[Dialogue] 2/10/11, Spong: The Transition from Tribalism: The Tea Party, States’ Rights, Strict Constructionists and the Reading of the Constitution

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The Transition from Tribalism: The Tea Party, States’ Rights, Strict Constructionists and the Reading of the Constitution
Recently, I read Brian Burroughs’ book, The Big Rich, the story of the rise and fall of the major Texas oil fortunes.  When I had finished this book, I finally understood the source of the irrational anger expressed toward the Federal Government in today’s political climate; the revival of “States’ Rights;” the meaning of the phrase “Strict Constructionists” as the criteria for Federal judges, and even that strange ritual which accompanied the opening of the House of Representatives under the new Republican majority, namely the public reading of the Constitution of the United States.  That is a considerable list of separate topics to bring together under the rubric of a single explanation, but I believe it can be done. At least I shall try.
First, from The Big Rich I came to understand how very deeply Texas oil money has influenced  political discourse in the last 50-60 years of American history.  The first obvious measure of this influence came when Lyndon Johnson rode into the powerful position of Senate Majority Leader in 1953 just four years into his first term, something unheard of prior to his career.  He accomplished this feat primarily because of his ability to place Texas oil money into the coffers of fellow senators running for re-election and every senator knew that Johnson could and would cut off the money from those who did not support him and cooperate with his agenda.  He then went on to become the most powerful Senate leader in history.
When Dwight Eisenhower became a candidate for the presidency in 1952, he also was a recipient of the vast resources of Texas oil money.  In turn, Eisenhower, when elected, needed majority leader Johnson to shepherd his program through the Senate because about half of the Republican senators were too conservative to support Eisenhower’s moderate and internationalist agenda.  Johnson gladly did exactly that, once again increasing his power.  When Jack Kennedy was looking for a running mate in 1960, he calculated that only by carrying Texas could he defeat Vice President Nixon and that only Lyndon Johnson could enable him to carry Texas so, despite personal animosity between the two, Johnson became Kennedy’s vice president.  It worked.  Texas oil money supported the Democratic ticket since they knew they could protect such things as oil depletion allowances with Johnson as part of that administration.
With the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, Lyndon Johnson became the first of three Texas presidents in the last half century, with the other two being George H. W. Bush who, after eight years as vice president, was president for four and George W. Bush was President for eight. Both were in the oil business. Other Texans, like former Texas governor John Connally, the primary lawyer for the Texas oil barons, were during that time on the edges of power.  Texas’ oil-based politics had thus been a major factor in our national life for half a century.
Texas oil was discovered in the early 1900s and it grew in volume through the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  It produced wealth in amounts that this nation had never seen before, even beyond the fortunes of the Rockefellers, the Mellons and the Morgans.  In a way quite distinct from America’s earlier wealth, Texas oil money was in the hands of relatively uneducated and uncultured people.  It produced the uniquely Texas culture of bigness and the “ostentatiousness” of wealth for which Texas is still famous– note the Dallas Cowboys’ new stadium, for example.  Texas relished public displays of wealth and gloated in it.  The “wildcatters,” who turned Texas land into the fortunes of the Hunts, the Murchisons, the Cullens and the Richardson’s, were fiercely independent people.  Texas had once been a Republic before joining the Union in 1845.  The “Texas Character” resented any power that tried to impose authority on that state.  Its ruling citizens wanted no central government to tax their wealth, to tell them how much they must pay their employees or to suggest that benefits be provided for laborers, most of whom were black or Hispanic. They even vested the real power in their state in the legislature, making the governor of Texas one of the constitutionally weakest governors in America.  They hated unions, income taxes and what they called “giveaway programs.” They regularly churned anti-Federal government rhetoric into the national bloodstream.
Another factor that we must embrace is a recognition of just how deeply southern segregationist politicians through the seniority system controlled the Senate of the United States after the Civil War.  The South stayed Democratic, not because of ideological compatibility, but primarily because their senatorial power in the National Democratic Party kept liberal thinking in check.  In return the Democratic Party regularly gave the vice presidential spot on the national ticket to a southerner.  One thinks of “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas who was Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years.  Harry Truman was a “border state” pick for vice president in Roosevelt’s last run for the White House in 1944.  In 1952 Adlai Stevenson chose John Sparkman of Alabama for his first try for the White House and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee in 1956 for his second.  John Kennedy then chose Johnson of Texas in 1960.  When Lyndon Johnson became himself the presidential candidate in 1964, he did not need to court the South politically, so he chose Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota to be his vice president.  When Jimmy Carter from Georgia won the presidential nomination in 1976, he chose Walter Mondale of Minnesota to be his running mate.  The pattern has been replicated time after time.
As the post World War II era entered American politics, however, this political marriage of convenience began to erode.  The support of labor leaders, as well as black, Hispanic and ethnic voters became increasingly important to Democratic victories finally placing mortal strains on the old coalition.  It began in 1948, when, in response to the inclusion of a strong Civil Rights plank in the platform of the Democratic Patty, championed primarily by the ringing oratory of the Mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, Strom Thurmond, then the Democratic governor of South Carolina, led a walkout and launched the Dixiecrat party, which nominated Thurmond as its presidential candidate.  Despite this defection Democratic incumbent Harry Truman won that election with little southern support and the traditional coalition between northern liberals and southern conservatives declined precipitously.  Through a combination of executive orders such as the desegregation of the armed forces in 1948; the decisions of a liberal Supreme Court, such as Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954, and Congressional bills like the Civil Rights acts of 1957 and 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965, the Federal government began to exert its authority over the states and in particular over the fiercely-independent states in the deep south like Texas.  The South reacted strongly and dramatically.  In 1964 Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona ran an overt southern strategy in his quest for the presidency, appealing to the anger of these white southerners.  It was not successful.  Richard Nixon, however, perfumed that strategy and re-used it to win the White House with southern votes in 1968.  Johnson, in the campaign of 1964, was thus the last Democrat to carry the south until southern candidates, Jimmy Carter first and then Bill Clinton, won for the first time since the Civil War, the Democratic top spot and began to cut back into the lost southern voter ranks, especially its newly en-franchised black voters.
By this time high sounding code language had been developed to cover the dark and base racism, which was operating in the body politic.  “States’ Rights” really meant “don’t interfere with the way people of color are treated in the South.”  “Strict Constructionist Judges” meant “don’t tell us how to run our segregated schools.”  “Big Government” became the favorite whipping boy of the new Republican coalition and from Ronald Reagan on resisting federal power was an emotional battle cry of white southern voters.  When a decade or so later Republican George W. Bush expanded the national debt through two wars and the passing of an enormous expansion of entitlements by adding prescription drugs to the cost of Medicare, the anger against big government became so intense that it produced a splinter within the Republican ranks that called itself “The Tea Party” and then political rhetoric got hotter and hotter.  That is what produced the desire to read the Constitution at the first session of the newly elected and now Republican-controlled Congress.  It was a tactic designed to emphasize that a return to “Strict Constructionism” would be the agenda of this Congress.  These are the elements that lie behind the non-civil tone of political rhetoric that marks our day.
Will this rhetoric accomplish its purpose and take over the government? Of course not!  It has no long-lasting power.  Its Waterloo will come with the realization that most of the states are deeply in debt and will need the federal government to rescue them.  It also won’t work because Blacks, Hispanics and women all now have the power of the ballot box and the control of the old ruling oligarchy is no longer possible.  It won’t work because the world is so much more deeply inter-connected today than it was 100 years ago and threatened white voters who utter these conservative clichés will soon be a minority, if they are not now, even in America.  As power shifts, however, anger rises.  This nation is in a period of transition through which we must walk.  The desires of the few will always collide with the hopes and needs of the majority.  It may take as long as a decade to walk through this transition, so we will be required to listen to the rhetoric of the declining majority.  They will read the Constitution in public, talk about “States’ Rights,” demand “Strict Constructionist” judges and oppose federal health care initiatives.   Time, however, marches on and the Tea Party will finally go the way of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1790 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850’s and become a mere footnote to history.  The United States will then emerge multi-ethnic, free and strong.  I plan to live long enough to see this day arrive.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Roz from Brisbane, Australia, writes:
Question:
I have read most of your books and have enjoyed all of them. I was once a fundamentalist Christian and your books have really opened my eyes to many things. I have been giving my husband your books to read but he is still not totally convinced and leans towards Biblical literalism. His problem is that prophecies in the Bible have come true; i.e. the Jews returning to their homeland in 1948 as prophesied in the Bible thousands of years before. He also sees great power in the north forming now and expects Armageddon to happen shortly. What are your thoughts on Bible prophecy especially in regard to the Jews and their homeland? 

Answer:
Dear Roz, 

I think that anyone who uses the Bible to predict the future is totally out of contact with both reality itself, to say nothing of the meaning of the scriptures. These strange interpretations have gone on for centuries. The “Power in the North,” for example, was the way the Babylonians were described by the Jews 2,700 years ago. Predictions of Armageddon have been made from time in memoriam and all of them have been wrong. If we would remove the book of Daniel from the Bible, written as it was, during the reign of terror that the Syrians imposed on the Jews in the second century, BCE; the apocalyptic chapters of Mark (13), Matthew (25) and Luke (21), written in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE, and the book of Revelation, written during the persecution of Christians during the reign of Domitian in the tenth decade of the common era, then all of this nonsense would disappear. It is all nothing less than religious hysteria and that needs to be said loudly and clearly. Your husband is a victim of superstitious ignorance of which there is a great deal in religious circles. 

Parenthetically, asking your husband to read books with the purpose of converting him is something less than loving, to say nothing of being almost universally unsuccessful. The kind of religious mentality your husband displays is a response, not to rational study but to the task of seeking security. I suggest you simply love him as he is and allow him to come out of his fears in his own way and in his own time. 

My best, 
John Shelby Spong 






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