Nixon’s Piano

Jesse and David say most of what needs to be said about Bruce Bartlett’s op-ed, but it’s worth saying more about one specific point. The central problem with Bartlett’s argument is its triviality and irrelevance: it’s indisputable that in the immediate wake of the Civil War and for several decades afterward the Republican Party was better on civil rights, but since this this is widely known and says nothing about contemporary politics, who cares? Presumably recognizing that persuading African-Americans to vote for people who have been dead for decades and wouldn’t be Republicans if they were alive is not a viable approach for the GOP, Bartlett tries a more recent example and the tendentiousness becomes embarrassing:

Richard Nixon is said to have developed a “Southern strategy” of using racial code words like “law and order” to gain votes in the South. Yet he did more to desegregate southern schools than any president in history.

It’s true that, because the late 60s was the high water mark of strong anti-desegregation opinions in the federal courts (led by the precedents created by the Warren Court that Nixon campaigned against) and there were a lot of holdover pro-civil rights lawyers in the DOJ, that a significant amount of desegregation took place in Nixon’s initial years in office. To claim that Nixon was responsible for this desegregation, however, requires evidence that he supported these policies and attempted to continue them. Needless to say, nothing of the sort is true. (As the fact that he appointed William Rehnquist and unsuccessfully nominated two Southern judges with segregationist histories to the Supreme Court indicates.)

As Rick Perlstein notes in Nixonland, the Nixon administration broke with previous administrations and started filing briefs against desegregation plans. Nixon’s reaction to the Swann decision (p. 604) lays out the basic strategy: talk about how the Courts have tied your hands in public, peel off Southern Democrats, and then appoint reactionary judges who will stop applying Brown aggressively.

And, of course, when Nixon got his appointments on the Supreme Court, this is what happened. In two landmark decisions with Nixon’s appointees providing 4 of the 5 votes, the Supreme Court effectively held that school systems could be separate and unequal as long as this was accomplished through tax policy and and the arbitrary drawing of district boundaries rather than through direct pupil assignment. To give Nixon credit for the desegregation policies he opposed is grossly ahistorical nonsense.