"An exchange, not a giveaway"

In American Greatness, Dinesh D'Souza writes about LBJ, the man behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

by every account, LBJ was a nasty, bullying, crude, selfish, mean-spirited, and abusive individual. These are not qualities that we associate with a moral exemplar undergoing a crisis of conscience. There was the time he gave dictation to a female secretary while urinating in a corner washbasin. In the account of a Senate aide, on another occasion, while sitting next to a woman in his car with his wife Lady Bird on the other side, “Johnson made a point of placing one of his hands under the woman’s skirt and was having a big time, right there in front of Lady Bird.”

There is much, much more in this vein in Caro’s biography. I don’t need to go into LBJ’s serial infidelities, even in the Oval Office, his chronic boasting about the women he had conquered, the name that he gave to his penis, his boasting about its size, and so on. Suffice to say that Johnson would not survive five minutes of scrutiny by the #MeToo movement. LBJ, like JFK and Bill Clinton, reflects the priapic aggression of the prototypical plantation boss.

Yet even more than the other two, he liked to lord it over people, not just women but everyone. As Caro shows on page after page, he derived pleasure from degrading and humiliating others. He was known to converse with aides in his office bathroom while emptying his bowels, which Marshall Frady interprets as a sign of his “Rabelasian earthiness” but which less charitably reveals an ugly demonstration of his power over subordinates.

LBJ was a pervert in every sense of the word; if I can pursue the excremental theme, he was into this shit. As LBJ himself put it, he wanted the type of person working for him “who will kiss my ass in the Macy’s window and stand up and say, ‘Boy, wasn’t that sweet!’” Surely many Democratic plantation bosses of the 19th century could have said pretty much the same thing.

...In the mid-1960s, LBJ nominated African-American lawyer Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When an aide suggested to LBJ that there were other qualified black jurists he could have chosen, suggesting as an alternative possibility Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, LBJ responded, “The only two people who ever heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in an otherwise positive biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, cites LBJ telling Senator Richard Russell during the debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

Think about why Martin Luther King, Jr., encountered so little intellectual resistance to his challenges to segregation. Fifty years earlier, he would have. This is not to deny that local officials, like Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor, unleashed dogs and hoses on civil rights protesters. King himself served time as a political prisoner in the Birmingham jail, an experience that strikes a chord with me. But by this time the intellectual fight had been won. The local segregationist establishment, not King, was on the defensive. That’s because popular opinion in America had shifted dramatically between the time FDR died in 1945 and the 1960s.

So what caused the shift? The obvious answer is Adolf Hitler. In the end, the horrific crimes of Hitler overthrew the doctrine of white supremacy. Once American troops entered the concentration camps, once people saw those ghostly emaciated figures emerge out of the camps, they could not longer subscribe to theories of Nordic superiority they might once have held. Those doctrines were now permanently discredited.

Here’s the bargain that LBJ offered African Americans. We Democrats are going to create a new plantation for you, this time in the towns and cities. On these new plantations, unlike on the old ones, you don’t have to work. In fact, we would prefer if you didn’t work. We are going to support you through an array of so-called poverty programs and race-based programs. Essentially we will provide you with lifetime support, just as in the days of slavery. Your job is simply to keep voting us in power so that we can continue to be your caretakers and providers.

...Here’s the part LBJ did not say. We are offering you a living, but it’s going to be a pretty meager living. Basically, you get public housing, food stamps, retirement checks every month, and medical care for the poor. If you have children we will subsidize them, provided they are illegitimate. More than this we cannot offer you, because we have to make sure that you stay on the plantation. This means that we need you to remain dependent on us so that you keep voting for us. Your dependency is our insurance policy to make sure that this an exchange, not a giveaway.

...LBJ knew that if the government were to employ blacks on a large scale it would draw blacks out of fields like teaching, preaching, and small business. Teachers, pastors and entrepreneurs would now become administrators, service providers, and social workers. In sum, they would lose their skills for succeeding in the private sector and learn only how to administer the agencies of government. They too would become captives of a sort, fatally dependent on the Democratic plantation. They too would have no way to leave.

Also as a consequence of LBJ’s deal, Democrats became the new champions of blacks voting. From LBJ on, Democrats wouldn’t merely advocate that blacks vote; they would in many cases supply the buses to take them to the polls. In her book on the great migration, Isabel Wilkerson writes, without irony, “Suddenly the very party and the very apparatus that was ready to kill them if they tried to vote in the South was searching them out and all but carrying them to the polls.” If LBJ were around to read this, I’m sure he would have found it hilarious.

That’s why LBJ “converted” from a racist Democrat who sought to keep blacks down on the old sharecropping plantation to a racist Democrat who sought to create a new type of plantation where blacks would now willingly vote for their Democratic providers. That’s why LBJ pushed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Great Society. That’s why progressives lionize LBJ even though they know what a vile scumbag he was. He’s their guy; he is the creator of their urban plantation in its most modern and most recognizable form. And that’s why blacks have become, as a group, the lifetime servile dependents of the Democratic Party.

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