Professor: Aren't you insulting all the intelligent people here and the 80 percent of African-
Americans who are Democrats by claiming that the current Democratic Party has anything to do
with that Dixiecrat party from fifty years ago that was trying to stop them from voting?
Aren't you conflating the word "Democrat" with "progressive?" They have utterly nothing to do
with each other. The current Democratic Party has absolutely none of those values from fifty
years ago, and you're pretending that they are guilty of something. Aren't you trying to claim
that Jesse Jackson is a dupe and shouldn't be supporting the Democratic Party because
Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and freed the slaves?
D'Souza: The Democratic Party was the party of the Dixiecrats all the way through the 60s, and
if what you say is true, that the blacks made a switch to their racial friends, it would appear
that the black switch would have to come in the 70s and 80s when blacks see these racists are
now moving over there, so it makes sense for us to move over here. But in reality, blacks moved
overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party in the 1930s. The black vote went from about
15 percent Democratic to about 70 percent Democratic within four years.
Professor: In the places they could vote. D'Souza: That's right, but...
Professor: It was in the North. Jackie Robinson was a Republican for a darn good reason.
D'Souza: That's absolutely right, but here's what I'm getting at...
Professor: And he would be today.
D'Souza: Well, we can debate Jackie Robinson, because it's always difficult to know what
dead people would say. "If Martin Luther King were alive today..." Martin Luther King isn't
alive today. Okay, here's the point I'm getting at: the reason that blacks switched from the
Republican Party to the Democratic Party had everything to do with the benefits of
the New Deal, and nothing to do with racism. In fact...
Professor: In the North. D'Souza: Yes, and in the South too, blacks
starting switching to the Democratic Party. It's not that blacks couldn't vote in the South,
it's that there were all kinds of barriers to black voting.
Professor: But they couldn't vote. D'Souza: Under FDR, there was a...
Blacks couldn't vote in the South at all? No blacks voted in the South?
Professor: Very, very few. D'Souza: How many? How many?
Professor: I don't know. D'Souza: Okay. I thought so. Look, there were
all kinds of poll taxes and barriers imposed by the Democrats on the black vote until
the Democrats realize that they could get the black vote by offering jobs, welfare, retirement
programs. Are you telling me that FDR in the South was telling blacks who were voting for
the Democrats, "You can't vote?" Not true, not true. Blacks in the North and the South
switched to the Democratic Party because of New Deal benefits. Many of them were very sad
about doing it, because they were leaving the party of emancipation and Lincoln and flinging
themselves in the party of the Ku Klux Klan and the Dixiecrats who were in the South
and were in the Democratic Party. Professor: [unintelligible]
D'Souza: Exactly. So what I'm saying is it was a Faustian bargain, in which you get
economic benefits, and at the same time, you're in bed with the racists, and you're on your own
team. And I'm saying that's American history. Now, whites began to switch to the Republican
Party, but much later. Whites began to switch to the Republican Party in droves in the 70s and
80s. Now here's the point: if you look at racial opinion in the South, and there's a voluminous
body of data on this, as racism in the South dramatically declines, the southern identification
with the Republican Party begins to increase. There's an opposite track. Racism is declining in
the South and whites begin to move to the Republican Party. In fact, two scholars who've
written a book about this, trace that the least racist Southerners all became Republicans.
That the poor, white racist Democrat never became a Republican. He was a dug-in
Democrat to the end of his days. So the Democratic Party remained the party of racism,
and as the South became less agrarian, more prosperous, industry came to the South,
the post-industrial society, the Republican appeal of equal opportunity, free markets,
and prosperity appealed to Southerners, and that's why... so what I'm getting at is the
progressives have sold the South on a guilt-trip. Even this whole thing about, you know,
"the Civil War was really about slavery, and the South did slavery." Wait a minute, again,
the Northern Democrats protected slavery. The Civil War, the fight over slavery, was between the
Democratic Party, north and south, that protected it, and the Republican Party, which
only was in the North, that opposed it. That's what that fight was about.
The North-South thing is now a disguise to hide the responsibility of a major political party, that
was the party of slavery for a hundred years. True or false?