Hours after President-elect Donald Trump smeared civil rights hero and longtime Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) as an “all talk” figure who has failed to help the black Americans he represents, Trump’s down east mini-me got in on the act too.
Asked about the dozens of House members who are boycotting Trump’s inauguration, Gov. Paul LePage (R-ME) fulminated that Lewis should be thanking Republicans instead of protesting against them.
“How ‘bout John Lewis last week, criticizing the president? I will just say this. John Lewis oughta look at history,” LePage said in his weekly radio interview with local station WVOM. “It was Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves. It was Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant that fought against Jim Crow laws.”
“A simple ‘thank you’ would suffice,” the governor added.
It would be ugly to dignify LePage’s personal quip about Lewis’ understanding of America’s past with a thorough debunk. Suffice to say that between Lewis and LePage, only one appears as a character in history books covering the decades-long process of extending America’s social contract to all its citizens.
But LePage’s broader claim — that black people got their civil rights from a trio of white presidents from a very different Republican Party — has become a common refrain from right-wing figures seeking to deflect accusations of racial bias. It’s a historical pole-vault, skipping decades and decades of political reality.
Most importantly, it ignores the massive 1960s-era realignment in what “Republican” and “Democrat” really mean. Racists, segregationists, and white supremacists who had been a key pillar in the Democratic coalition across the South prior to the civil rights movement’s major legislative victories abandoned the party and flocked to the GOP.
In later decades, after white southerners switched parties out of anger over the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Republican consultants intentionally designed electoral strategies that catered to the entrenched racism of a voting block that Democrats had previously called the “solid south.”
Veteran Republican consultant Lee Atwater notoriously summarized the evolution of the party’s approach to white prejudice in a 1981 interview describing the modern “Southern Strategy” by which over racism was replaced with dogwhistle rhetoric. “You start out in 1954 saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger,’ that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
LePage pointed to three Republican presidents from long before the Civil Rights Era realignment, dodging all that modern political history in the process. But even setting that deception aside, his invocation of Hayes in particular is bizarre and ahistorical. Hayes oversaw the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of a revanchist backlash against black progress across the south. He removed the former Confederacy from the strict federal oversight that had helped foster black economic and political gains, restoring local control that white landowners and former slaveholders quickly used to break up working-class coalitions of black and white voters and gin up the very segregationist policies that Lewis and other civil rights leaders physically defied two generations later. It’s unclear which part of that saga Paul LePage thinks merits a “thank you” from black leaders.
John Lewis has lived the history of evolving white supremacist politics. He and other core members of Dr. King’s movement helped prompt the very legislation that destabilized the old order where the Democratic Party leaned on the racist south. He has been on hand as modern-day Atwaters built a new order where the Republican Party draws power from white nationalists on the internet and misdirected white working-class rage across the Rust Belt.
LePage seems to enjoy poking at anyone even half a step to his left. The Maine leader’s political persona is built around a style allies would call gruff and enemies would call unhinged. LePage is his state’s Troll in Chief, in a manner reflective of Trump’s own style.
LePage has baited media criticism with racist comments before — such as when he said his state’s drug problem is caused by black dealers who get white girls pregnant — and then reframed any criticism to his political base as further reason to celebrate his leadership.
After all, as his administration is quick to point out, LePage can’t possible be a racist because he and his wife once adopted a black teenager.