Quote of the Day (John Sayles, on the 1980 GOP National Convention)

“In 1980, I covered the Republican National Convention in Detroit for a magazine [The New Republic]. The Republicans put most of their delegates across the river in a hotel in Canada. They put cardboard over the windows of the buses so when they went through the funky Detroit neighborhoods they wouldn’t see them on the way to the Joe Louis Arena. These delegates from Kansas and other parts of the country did not even see these neighborhoods, so in effect they could never admit that these areas exist. They never saw them. This is what you’re asked to do for most American films, and it may be appropriate for certain movies, but it’s one of the reasons that Americans don’t know anything about their own history.” — Indie actor-screenwriter-director-novelist John Sayles interviewed by Antonio D’Ambrosio, “An Interview with John Sayles,” The Believer (Issue 61, March 2009)

Forty years ago today, in his third attempt, Ronald Reagan took the decisive step in his 12-year campaign to achieve the nation’s highest office when he accepted the Republican nomination for President. He would go on to move the GOP in a new, more conservative direction and solidify the support of the party faithful in a manner not seen until the rise of Donald Trump. 

The so-called "Rockefeller Republicans" of moderate liberals--named for the New York Governor who, 20 years before, had successfully pressed Richard Nixon to add a more pro-civil-rights stance to the party platform at that year's convention--were well on their way to dinosaur status.

With a genial smile and a wave of the hand, Reagan had also confirmed that the Republican commitment to civil rights that had been a part of its philosophy since Abraham Lincoln had considerably softened—or, at very least, had become secondary to its visceral dislike of government, the primary means for ensuring equality before the law.

In his acceptance speech at the convention, Reagan hailed "that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries." It is easy to miss from the sonorous tones that the word "racial" is missing from this list. From the perspective of 2020, it is much harder to miss a particularly piquant phrase: "a great national crusade to make America great again."

The role of racism in the GOP realignment that began with Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 is a fraught one. Arguing that race has been central to the swing toward the GOP over the last half-century is counter-productive, as it not only angers individuals who resent being labeled racist, but also fails to account for the concerns of particular elections, including prosperity and national security.

But the observation by filmmaker John Sayles offers another way of viewing this. After the postwar period of convulsions over race, much of the electorate preferred not to look at its continuing presence on the American scene. It was just too ugly and painful. Better to move away, even to block one’s view of this.

That tendency was embodied in Reagan. In a PBS “Newshour”roundtable discussion of "The Reagan Legacy" with Jim Lehrer following the President’s death in 2004, historian Richard Norton Smith noted that Reagan was “one of those classic examples of conservative Republicans who on the personal level would gift their shirt off their back to someone in need whoever it is but who on a cultural and philosophical level can often be accused of at least insensitivity.” He was personally kind to individual African-Americans.

In recent years, Reagan’s stock among historians has risen, with Siena College Research Institute poll results released last year showing that he had risen from 18^th in the last time these scholars were surveyed to 12^th. But I think that improvement will itself come in for revision, and that Reagan will slip back to something close to his prior ranking.

Although the U.S. economy recovered in the Reagan era, the results were not shared evenly. Inequality rose during his eight years in office, as shown by Capital and Main’s Abby Kingsley in an article for Fast Company Magazine. Numerous initiatives begun during his administration widened the gap between rich and poor, including:

* The Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981, which made hundreds of thousands of families ineligible for Aid to Families with Dependent Children;

* A 74% reduction in the budget allocation for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1980s;

*Reagan’s 1981 breaking of a strike by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which dramatically underscored the decline of American unions;

*The 1981 tax cut, which reduced the tax burden for the top bracket while redistributing it toward the middle; and

*Stock buybacks' legalization in 1981 by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which encouraged corporations to prioritize stock value over distributing earnings to employees through bonuses or salary raises.

African-Americans’ economic advances, only recently gained, were materially affected by all of this. Reagan’s tone and rhetoric likewise signaled that Blacks could not look to the federal government for help. 

Campaigning in Georgia in 1980, the candidate noted that Confederate President Jefferson Davis was “a hero of mine.” His continual invocation of “states’ rights” cut little ice with a group that had heard that concept used to undercut their rightful demand for their own rights at the ballot box and in the workplace.

Reagan's belief in laissez-faire government was matched only by his laissez-faire managerial style—a work practice that got him in trouble during the Iran-contra scandal. He simply did not notice things, much like the bus riders from outside Detroit who propelled him toward the Presidency in July 1980.

Whatever else happens this election year, there will be no more cardboard that can be used to obscure  problems experienced by African-Americans. It will be impossible to turn away from them again, and the burden will be all the heavier on Americans 40 years after the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to find the solutions that he did not see as a priority.