This month, tantrums by the Maga wing of the Republican control of the US House of Representatives got even worse. On November 15^th, they shut down House business by refusing to pass a procedural vote to take up a spending bill. They had threatened to do this in retaliation for the passage of a resolution to fund the government into the new year. 

This is the fourth time the extremists have defeated special rules in the House this year. Their doing so is highly unusual. In the previous 20 years the House voted down no such measures at all. Although in the middle of a 17-vote series at the time, the Republicans then recessed the House until after Thanksgiving.

Such eccentric utterances and venal actions of Maga Republicans brinkmanship endangers both economy and government. But even those who follow such antics closely may be surprised to learn this did not start with Trump. Demonising political opponents as “Communists out to wreck America” started with Lincoln and the Civil War.

This Thanksgiving weekend, when our American cousins are celebrating with family by stuffing themselves with turkey and pumpkin pie, seems a good time to reflect on that time 160 years ago when that great country almost fell apart. Though the war ended in 1865, its legacy didn’t, as political differences were papered over, rather than resolved. The continued racial divisions in Southern states remained institutionalised and it was, strangely enough, Southern Democrats who kept the racial pot boiling. Southern “good ol’ boys” refused to vote Republican because that was Lincoln’s party—and he had freed the slaves.

Democrats were once the dominant political force from Texas to Virginia and—emancipation of the slaves or no. They spent the next century defending segregation and white supremacy. But after WW2 had removed segregation from US Armed Forces, Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, the march on Selma went ahead and MLK had a dream, the status quo in Southern States was coming unglued.

In 1962, he U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that black army veteran James Meredith had the right to enrol at the University of Mississippi, known as ‘Ole Miss’. When the Department of Justice ordered officials at Ole Miss to register Meredith, Mississippi’s Democrat governor Ross Barnett physically barred Meredith from entering the building and vowed to defend segregation and states’ rights.

So, the Department of Justice detailed dozens of U.S. marshals to escort Meredith to the registrar. White supremacists rushed to meet them, things turned violent. The rioters destroyed property and, under cover of the darkness, fired at reporters and the federal marshals, killing two. That night, Barnett told a radio audience: “We will never surrender!”

At that point, Democrat President Kennedy, along with his brother Robert, as Attorney General, backed the Court of Appeals decision, saying James Meredith had the right to enrol at Ole Miss. Kennedy sent 20,000 troops to the campus, the riot was quelled, and Meredith enrolled.

By making it clear the federal government stood behind civil rights, Kennedy ran foul of white supremacists in his own party, who joined right-wing Republicans in insisting this proved the Kennedys were communists. Kennedy’s use of a strong federal government to protect civil rights was presumed to then take tax dollars from white Americans for the benefit of coloured people.

This conflation of black rights and communism stoked such anger in the southern right wing that Kennedy felt obliged to travel to Dallas to try to mend fences in the state Democratic Party.

And, as he prepared to ride in an open-top motorcade through the city, on November 22, 1963, the Dallas Morning News contained a flyer saying the president was: “wanted for treason for “betraying the Constitution and giving support and encouragement to Communist-inspired racial riots”.

What motives Lee Harvey Oswald may have had for assassinating Kennedy remain a mystery because he himself was assassinated before he could talk. But neither media, nor the myriad conspiracy theories around this terrible event say much about the fractious background to Kennedy’s visit, Few accounts of today’s fractiousness draw the clear parallels between the current Maga myopia and the entrenched bigotry surrounding events half a century ago. But those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

“We need to stop the false equivalency BS between Biden and Trump. Only one acts with the intention to do real harm.”

—Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chair

NOTE: This article uses material from Heather Cox Richardson’s insightful and informative (if vaguely Democrat) blog “Letters from an American”.

#1085—748 words