Everybody Get In Line

I was digging through the archives the other day, and I found a 1955 issue of the City Pages (they haven't yet put their pre-web archives online - I had to trascribe the below by hand).

It featured a cover story by Gustav Anderssen that featured an interview with Bobby Joe DuPray, a Democratic Party heavyweight and Assistant Grand Kleagle of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan. The headline:

“They talk about freedom and values, but those New Dealers really don't believe in representative government.”

DuPray was lamenting the rise of the "liberals" in the southern Democratic Party.

GA: So what do you think about your party today?

BJD: I don't know how many times I talked to [the late forme Louisiana governor] Billie Ray Clampett about this. Drove by Billy Ray's yard last fall, and all you'd see were signs with "Jew Lover" scrawled over Truman's name. I'd say, "Billy Ray, have you given up on the Democratic Party?" And he'd say, "Of course not. This is all evolutionary." Right now we've got what looks to be colored-lovin', or if you look at it nationally, a North and East Democratic party. We've got an antiwhite, anti-establishment party--well, selectively anti-establishment, obviously.

Even if they say lofty things like "equality" or whatever it is they say, they don't mean it. I've told (Grand Dragon) Toby Beauregard that. You know, when he was talking about running for the Senate, I said, "You know, Toby, I'm not in the district, but what I remember from your campaign is no burning crosses." I've known Jonny Lee Bodine since two days after his kids were forced to go to school with colored kids. And I think it was necessary to run that kind of a campaign. And even though he said they weren't his ads, they were from the Democratic National Committee.

GA: This is the focus on winning elections, the electoral process, that you're talking about.

BJD: Right, and the same thing is going to go on more. Destroying white people and tearing down the white race and whatnot. They'll wrap it in things like "the constitution." There are ways to package miscegenation that work, but it's still against the revealed word of the Almighty!.

GA: Isn't it a basic tenet of good white governance that you reserve the right to change your mind? The Eisenhower administration is very good at sticking to their side of a particular issue, but is that good governance?

BJD: In my view, the problem is a chief executive who will never acknowledge a mistake, an error, or a fault. Pretenting that letting coloreds go to school with white kids is not leadership. Leadership is not just success winning the seat of the president. [1]

Pretty crazy, right? Don't you just want to tell Mr. DuPray to get over it, the Democrats have changed?

Of course it's going on for real right now.

The interview above is fake, by the way. But the next one isn't.

The City Pages' G. R. Anderson interviews former Minnesota senator Dave Durenberger.

If you're not from Minnesota, let me try to put some context to this: Remember what the GOP was like up through the Gerald Ford years? From the end of the New Deal until the rise of Reagan, Republicans were basically Democrats with better suits. It was the age of Rockefeller, of Richard "I am a Keynesian" Nixon, an era when Goldwater and Buckley were exiles even within the GOP. Reagan changed all that...

...except in Minnesota. The Republicans (they renamed themselves the "Independent Republican" party after Watergate, an identity they kept until the "Contract with America" and a rising conservative wing made it safe(r) to be a Republican) assumed more or less the same role through the eighties and nineties that the national party had during its time in the electoral wilderness. The IR had some success; in 1978, it took the governor's office and both Senate seats. Don't let it fool you; the IR in those years was only slightly less profligate, less big-state centered, than the DFL. James Lileks once joked on the air that during the 1990 gubernatorial election Minnesotans had a choice between the pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-intervention, pro-tax-increase candidate, and the Democrat.

Things are different today; Republicans present a genuine alternative to the DFL.

That really seems to bother the local left.

It's become a minor cottage industry here in Minnesota, since 2002; reporters fan out through greater Minnesota, dredging up old politicians from the IR days to tut-tut at the shape of the new Republican party.

G.R. Anderson, judging by his recent work, he seems to be assigned to the "scurrilous anti-conservative hatchet piece" beat that used to be owned by Michael Welch. Here's the trick; read the article, and try to see who oozes more condescension, Durenberger or Anderson.

On the changing role of the MNGOP:

[Durenberger]: The Republicans have never been the majority party, in my lifetime. Even when we've had conservative majorities in the state--we had a conservative Senate in Minnesota from the founding of the state until 1970--we had a minority complex. But the common bond was a respect for the role of government in building a society in the broadest sense. It wasn't the negatives that drive the electoral process today.

Unmentioned; the government mixed up its "role in building a society" with "authority". State government started seeing Minnesotans' earnings as state property first, income second.

And you're right, Mr. Durenberger; I don't want government "building a society". I want government to enforce the laws while the free association of equals we call society builds society. See the difference?

Arrogance is rather off-putting.

Back to Durenberger:

We are, as a state, traditionally both conservative and liberal. "Progressive" is a word that's often laid on top of something like that. There had always been this tradition in the public policy I was a part of to add some advantage to the disadvantaged in Minnesota. Whether that was rural people needing access to markets, or all poor and minority kids needing access to schools. Or the whole movement toward identifying mental health in health care policy. We started that movement here. We didn't do it just by talking about it.

Unmentioned: Most conservative Minnesotans appreciate that. However, it's the little things - like paying the third-highest taxes in the nation while our schools decay around our kids, or look at a state government that gobbled up a decade of surpluses (read: overtaxation) and tacked them onto permanent spending, regardless of economic cycles (did the 1999 legislature really think the economy was never going to turn down? That people couldn't maintain that level of spending forever? Of course they did; when Minnsotans' unemployment started rising after 2000, the state and its employee unions turned the screws harder!

I don't know how many times I talked to [the late former governor] Elmer Andersen about this. Drove by Elmer's yard last fall, and all you'd see were signs with Bush X'ed out. I'd say, "Elmer, have you given up on the Republican Party?" And he'd say, "Of course not. This is all evolutionary." Right now we've got what looks to be an exurban, or if you look at it nationally, a south and west party. We've got an antigovernment party--well, selectively antigovernment, obviously.

Durenberger states this like it's a bad thing. Or rather, mis-states it. I'm pretty familiar with conservatives in Minnesota - and it'd be fairer to say that we want accountability and reason from our government; we don't want to keep feeding them blank checks.

There's more. More article, I mean. Not more patience to keep reading it.

Earth to Anderson, Nick Coleman, Dave Durenberger and the assembled DFL: The GOP has changed. Get over it!

[1] No, it's not real.

UPDATE: I got some emails and a comment - people seem to be missing my disclaimer. The City Pages "1955 interview" is satirical fiction, and the City Pages started in (I think) the early '80s.

Posted by Mitch at March 10, 2005 05:46 AM | TrackBack