by Berry Craig

MAYFIELD, Ky. – I’ve got a pretty good idea what Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, would make of his party as we get ready to celebrate his 200th birthday next February.

The Great Emancipator must be spinning in his tomb.

“The Republican Party is only a step away from becoming the fringe of the fringe, identified more with cross-burning weirdoes wearing hoods, folks like the Alaska secessionist party, all those gun owners stocking up on assault weapons before the ‘Socialist/United Nations/Obama/Muslim’ conspiracy comes to fruition, than with anything remotely like a serious national political force,” wrote Frank Schaeffer on the Huffington Post Internet website.

Schaeffer said he is “a former lifelong Republican” who was for John McCain “up through the 2000 primary campaign…and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations.”

Other Republicans have left the GOP for the same reasons Schaeffer departed. But he didn’t go quietly.

“The Republican Party…is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags,” he wrote. “These folks include outright crazies (such as Sarah Palin's Assemblies of God pals who are waiting for Spaceship Jesus to rescue them and/or rooting out ‘witches’ from their midst), white racists and a few not-very-bright attention seekers, including Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity etc.”

Despite the Barack Obama landslide, some people voted the McCain-Palin ticket “in bigger numbers than they even voted for Bush/Cheney,” Schaeffer added. He named them: “…Uneducated white folks in the [D]eep [S]outh and a few folks in Appalachia. Take away the white no-college-backwoods-and/or-[S]outhern McCain/Palin vote and the Republicans would have been approaching single digit electoral college oblivion.”

If the current GOP is troubling Honest Abe’s immortal soul, Jefferson Davis probably isn’t resting in peace over the Democrats either.

Davis, the Confederate president, was a Democrat, but one who believed slavery and white supremacy were heaven-ordained. The other Confederate white guys -- ancestors of a lot of McCain voters – said amen to Old Jeff.

Davis and his bunch lost the Civil War. Eventually, they shot, burned and lynched their way back to power, terrorizing the newly-freed slaves and calling themselves "redeemers." They and their offspring made Dixie the "Solid South," as in solidly Democratic and white-run.

So what turned the South from Rebel gray to Republican red forty-odd years ago? It was race.

In the 1860s, the Kentucky-born Lincoln and the Yankee Republicans ended slavery. In the 1960s, the Texas-born Lyndon Johnson and the Yankee Democrats stopped Jim Crow segregation and put the ballot back into black hands.

When that happened, most African Americans – heretofore partial to the party of “Lincoln and Liberty” -- became Democrats. Because it happened, most white Southerners became Republicans. (By the 1880s, the Republican Party had shifted priorities from promoting racial equality to doing the bidding of big business.)

President Lincoln was the most despised man in the white South in the 1860s. In the 1960s, segregationist Southern whites focused much of their hatred on President Johnson, a Democrat, whom they considered a traitor to his race and his region.

Johnson knew the landmark civil rights bills Congress passed would trigger a tsunami of a white backlash in his part of the country. “We have lost the South for a generation," the president supposedly confided in an aide.

The Democrats’ loss turned out to last a lot longer.

McCain grabbed eight of the 11 ex-Confederate states. Obama’s support among white voters was weaker in the South than in any other region.

I don’t think Schaeffer meant that every white person who voted against Obama is a racist, not even every white Southerner. But there’s ample evidence that McCain romped in Dixie because a multitude of white folks couldn’t bring themselves to vote for an African American for president.

The New York Times concluded the same thing Schaeffer did about why McCain got more votes than Bush did in the South. But the Times’ prose was predictably more measured.

"Mr. Obama’s race appears to have been the critical deciding factor in pushing ever greater numbers of white Southerners away from the Democrats," the paper reported.

The Times isn’t the favorite read of Southern Republicans. No doubt, they’d deny in prose as pointed as Schaeffer’s that racial prejudice had anything to do with McCain beating Bush’s numbers in the old Confederacy.

Southern Republicans and their apologists in academia also claim that the civil rights bills didn’t really spur Dixie toward the GOP in the 1960s. They insist it was economics.

They argue that when the South significantly industrialized after World II, Southern factory owners and managers and their political allies – white men -- identified more with pro-business Republicans than with pro-union Yankee Democrats, many of whom were national party leaders.

Every former Confederate State is a right-to-work state. Unions are also scarcer in Dixie than elsewhere in America. But white Southern opposition to unions is also rooted in race.

"The labor-hater and the labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed.

In the 1930s and 1940s, segregationist Southern Democrats in Congress – more than a few of them the granddaddies and great-granddaddies of current Southern Republicans -- made common cause with anti-union Northern Republicans against FDR’s pro-labor New Deal. Dixie Democrats joined anti-labor Yankee Republicans in passing the union-busting Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

White Southern Democrats hated and feared unions in part because in a union everybody is equal. Union brotherhood and sisterhood could help lead to brotherhood and sisterhood in society and at the ballot box, segregationist Democrats worried.

In the 1960s, the United Auto Workers and other industrial unions strongly supported the civil rights movement. Walter Reuther, longtime UAW president, stood near King when King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in 1963.

Today, Southern Republicans – all of them white -- are among the most anti-union members of the U.S. House and Senate. George W. Bush – the former governor of right-to-work Texas -- is one of the most anti-union presidents ever.

McCain, who favors a national right-to-work law, is as anti-union as Bush.

Meanwhile, some on the Republican far right -- “the racists, the anti-gay hate-mongers….the fringe of the fringe” according to Schaeffer – are rallying to McCain’s running mate. “Sarah in 2012 signs” started popping up when it looked like McCain would lose.

“Sarah Palin will never be president because the right wing of the Republican Party has perfected the art of believing their own b------t, starting with the idea that Palin has a future,” Schaeffer predicted. “Palin and her fans don't know it yet, but having reduced itself to a grim angry joke, the Republican Party has also divorced itself from American politics.”

He offered a novel suggestion: “What's the best defense against the rube/Palin voters derailing the Republican Party forever? If the statistics of who voted for whom are correct, the education of white people in the [D]eep South and their economic empowerment is the best answer. Maybe it will take a black Democratic president to figure out some affirmative action program that can get our [S]outhern born-again white underclass into colleges and thereby save the Republican [P]arty.”