Doug Jones vs. Roy Moore Lesser evilism wins in Alabama

Scan page 12

“Our opponent,” said Kayla Moore, wife of the now defeated Republican Party U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, “who is an ultra-liberal, who was an Obama delegate, who is for full-term abortions, who is for more gun restrictions, who is for transgender bathrooms, who is for transgender [people] in the military—is against everything we in Alabama be­ lieve and stand for.”

“Opponent” Doug Jones, who on Dec. 12 became the first Alabama Democrat elected to the Senate in 25 years, replied, “If you look at the positions I’ve got on health care, if you look at the positions I got on jobs, you should look at the support I have from the business community, I think I’m pretty main­ stream. I want to reach across the aisle…”

Jones often explained his reference to the “aisle” with a story about two Civil War generals, one from Maine, the other from the slave state of Alabama. They faced off at the historic Battle of Gettsyburg. Then we were on different sides, he explains. To­ day we must work together, “across the aisle.” This was Jones’s way of appealing to at least some of the Southern racist bigots needed for his victory.

The not so perfect and clean newcomer Jones fa­ vors increased spending on the military. He also is quite frank on the abortion issue, stating, “I fully support a woman’s freedom to choose what hap­ pens to her own body. That is an intensely, intensely personal decision that only she, in consultation with her god, her doctor, her partner or family, that’s her choice” (emphasis added).

For many Alabama voters, the “mainstream” Jones served as the “lesser evil” next to the evangelical racist-sexist Judge Roy Moore, who was backed by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. Moore was ac­ cused by multiple women of pursuing relationships with them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. Some of them accused Moore of sexual abuse.

In 2003 Moore was removed as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing a federal court order to remove a marble monument of the Ten Command­ ments he had installed in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building. He often presented his view that the Sept. 11, 2001, New York City Twin Towers ter­ ror bombing was the Lord’s divine punishment for America’s “blasphemous” toleration of homosexual­ ity and women’s right to choose abortion. I can only wonder if Moore’s 9/11 wrath was directed at New Yorkers because they live in the North as opposed to his beloved racist South.

One would think that Moore’s outrageous views would serve as a major handicap, even in today’s Deep South. The Alabama Senate race came to na­ tional attention when the Democrats saw a wideopen opportunity to pick up a Senate seat from the very vulnerable Republican sexist bigot. Yet, Moore almost won, receiving 72 percent of the white male vote and 63 percent of the white female vote. It was only the massive Black vote, well over 90 percent, combined with disgruntled Republicans whose usu­ ally stuffed campaign coffers did not fully material­ ize, that defeated him.

Doug Jones, a 1997 Clinton-appointed U.S. attor­ ney for the Northern District of Alabama in Bir­ mingham, had previously been the lead prosecutor in a 1992 case against two of the four Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the 1963 16th Street Bap­ tist Church bombing that killed four African-Amer­ ican girls. Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were found guilty of those murders in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Each was sentenced to four life terms.

“Justice” was done in Alabama, almost three de­ cades after the murders! Never having held elected office, Doug Jones was slated as the man of the hour.

Few, if any, corporate mainstream reporters were 12 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 inclined to review the South’s political history prior to this election contest—25 Republican years since the last Democrat was elected was history enough. The fact that it was only in 1968, when Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s infamous “Southern strategy” was deployed, that the South turned decisively to the Republicans was not men­ tioned. Nixon campaigned in the South for “states’ rights,” the code words of Southern Democratic Party segregationists who desired a return to the good ol’ days of overt racist white rule and “legal” segregation.

Nixon’s focus in the South was against Democratic Party President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 civil rights legislation that formally, but not until decades later in fact, ended, or better, limited legal segregation. Under Nixon and his Republican successors, the vir­ ulent racist “solid South” bloc of racist Democratic Party Senators and Congresspersons became the virulent racist “solid South,” and today “red state,” terrain of the Republican Party.

Few today care to note that the Democrats origi­ nally arose as the party of post-Civil War plantation owners and Southern capitalists who smashed the post Civil War Reconstruction-era gains won by Blacks by utilizing their created organizations like the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citi­ zens Councils.

All of the racist re-segregation legislation with regard to the obliteration of civil and democratic rights won following the Civil War were the product of the former racist slaveholders’ new political vehi­ cle, the Democratic Party coming to power with the consent of the former Northern Republican slave state “liberators.”

Indeed, an infamous deal was cut wherein North­ ern occupying troops would be withdrawn in return (Left) Democratic Senator Doug Jones.

for the former Southern slaveholders’ agreeing to vote Republican in a future election.

The Lyndon Johnson-era civil rights legislation was qualitatively more a product and of the massive civil rights mobilizations led by Southern Blacks than it was the largess of Johnson, who was a Texas segregationist in his own right—a property owner with codicils included in his property deeds to en­ sure that his land could not be sold to Blacks.

Johnson had come to the presidency as John F. Kennedy’s vice president after the Kennedy assassi­ nation. In those days the Democrats’ “strategy” was to win the presidency with a combination of a “lib­ eral” Northerner for president and a racist Southern Democrat in the V.P. slot.

The Democrats’ answer to Nixon’s “Southern strat­ egy” was to switch to running a Democrat of South­ ern racist heritage for the top spot and a Northern liberal for V.P. Hence, the more recent Democratic Party candidacies of Jimmy Carter (Georgia), Al Gore (Tennessee), and Bill Clinton (Arkansas)—all slick-sounding refurbished Southerners with deep roots in the racist South. The then segregationist Carter, for example, was among those pro-Nixon Democrats.

In the 1960s, the “lesser-evilist” Democrats and “progressives” of that era winced at the inclusion of openly Klan racists on their tickets but insisted that the Republicans, like Barry Goldwater, were far worse.

Today, the lesser-evil swindle is being played out big time, with the Democrats gearing up for an im­ age change in preparation for 2018 and then 2020, when they promise to challenge Trump’s increas­ ingly discredited racist, sexist, populist, proto-fas­ cist tirades. Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax rip off, opposi­ tion hype aside, was a bipartisan affair.

This time out, to be sure, the rhetoric will be modi­ fied, but the content of all twin party ruling-class politics will differ little, if at all, from the reactionary achievements of the Trump administration. Indeed, the chief Democratic Party media booster, The New York Times, recently challenged Trump’s boasts to be top gun with regard to “border security” and war spending. In a Dec. 19 “Fact Check” article entitled, “He’s Not the ‘First,’ And It’s Not a ‘Record,’” The Times countered Trump’s braggadocio with their own facts.

“President Barack Obama,” they stated, “signed a defense authorization bill of $725 billion for the (continued on page 11, in “The Lenin of Libertarianism”)