Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [89]
Of course, there were some serious civil rights champions among Democrats in the twentieth century—we’ve been hearing endless panegyrics to them our entire lives. This is the history you’ve never read.
Although Democrats act as if the 1964 act was the only civil rights act that ever mattered, it is a curious fact that, as Thomas Sowell says, “the rise of blacks into the professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the years preceding passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in all the years following passage of that act.”21
Once the Democrats got involved, civil rights became just another racket with another mob. Unlike previous civil rights laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act included provisions aimed at purely private actors, raising the hackles of some constitutional purists, notably Barry Goldwater, the Republicans’ 1964 presidential nominee. Goldwater, like the rest of his party, had supported every single civil rights bill until the 1964 act. But he broke with the vast majority of his fellow Republicans to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Like many other conservatives opposed to a living, growing, breathing Constitution, Goldwater actually opposed only two of the seven major provisions of the bill—those regulating privately owned housing and public accommodations. But there were other provisions he would have made tougher. For example, Goldwater wanted to make it mandatory that federal funds be withheld from programs practicing discrimination, rather than discretionary, as President Kennedy had requested.22
Goldwater was a vehement foe of segregation. He was a founder of the NAACP in Arizona, donating the equivalent of several thousand dollars to the organization’s efforts to integrate the public schools. When he was head of the Arizona National Guard, he had integrated the state Guard before Harry Truman announced he was integrating the U.S. military. As the Washington Post said, Goldwater “ended racial segregation in his family department stores, and he was instrumental in ending it in Phoenix schools and restaurants and in the Arizona National Guard.”23
But he was also a believer in limited government. It was, after all, racist Democratic politicians in the South using the force of the government to violate private property rights by enforcing the Jim Crow laws in the first place. As Sowell points out, it wasn’t the private bus companies demanding that blacks sit in the back of the bus, it was the government.24
Goldwater not only had personally promoted desegregation, he belonged to a party that had been fighting for civil rights for the previous century against Democratic obstructionism. Lyndon Johnson voted against every civil rights bill during his tenure in the Senate. But by the time he became president, he had flipped 180 degrees. Appealing to regional mobs wouldn’t work with a national electorate.
Unlike mob-appeasing Democrats, Goldwater based his objections to certain parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on purely constitutional principles. Along with other constitutional purists in the Republican Party, Goldwater opposed federal initiatives in a lot of areas, not just those involving race. By contrast, segregationist Democrats routinely criticized the exercise of federal power and expenditure of federal funds when it involved ending discrimination against blacks—but gladly accepted federal pork projects for their states.
It would be as if, after fighting the Democrats for a hundred years over the issue of abortion, Republicans finally got Roe v. Wade overturned, and then, out of pure political calculation, Democrats