Steinberg should end “racist” name-calling and instead debate CRT
/By Rubashov
Once again, Alan Steinberg proves just how selective and fickle memory can be. He appears to forget just how the gubernatorial election of 1981 was won. A scandal repeated in 1993, after Whitman consultant Ed Rollins bragged about spending $500,000 in “street money” to suppress black voter turnout.
If he needs reminding, perhaps Steinberg should place a call to Ray Lesniak, the Democratic Party’s State Chairman in 1993, the man who called for a U.S. Justice Department investigation into Whitman’s victory. If memory serves, we recall Steinberg playing a role in that victory – one for which he was rewarded with a fat patronage job. For someone intent on discovering racism everywhere he casts his eye, perhaps he should look in the mirror?
Steinberg’s memory is so bad that it appears impervious to basic search engines. He writes:
“The reason for the emergence of this GOP racist message is explained in the landmark book, How Democracies Die, by Harvard political science professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, enacted through the efforts of a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, signaled that the Democrats constituted the party of civil rights change, while the Republican Party was the constituency for voters wishing to maintain the racial status quo. This began the political ideological polarization of America, with African-American and white civil rights supporters flocking to the Democratic Party, while white supporters of the racist status quo, largely Southerners, enlisted in the GOP.”
Wow, what a dickhead.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 (S. 1564) was introduced by both party leaders of the U.S. Senate – Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield for the Democrats, and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen for the Republicans. On May 26, 1965, the Senate passed the bill by a 77–19 vote (Democrats 47–16, Republicans 30–2). The House of Representatives approved this conference report version of the bill on August 3, by a 328–74 vote (Democrats 217–54, Republicans 111–20), and the Senate passed it on August 4 by a 79–18 vote (Democrats 49–17, Republicans 30–1). On August 6, President Johnson signed the Act into law.
Only a dickhead like Alan Steinberg could read some racist “signal” in such a bi-partisan undertaking.
The great W.E.B. Du Bois understood the difference between racialists (like Steinberg) and racists. The old racialist South – which often boiled over into absolute overt racism – was built on the bitterness and spite that followed the Civil War. Its political institution was the Democratic Party. The hated Republicans – of whatever skin color – were universally referred to as “black Republicans”. Alan doesn’t know. He wasn’t there. (In fact, a contributor to this website was on the receiving end of that epithet and was actually called a “black Republican”.)
As the memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction faded, so too did the Democratic Party’s hold on Southern voters. Southern Democrats started voting for populist “conservative” Republicans long before Richard Nixon. In 1928, for example, Herbert Hoover won Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Florida.
On the other hand, Democrats like George Corley Wallace kept getting elected in Alabama well into the 1980s. When they left the stage, they took the old politics of overt racialism with them. It was Wallace, now a born-again Christian, who said in 1982: “Those days are over, and they ought to be over.” But for race-hustlers like Alan Steinberg they’re never over.
People like Alan Steinberg act as if the population of the South remained constant. In fact, there were huge migrations from the South and to the South. It was these migrations that ended the hegemony of the racialist Democratic Party in the South and allowed a more garden-variety conservative Republicanism (hawkish, pro-business, anti-tax & spend) to establish itself.
Take Huntsville, Alabama. It was just one city dramatically changed in the 1960s by the work-migration to it (in this case, by thousands of engineers and scientists because of NASA and the space program). Huntsville’s population jumped from 16,437 in 1950 to 139,282 in 1970. Steinberg would have us believe they were all institutional racists who migrated to Huntsville to be racist together. Like we said, what a dickhead!
No “Southern Strategy” could be pertinent for more than an election cycle. In fact, the strategy was particular to the 1968 presidential election, in which Nixon faced TWO Democrats – Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Governor George Wallace). Between them, they split the South. Humphrey won Texas. Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Nixon took Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Nixon won the election with 43% of the vote.
In 1952, the year Richard Nixon was elected Vice President, Texas had 22 members of Congress. Today, it has 37. Georgia had 10. It now has 14. Florida had 8. It now has 28. South Carolina had 6. It now has 7. Did the pre-existing populations have massive numbers of children (as Steinberg seems to think)… or did people move there from someplace else? Here’s a hint: In 1952, New York had 43 congressmen, Pennsylvania had 30, New Jersey had 14. Today those numbers are 26, 17, and 12.
Steinberg thuggishly attempts to shutdown debate about a subject that voters have democratically demanded a voice in discussing – Critical Race Theory or CRT. Steinberg makes the ludicrous claim that CRT hasn’t made its way down the educational chain and insists that it is something only discussed in law schools. In fact, CRT is no different than any other “popular” theory that starts out in academia and then makes its way into everyday life. From “Manifest Destiny” to Freud this has been the way and CRT is no different. A watered-down version of it is now being force-fed to children in classrooms across America. Parents got wind of it courtesy of pandemic-related school lockdowns and accompanying distance-learning. They are not going to forget it just because some handjob insists that they do.
We have a better suggestion. Perhaps Alan Steinberg would wish to debate his position on CRT in venues around New Jersey? We would help facilitate this. He simply needs to let us know.
Alan Steinberg's hero
and
a MODEL for all Republicans
(so says Steinberg)
Did New Jersey Governor Whitman, who stopped and frisked a 17-year-old for a photo op, ruin his life?
