By Jamelle Bouie
Opinion Columnist
It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.
Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.
Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.
In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.
Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.
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You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”
What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.
There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.
In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”
“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.
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As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”
But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.
These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”
Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.
Opinion Columnist
It’s obvious. Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia, wants to be president.
Within months of taking office, Youngkin had already established two political organizations, Spirit of Virginia and America’s Spirit, meant to raise his profile in national Republican politics with donations and assistance to candidates both in his home state and across the country. In July, he met privately with major conservative donors in New York City, underlining the sense that his ambitions run larger than his term in Richmond.
Youngkin, a former private equity executive, is on a tour of the country, speaking and raising money for Republican candidates in key presidential swing states. And as he crisscrosses the United States in support of the Republican Party, Youngkin is neither avoiding Donald Trump nor scorning his acolytes; he’s embracing them.
In Nevada last week, Youngkin stumped for Joe Lombardo, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who acknowledges that President Biden won the election but says he is worried about the “sanctity of the voting system.” In Michigan, Youngkin stumped for Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who has repeatedly challenged the integrity of the 2020 presidential election. And later this month, in Arizona, Youngkin will stump for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican nominee for governor who accused Democrats of fraud in the state and says that unlike Gov. Doug Ducey, she “would not have certified” the 2020 election results.
Whether Youngkin agrees with any of this himself is an open question. In the 2021 Virginia Republican primary, he flirted with election denialism but never fully committed. What matters, for our purposes, is that Youngkin believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
You can sense, in conversations about the present and future of the Republican Party, a hope that there is some way to force the party off its current, anti-democratic path. You could see it in the outrage over Democratic Party “meddling” in Republican primaries. As the conservative columnist Henry Olsen wrote for The Washington Post in July, “True friends of democracy would seek to build new alliances that cross old partisan boundaries.”
What Youngkin — a more polished and ostensibly moderate Republican politician — aptly demonstrates is that this is false. The issue is that Republican voters want MAGA candidates, and ambitious Republicans see no path to power that doesn’t treat election deniers and their supporters as partners in arms.
There is an analogy to make here to the midcentury Democratic Party, which was torn between a liberal, Northern, pro-civil rights faction and a reactionary, Southern, segregationist faction. The analogy is useful, not because the outcome of the struggle is instructive in this case, but because the reason the liberal faction prevailed helps illustrate why anti-MAGA Republicans are fighting a losing battle.
In 1948, the mayor of Minneapolis — 37-year-old Hubert Humphrey — called on the hundreds of delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to add a strong civil rights plank to the party’s national platform. “To those who say we are rushing this issue of civil rights,” Humphrey said, “I say to them we are 172 years late.”
“The time has arrived for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” Humphrey added.
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
As the historian Michael Kazin notes in “What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party,” both “the speech and the ebullient, and quite spontaneous, floor demonstration that followed helped convince a majority of delegates — and President Truman, reluctantly — to include the civil rights pledge in the platform.”
But there were dissenters. A small number of Southern delegates left the convention in protest. Calling themselves the States’ Rights Democratic Party, they organized a challenge to Truman with Gov. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina at the top of their ticket.
These “Dixiecrats” were anti-civil rights and, for good measure, anti-labor. “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race, the constitutional right to choose one’s associates; to accept private employment without governmental interference, and to earn one’s living in any lawful way,” reads the States’ Rights Democratic platform, unanimously adopted at their convention in Oklahoma City the next month. We favor, they continued, “home-rule, local self-government and a minimum of interference with individual rights.”
Of course, this meant the maintenance of Jim Crow, the subversion of the constitutional guarantees embedded in the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the continued domination of Black Americans by a tyrannical planter-industrial elite.
Opinion | Glenn Youngkin Knows Exactly What He’s Doing
The governor believes he needs to cater to and actually support election questioners and deniers to have a shot at leading the Republican Party.
www.nytimes.com