If my mother were alive, she would be disappointed in the current state of the Republican Party. But I’m not surprised. She witnessed the Republican Party in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s inch toward scapegoating some Americans to score political points with others, a tactic that Although subtle and often effective, she believed it betrayed those who, like her, had long supported African-American Lincoln Republicans.
During the holiday season, I think of my mother, the woman who kept our vast and raucous clan together. No matter what was going on in our lives, as our family grew, we squeezed into Baltimore rowhouses and headed out to old farms, paying close attention to our dinner table etiquette.
After a few meals and drinks, all bets were off. However, in retrospect, it was not political issues but unresolved personal conflicts that caused occasional conflicts.
As a young child, my mother worked overseeing precincts on election days, so I knew quite a bit about how a democracy was supposed to work, so I used to do the same thing as my elders at rallies. I yelled about the news. Our political differences seem trivial, especially compared to today’s coverage of heated interactions with families and entire countries that have contributed to Merriam-Webster’s 2024 Word of the Year: “Polarization.” It was.
I think one of the reasons for that was the diversity of views within the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The Democratic tent was large enough to cover Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Senator Humphrey’s speech as a young Minneapolis mayor at the 1948 Democratic National Convention played a pivotal role in the party’s decision to add a civil rights plan to its platform. President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Rights Act in the 1960s. and Southern senators who opposed and filibustered those bills.
The Republicans my mother admired were progressives like Sen. Ed Brooke of Massachusetts. He was an African American senator who stood up for his party when he felt his duty called for it, such as when he prematurely called for President Richard Nixon to resign. In our state of Maryland, Republican Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias continued in the tradition of moderate, so-called Rockefeller Republicans, criticizing President Ronald Reagan’s rightward moves.
My mother also agreed. During his 1980 campaign against President Jimmy Carter, President Reagan exposed the Southern strategy employed by his predecessors, including President Nixon, and embraced harmful racial stereotypes such as “welfare queens” and “hard-to-reach young men.” When I brought it up, I wondered how she was able to get by, she told me. Buy a T-bone steak with food stamps. He insultedly opposed the civil rights bill and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday before signing it into law.
It was ironic that even though Reagan rejected her, she attracted so many of the same Reagan Democrats who gave her victory. In Baltimore, we knew some of them very well. Some of the working-class white voters and union members lived in tenements just like us, in areas we knew we shouldn’t go into.
Many were Catholics like us, but when Cardinal Lawrence Shehan implored them and all citizens to support an open house bill that would ban residential segregation in the city, he was met with boos and jeers. and received death threats.
My mother was a practical person and knew that for politicians, a vote was a vote. But where did that leave her, having worked so hard, including for her own party, not listening to the candidates speak to people like her, and instead speaking to her loved ones? She wondered where that left an honest person who would repeat petty lies that made someone’s life even more difficult.
This is a family that proudly sends its three older children to the civil rights movement with love and concern, believing in their cause, and teaching them about character and correct behavior that inspires them. It was my mother who was there.
She knew there were people like Donald Trump in the world and within her party. But when his followers marched on the Capitol with Confederate flags, breaking the law not in the name of justice but to stop the law, they were driven by fear of a man. I know that there was very little rebuke from the Republican Party.
As someone who won’t accept excuses from any of my five children, today’s Republican senators are lining up to make excuses for a rogue group of Trump Cabinet nominees, offering pardons, accusations of sexual misconduct, and secrets. She’ll just shake her head if you drag the retention contract around. .
By 2024, opposition within the party had died down, with many choosing not to run for seats they had no chance of winning. Mr. Trump demands loyalty, and party members respond, repeating talking points that Mr. Trump dictated. They call in people with the experience, education, and stacked resumes that DEI hires if they happen to be black and Democrats, and then add to the unqualified crew that the next president is trying to foist on the American people. Most of them did not vote for him.
That’s what you get when the loudest voice in the room is always a South African exile who seems to miss apartheid and is all too eager to recreate it in the United States.
Her mother was wise and knew what her party members thought of her. He was an honest black election official who always chose truth over loyalty.
I’ve written about the belief of many African Americans that the Democratic Party is taking its most loyal voting base for granted. It’s also true, and I’m sure my mother would agree, that the Republican Party has run a campaign that relies on resentment and fear to cast Republicans like my parents as collateral damage.
She was the kindest person you’d ever want to know, so you won’t be surprised or angry.
But it’s definitely sad.
Mary C. Curtis has worked as a national political correspondent for the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the Charlotte Observer, and is a senior facilitator for the OpEd Project. She is the host of the CQ Roll Call “Equal Time with Mary C. Curtis” podcast. X Follow her at @mcurtisnc3.
