The Party of Trump is the Party of Bush is the Party of Bigotry

By Ron Stubblefield

Former RNC chair Ed Gillespie is running against Ralph Northam to be the next Governor of Virginia. Bush endorsed Gillespie, obviously.

Last week, former President George W. Bush called for the removal of “racial bigotry” and hatred from American politics. The speech was well received, as his is the latest in a growing chorus of public figures calling the vitriol behind Trump’s rise into question.

But to read the speech as a courageous missive on the importance of returning to some glorious moment of justice and equality would be a mistake. After all, the only thing that outmatches the bravery of the speech is his endorsement of the identity-politics swinging Ed Gillespie, the Virginia GOP’s candidate in that state’s Gubernatorial race.

Consider the ads pouring onto the airwaves from the Gillespie campaign:

1. “MS-13 is a menace, yet Ralph Northam voted in favor of sanctuary cities that let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street, increasing the threat of MS-13,”
2. “MS-13’s motto is kill, rape, control,” says the narrator, against an image of a hooded figure holding a baseball bat in a darkened home.
3. “Who will keep your family safe?” before blasting Northam as indifferent to the threat of gang violence from “illegal immigrants.”

That’s not all. The Virginia Republican Party sent out mailers, approved by the Gillespie campaign of course, accusing the democrat Ralph Northam of wanting to “ tear down history while making life easier for illegal immigrants.” Full Willie Horton.

These thinly veiled racial appeals is routine for Republican party politics. We should resist the idea that Trump and his faction alone owns this sentiment within the party, as some contemporary commentators of Republican Party politics have tried to do. That politicians like Bush have tried to distance themselves from Trump even as they prop up a racist party machine is all the evidence we need.

The barely-veiled vitriol on which Republicans have latched is not isolated to the Trump era, either. In 1980, Reagan kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi, as if to bolster his ‘good ‘ol boy’ credentials, in a place historically known as a meeting-ground for the KKK.

Then there is the legendary GOP consultant Lee Atwater who laid the playbook bare only a year after Reagan’s announcement:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

When Atwater pledged to “rip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]” on behalf of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, he was taking a line from the playbook. Bush’s campaign ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, “repeatedly raping” a white woman.The fear that incarcerated people of color would roam free and rape white women delivered the White House to Bush, and this logic is eerily similar to the messaging in the Virginia governor’s race.

This strategy did not die in the 1980s. In 2006, the RNC attacked Harold Ford Jr, an African American candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee , by using an ad which ended with a white woman winking and saying “ Harold, call me.” The fear of race-mixing paved the way for Bob Corker to win that seat. (Something to keep in mind as liberals line up to welcome Corker to “the resistance”.) (Obama was the “food stamp president”according to Newt Gingrich in 2012. Karl Rove used a similar tactic in 2004 to force on-the-fence conservatives to choose between gay-marriage, a second Bush term, and John Kerry.)

Former President Bush is right: hatred and bigotry have no place in our politics. But this requires that he reflect on his party’s long-standing complicity. The removal of hatred and bigotry from public life should not be a signal to be more subvert in how a campaign invokes these principles. Rather, we should pledge to remove hatred and bigotry altogether and refuse to reward and support anyone who does. The only role of discussing hatred and bigotry in modern society is to confront the legacy of racial injustice and inequality so that we can pursue policies that allow us to realize a more just world.