Is the Republican Party Willing to Purge its Extremists?

by Jeff Kolnick

Jeff Kolnick teaches history at Southwest Minnesota State University. Kolnick is a founder of the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy and he served his faculty union, as a negotiator and as a local president.

Even a casual look back at U.S. history uncovers an undeniable vein of intolerance and right-wing fanaticism.

From the birth of the Republican Party in 1854 until about 1965, the real home of right-wing fanaticism was the Democratic Party.

Since 1965, the far right has migrated to the Republican Party, where today it is has captured the party's soul. The story of how and why haters migrated to the Republican Party is better known that the story of the forty-year purge of bigots and misogynists from the Democratic Party. This story is important because it provides a blueprint for how Republicans can begin to remove the hate and intolerance from the GOP.

Democrats dominated the Southern part of the United States after the Civil War and ruled Dixie in the interests of white manhood. In 1928, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, the dean of Southern historians, proclaimed that maintaining the South as a "white man's country" was the "central theme" in Southern history.

The South experienced regularized and public lynching for more than 50 years; disenfranchised millions of black voters, and created a segregated system of life that was dramatically unequal.

But the Democratic Party was a complicated organization. As the great American humorist Will Rogers said long ago: "I am not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat."

And sure enough, as the Democratic Party reorganized itself in the North following the Civil War, it became the home of millions of immigrants, most of them from Eastern and Southern Europe, and many of them Catholic and Jewish.

In 1924, the Northern wing asserted itself at the Democratic National Convention. New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith attempted to become the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party. Before the nomination battle, Smith's forces attempted to pass a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. The resolution failed, and, after 103 ballots, so did Smith's run for president.

In 1928, Smith would win his party's nomination. And 32 years later, Democrat John Kennedy would become our first Catholic president.

Al Smith and his supporters had challenged the anti-Catholic bigotry and the Ku Klux Klan that dominated the Democratic Party. After 1928, those who felt committed to anti-Catholicism had to find a new party.

Twenty years later, at the 1948 Democratic Convention, Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey delivered a speech declaring that "the time has now arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights." Humphrey was part of a wing in the Democratic Party that favored an end to segregation. President Harry Truman was part of that wing, and that same year, he moved to desegregate the US Military. The Democratic party passed a pro civil rights plank in its 1948 platform that included a call for voting rights.

After white supremacists were successfully challenged for power at their national convention, the entire Mississippi and Alabama delegations walked out of the convention and soon, with other Southern states, formed the so-called Dixiecrat party. Led by South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrats' platform left no doubt about where they stood: "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."

By 1965, after a decade of massive protests in every corner of the United States, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, signaling to every bigot and racist in the country that they no longer had a home in the Democratic Party.

Americans like to believe that with the triumph of the civil-rights and women's movements, the nation overcame its legacy of intolerance. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The far right did not disappear. It suffered setbacks between 1954 and 1973, but it never gave up, nor did it fade away.

And now, the radical right has come to dominate the Republican Party.

Just as Hubert Humphrey used to sit in caucus with notorious racists, today well-meaning Republicans caucus with far-right extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who adhere to the QAnon conspiracy.

Well-meaning Republicans caucus with colleagues who would deny basic human rights to our LGBTQ+ neighbors; who oppose birth control and reproductive rights; who reject background checks for buying the most lethal forms of firearms; who question the loyalty of Muslim Americans; who equate immigration with an invasion that threatens to replace “legacy Americans;” who supported the January 6 insurrection that sought to overturn a presidential election; who have backtracked on voting rights and question the very foundations of democracy.

Between 1924 and 1965, courageous Democrats struggled for the soul of their party, and won. If the same struggle were to happen within the Republican Party, we might at last become a nation where no national party welcomes the intolerant and the bigoted. But who among the Republicans has the courage of Alfred E. Smith or Hubert Humphrey?