—would be the first legislation to impact the entire nation equally, not just the South. (What that reaction most decidedly did not rest on: fear and loathing of "hippies," which were unknown, except in California, to most of the nation until 1967; or anti-war activists, which were not associated with either party, because Republicans and Democrats had about an equal number of hawks and doves in 1966.)

When I learned that the papers of Senator Paul Douglas were at the Chicago Historical Society (as it was known then; now it’s cursed with the decidedly more prosaic name the Chicago History Museum), I decided to make Douglas’s 1966 loss to Republican Charles Percy a key case study for my hypothesis. Douglas was a popular liberal lion first elected in 1948 and a civil rights champion, whose wife Emily Taft Douglas (a one-term congresswoman herself) had strode proudly across Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 arm in arm with Martin Luther King. He was also, as an economist, one of the architects of many of the New Deal ideas and programs that created the world’s first mass middle class.

In the summer of 1966, as debate over open housing raged in Congress, King marched not in Alabama but in Chicago, to implore the city to enforce its own open housing ordinance, passed in 1963—which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north. As I put it in NIXONLAND (drawing on this classic study):

You could draw a map of the boundary within which the city’s seven hundred thousand Negroes were allowed to live by marking an X wherever a white mob attacked a Negro. Move beyond it, and a family had to face down a mob of one thousand, five thousand, or even (in the Englewood riot of 1949, when the presence of blacks at a union meeting sparked a rumor the house was to be "sold to niggers") ten thousand bloody-minded whites. In the late 1940s, when the postwar housing shortage was at its peak, you could find ten black families living in a basement, sharing a single stove but not a single flush toilet, in "apartments" subdivided by cardboard. One racial bombing or arson happened every three weeks…. It neighborhoods where they were allowed to "buy" houses, they couldn’t actually buy them at all: banks would not write them mortgages, so unscrupulous businessmen sold them contracts that gave them no equity or title to the property, from whcih they could be evicted the first time they were late with a payment.

And in 1966, a teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death. That was what Martin Luther King came to fight in Chicago.

At the Chicago History Museum, the Douglas collection covers seven hundred "linear feet"…. I stumbled upon Box 722, which contained all the letters Senator Paul Douglas received about open housing and Martin Luther King’s presence in Chicago….

Republican Charles Percy had gone into the race a civil rights liberal: "Chuck, do you have to talk so much about open housing?" one suburban Republican official complained to him. But by October, following Jerry Ford’s talking points to the letter, he went on ABC’s "Face the Nation" and said that while he still supported the "principle" of open housing, he disagreed with Senator Douglas on one thing: including "single-family dwelling" would be "an unpassable and unenforceable" attack on property rights. "Right now, we aren’t ready to force people to accept those they don’t want as neighbors," he said in tones of rue.

Long story short: Douglas soldiered on, imploring his constituents to remember the favors they had received from the Democratic Party—entree, for one thing, into the world’s first mass middle class of factory workers. To no avail. Percy won in an upset. Pundits said it was because Percy’s daughter had just been brutally murdered; it was a sympathy vote. But if people voted for Percy because he was a grieving father, the ratio of the sympathetic to the callous was suspiciously high in the Bungalow Belt neighborhoods where Martin Luther King had marched. A ward analysis demonstrated that in Chicago neighborhoods threatened by racial turnover, new Percy voters were enough to account for Douglas’s 80 percent decline in the city since 1960. Pundits also pointed to people’s unwillingness to vote for such an old man. But in the backlash wards younger Democrats declined almost as significantly.

No, it was voters like this, from 4315 W. Crystal:

A few years ago I had written you a letter stating how I and my family would welcome the opportunityy to vote fyou in to the highest office in the land–The Presidency. Since that time however your support of the open occupancy bill has caused me to change my support of your candidacy for senator of Illinois, and believe me sir there are many more in my category who are changing in their support of you.

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn’t need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn’t need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their social security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

Now a black man from the city King visited in 1966 and called more hateful than Mississippi is running for president, fighting for all those things that made the midcentury American middle class the glory of world civilization, but which that middle class squandered out of the small-mindedness of backlash.

This post is for Chicago. This post is for America. This post is for our future. This post is for our history—that we may, this November, redeem it. This post is for a man who, had he walked down the wrong street in his own city 42 years ago, might well have been beaten to death.

Emphasis mine.  At a time when the nation needed healing from racial strife, Nixon and the republicans embarked on a deliberate campaign to inflame those wounds because they figured that would finally break up the New Deal coalition and restore the prerogatives of the rich and powerful.  Nixon paved the way for Reagan, who began his successful campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been kidnapped and murdered for helping black citizens register to vote, by making a speech on state’s rights.  Reagan knew exactly what he was doing then, was following the playbook laid down by Nixon and his henchmen a decade before, of inciting race hatred in poor and working class whites, so they would vote for men who would later line their pockets with the money from their pension plans.  Everything since then has been a variation on that theme set by Nixon.  Find out what scares middle class and working class whites and wave it in their faces so enough of them won’t vote democrat.  And never mind the damage it does to America.  The more the people hate each other, the better that is for us.

And now the factories are closed, the unions either dissolved or paper shells of their former selves.  The pensions are gone and your 401K is monopoly money for Wall Street to play the stock market with.  Lincoln said you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but not all the people all the time.  But race is the gift that keeps on giving in this country.  Look at the gay callers to the Signorile show saying they’d rather vote for an anti-gay republican then Obama.  It isn’t all about bitterness in the Hillary camp.  I don’t think it’s even mostly that.  When we saw the statistics saying more Obama voters would vote for Hillary then Hillary voters would vote for Obama, that wasn’t about her base being cheap and vengeful.  Nobody likes it when their candidate looses, especially if they’ve invested a lot of their dreams for the future in that candidate.  Obama’s supporters would have been just as disillusioned if he lost.  But if Obama was white you wouldn’t have seen that difference.

I have had anti-gay prejudice shoved in my face often enough to know that most people who act that way don’t regard themselves as being prejudiced.  I don’t have anything against gay people…I just don’t want them teaching my kids…   I don’t have anything against gay people…I just feel marriage should be between a man and a woman.  I don’t have anything against gay people…so long as they don’t flaunt it…  Prejudice doesn’t always burn crosses.  Sometimes it burns bridges.  Divide the country, said Pat Buchanan to Nixon, and we’ll have the bigger piece.  For decades now, the republicans have been pushing our buttons, making us afraid of each other, waving scarecrows in our faces to keep the middle and working class divided and weak.  So they could raid our pensions.  So they could raid our standard of living.  So they could get us to accept living in a nation where government can conduct its business in secret, and tap your phones and your mail without a warrant.  Iraq.  Katrina.  The Patriot Act.  Torture.  Guantanamo Bay.  Look closely at the face of the scarecrow they are waving at you.  It is yours.