How can we peel away Whites who are oppressed by Republicans from the Republican Party? Surprise! It's already happening by the millions each year.
In Zen Buddhism we call the discovery of compassion for oneself and others in the face of total denial from society either kensho (seeing your reality) or satori (sudden remembering). Christians call it conversion, and atheists might call it coming to your senses. In each of the individual cases cited below, the writer or the actual person has told us in some detail of the thought process and the human interactions that led these characters and people into delusion and then out again. In the case of mass polling, the question is not generally asked, but we do have some clues.
This Diary began as a comment to The Republicans' Southern strategy still works. Here's how liberals can counter it.
That's where this all started, when Barry Goldwater hired Strom Thurmond's campaign strategist, Harry Dent, Sr., for his 1964 campaign of vicious hatred against LBJ and Blacks, and so on through Nixon-Ford-Reagan-Bush-Bush, and through strategists Kevin Phillips, Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove, and the growing misogyny, bigotry, Mammonism, warmongering, and !!!More Guns More!!! that we have seen from them ever since.
But now there is nobody left whom the Tea Parties will allow them to recruit, and they continue to lose Angry Old White Guys in the normal manner without replacing them all.
For fifty years, the Southern Strategy and its extensions, including the Religious Right and the Reagan Democrats, were effective in riling up a base that could sometimes gain majorities in Congress and could sometimes elect Presidents. But now it is driving children away from the base in droves, while the RINOS are cast into the outer darkness and the remaining Faithful Remnant becomes ever purer, and thus louder and nastier, in its views and policies. So loud and so nasty that the Party routinely loses elections it should win, because even faithful Republicans can't hold their noses and vote for the crazies.
Let's look at how some people have changed their minds on such issues in the last two centuries.
In fiction
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, "a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision. And the conscience suffers defeat!"
Well, I will go to Hell, then.
resolving to break the laws of both God and Man by helping his friend Jim escape from slavery.
Dingaka, directed by Jamie Uys, of The Gods Must Be Crazy fame, and starring Ken Gampu
I will do right, though the Gods slay me.
resolving to kill the lying and hypocritical tribal religious leader who murdered his daughter, even if the murderer does have the power of the Gods on his side.
In the Heat of the Night, directed by Norman Jewison, and starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger
Hey! You"re just like us!
realizing that an honest Black cop wants the collar in a murder case just the same as an honest White cop does, no matter who it turns out to be.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, starring Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn
Well, I'll be a son of a bitch.
recognizing that he is too a racist for all that he denied it and blamed society. Then he has to get right with himself, his daughter, her fiancé, and everybody, except the frank racist whom he simply throws out of the house.
To Kill a Mockingbird and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe do not involve such conversions, but they let us see the dynamics of White anti-racists and straight anti-bigots in the Deep South even at the height of Klan nastiness, which both also put on full display.
In real life
I don't have to explain Schindler's List to you, do I? Let's just say a rather shady and unpleasant person joins the Righteous among the Nations, but still doesn't understand how to run a legitimate business afterwards.
Rev. John Newton, Anglican priest, author of the hymn Amazing Grace, and mainstay of the anti-slavery movement in the British Empire, but previously a slave ship captain.
John Dean, first of Watergate infamy, then the chief witness against Richard Nixon until the tapes came out. Dean later wrote Worse than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience.
Studs Terkel's favorite interview of his whole life was with C. P. Ellis, once a Klansman and later an official with a mostly Black labor union.
Annals of Race and Redemption
"Why I Quit the Klan”—An Interview with C. P. Ellis
They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change. That's not necessarily true. Since I changed, I've set down and listened to tapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes cause I know what he's sayin now. I know what's happenin'.
—C.P. Ellis
"A conscience awakened is the most beautiful thing in the world." —Brazilian Bishop Dom Helder Camara
C.P. Ellis was born in 1927 and was 53-years-old at the time of this interview with Studs Terkel. For Terkel, America's foremost oral historian, this remains the most memorable and moving of all the interviews he's done in a career spanning more than seven decades, for C.P. Ellis had once been the exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, N.C. During the interview, Terkel learned that Ellis had been born extremely poor in Durham, North Carolina; had struggled all his life to feed his family; had felt shut out of American society and had joined the Klan to feel like somebody. But later he got involved in a local school issue and reluctantly, gradually, began to work on a committee with a black activist named Ann Atwater, whom he despised at the time. Eventually, after many small epiphanies, he realized that they shared a common concern for their children, common goals as human beings. More surprising still, Ellis became a union organizer for a janitor's union—a long way from his personal philosophical roots. The Ellis-Atwater story is best documented in The Best of Enemies, a book by Osha Gray Davidson that tells of the unlikely friendship that developed between Ann and C.P. Ellis, when they first met in the 1960's. Apparently, their commonalities as oppressed human beings proved far stronger than the racial hatred that initially divided them.
Abraham Lincoln was raised in racism, but evolved out of it step by step over many years. Frederick Douglass helped him get from not freeing any slaves at the beginning of the Civil War, to freeing the slaves and sending them back to Africa, and eventually all the way to letting former slaves be full citizens.
In Quantity
There are other famous examples. But those are one-at-a-timers, even though Lincoln's evolution was so consequential, coming at the head of a national movement. What counts much more today is the millions of mostly young people who fall away from the Right every year, even if it comes at the cost of being cast out from their communities and shunned by their families.
We have a number of sources of polling on these matters of which I find Pew Research and Pew Forum on Religion & Society the most useful. I can also recommend the Barna Group, which polls Evangelicals. For example, Barna has found that 38% of young Evangelicals fact-check sermons on their smart phones. On average, the Right has been losing about 1% of its adherents annually, more on some issues such as Marriage Equality, fewer on some others, notably abortion.
That should mean that in each election cycle going forward, one or two states, possibly even more, should evolve from lean Red to Tossup or Swing, and others from Swing to Lean Blue. Of the swing states in recent elections, Romney won only one, North Carolina. A shift of only a few more states will leave Republicans with no path to electing a President at all. A shift of a few percent of the population will allow Democrats to take the House again, and to undo the gerrymanders, the voter suppression measures, and the filibuster, and then to take on all of the other issues where there is a Progressive majority among the population but not yet in government.
Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton left the Southern Baptist Convention when it gave up on racism, but doubled down on misogyny, bigotry, and science denial, helping to form the New Baptist Covenant
to address poverty, the environment and global conflicts
Their 20 million members have some evolving to do on LGBT rights, but they are engaging the question, unlike the SBC. NBC just doesn't get any press for being fairly reasonable and more or less Christian. "Dog decides not to bite man" is totally not a headline.
Moral Monday organizers in North Carolina are being invited into some White communities that are realizing that Republicans consider them the enemy, too.
What’s Next for the Moral Monday Movement?
Barber traveled to a Moral Monday event four hours west of Raleigh in Mitchell County, deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Tennessee border, which voted 75 percent for Mitt Romney and is 97 percent white. In 1923, after a black man allegedly raped a white woman, every black person in Mitchell County was put on a train and not allowed to return. Despite the county’s history and Republicanism, every week Moral Monday activists had been rallying at the Food Lion parking lot and riding buses to Raleigh to join the protests. Barber spoke to the faithful at the packed Trinity Episcopal Church in the tiny town of Spruce Pine. “It is something to behold for the president of the NAACP to be here in Mitchell County,” he said to cheers. (The next day, a Moral Monday rally in Asheville drew 10,000.)
Integrating the US military starting in 1948 resulted in one of the most powerful forces for further progress by putting huge numbers of Blacks and Whites in close quarters on increasingly the same footing, at the same time that it provoked the Dixiecrat backlash and other retrograde movements.
The US union movement in the 19th century was seriously racist, refusing to allow Blacks to join unions at all in the beginning. Racism among Reagan Democrat blue-collar workers was at the heart of the Reagan Revolution in 1980. But unions have gradually become more and more diverse in ethnicity, in gender, and in other ways. That makes them another powerful force that Republicans are naturally taking every opportunity to demonize and undercut.
Once you start looking for it, you can find bits and pieces of it everywhere, including some you can join in with, to welcome our new allies, and help them evolve on the rest of the issues.