White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics by Joe R. Feagin

Author:Joe R. Feagin [Feagin, Joe R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-04-23T07:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

For the most part, the political era of the 1970s to the 1990s was one of increasing, if sometimes oscillating, conservative political resurgence and power. In rather pointed language, Allan Lichtman has summed up the numerous victories over time of the expanding and successful right-wing and authoritarian political efforts from the 1940s through the 1990s. As he summarizes, over this significant era the far right had “turned back the tide of union organizing. They had slashed taxes, deregulated business, and rewritten the welfare laws and America’s criminal statues.” In addition, he adds, they “blocked the Equal Rights Amendment, turned civil rights measures into quota laws, and sounded the alarm against deviance and decay.”98 In this process, moreover, the far-right resurgence has united many white religious conservatives from various Christian groups and has made the white South into a major long-term stronghold of arch-conservative Republicanism.

This was a political party era that, like previous eras, constantly revealed numerous aspects of systemic racism, including versions of the old rationalizing white frame. This racist reality could be seen repeatedly in an array of political activities, party events, party organizations, and government policies. Much in this racist array was accentuated in the efforts of Republican Party leaders and voters, but it could also be seen in the efforts of some Democratic leaders and officials. These racially revealing endeavors included electoral campaigns pervaded or undergirded by racist strategies, presidential candidates intentionally appealing to white voters’ racist framing, and racialized governing strategies that sought to weaken civil rights laws or enforcement. Although the most recent years in this political era brought us some new racial terminology such as the “end of racism” and “post-racial America”—terminology that first began to appear among white media commentators, experts, and politicians—the actual political realities examined in this chapter, as well as those we assess in the next few chapters, directly contradict such transparent attempts at obscuring or defending the continuing and substantial reality of white racial power and privilege.

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