On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan kicked off his successful presidential campaign with a speech at the Neshoba County Fair, 7 miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town associated with the murders of the Civil Rights activists Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner in 1964.
“I believe in state’s rights.” Reagan declared in his speech. Picking up the pieces of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” holding an olive branch to southern White Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act that LBJ, a southern White Democrat himself, had signed into law.
With LBJ’s stroke of a pen, Democrats had turned their backs on the American racial caste system that Democrats themselves had a huge hand in creating and maintaining. Lincoln was a Republican after all.
Now, Democrats were offering atonement. They intended to turn that sorry page as a party. They had repented. They were embracing, however tentatively and incompletely, a new future. A new hope. It was a seed they hoped would take root.
The Civil Rights Act was their vision and hope for that future, as imperfect and aspirational as it was. And it created an opening, that conservative Republicans were only too happy to exploit, (though they didn’t have to).
Which Reagan demonstrated at the Neshoba County Fair on August 3,1980, when he broadened the definition of Conservative to implicitly include the American racial caste system that gave the country slavery, a civil war, and Jim Crow.
Reagan was once again renewing Nixon’s offer of a Republican home for disenfranchised southern White Democrats (Dixiecrats) and their political goals and interests.
Instead of joining the Democrats’ aspirational journey, Republicans decided to scavenge the inevitable fallout such a transformational moment creates.
Republicans swooped in and took delivery on the Southern states and now disenfranchised Dixiecrats. All with a wink and a nod.
“Mi casa, su casa.” The Southern Strategy.
Reagan ushered in a conservative era by including the racial caste system as one of the things conservatives wanted to conserve. Which was an implicit “yes” to White privilege and White supremacy, played on a dog whistle for most of the past 40 years or more.
White grievance was the conservative Republican gas pedal. When Republicans wanted to build speed and momentum to get themselves elected, they pressed the “white grievance” pedal to the metal.
“Welfare queens” (Reagan), led to “Willie Horton” (H.W. Bush) and brought us to “Black Lives Matter” today.
Reagan’s Conservative Revolution dominated American politics for the past 40 years, and kept a racial caste system alive on life support. A caste system that should have been allowed to die a natural death.
Here’s the thing…it’s dying anyway. Republicans borrowed against the future of us all to hold power in the present.
It was a deal with the Devil. The patient is dying, power is slipping through their fingers, and the loan is due and payable in full.
The only place Reagan’s Conservative Revolution could bring us was Donald Trump. It took more than 40 years. But the outcome was never in doubt.
And the only place Donald Trump could take us was what we witnessed on January 6th. The final stop on this sad, pitiful journey. Trump’s mob taking over the Capitol.
The “Blue Lives Matter” crowd, in a blind rage beating a fallen police officer with a flagpole that still had the American flag attached.
The present rendering its condemnation and exposing the moment in unmistakable metaphor. No one could miss the meaning.
The Republican Party is left without a soul. There is no surprise in that. It’s the way all deals with the Devil end.
Now, we gather to bury Republicans instead of America’s racial caste system. And the lesson moving forward is clear. If we want to see it. Or, as Amanda Gorman said, “if we want to be it.”
Because there is no functioning Republican Party. It is dead from the inside. Today’s Republicans are little more than the flies that gather around the body. The longer the body lays there, the more flies there are. All looking for a quick meal. A place to lay their eggs… MAGA
Yes, the metaphorical narrative of the present is unsparing and unflinching in its brutal honesty.
But the Republican future is not America’s future. That headstone says REPUBLICAN. Look closely.
For better or worse, the aspirations that founded the American experiment are solely in the hands of Democrats today.
Yes, I know. Scary. We all need to take a breath, cross our fingers and roll up our sleeves!
Democrats now will need to be clear-eyed and relentless in their pursuit of a “Common Good,” and learn to distinguish “justice” from their own political advantages and interests.
I have to say, they are off to a pretty good start so far. But there is a long way to go.
Democrats need to be willing to see the flaws in their own narrative, which was the life support that kept Reagan’s Republican Conservative Revolution alive for so long.
Voodoo economics got Reagan and Republicans farther than they had any right to expect. But we are about to step across a new threshold. Every ending is the beginning of something else.
Today, we are all assembled at the graveside for the final committal. The Republican casket is waiting to be lowered to its final resting place.
As a pastor, this is a place I’ve stood many times with grieving families. I’ve done more funerals than I can remember. They all play out the same, follow the same themes and sound the same notes.
Republicans are in denial. They know they can’t remain where they are, and they can’t bear to leave.
They are the widow in her folding chair weeping into her hankie with a blanket over her knees.
They are the children peering out at an irrevocable future through hard tears across rows and rows of headstones on a sunny, clear morning.
What they don’t know right now is that everything will be OK.
Different? Yes. Most definitely.
There will be growth and heartache. Discovery of new strengths and inner resources. Some will be welcome, and some will be hard to accept.
But, life will continue. Whether they want it to or not. There is grace in that, as much as we are loath to admit it.
The rest of us now need fill in the grave and pursue Donald Trump and hold him criminally accountable for what he’s done. What he continues to do.
There can be no pass on that any more than you can leave the casket suspended over the open grave. Even though it may be too much to ask the family to throw in the first handful of dirt.
Now, it’s time for us to help the widow to her feet, get her to the car and back to the restaurant for coffee and potato salad and begin to figure out what the next family Christmas is going to look like.
All we know right now is that Democrats will be the hosts this year. And there will be more people there than last year. New people.
Oh yes, and there will be angels and singing and a star to lead the way.
Charles Oberkehr 