Pointing to any of the handful of Black Republicans is pointless. There were always some slaves who were happy to do the bidding of their owners, and that sad fact has not changed.
The easy way to make the point is to note that the Party is voluntarily in thrall to their racist in chief, Donald Trump. Accounts of Trump’s racism are easy to find, for anyone who is willing to ignore the claim he made in declaring his candidacy that most Mexicans are rapists and murderers. That “Mexican” is not a “race” in the usual sense is irrelevant. The move is the same. Identify a group by an irrelevant characteristic and promise to heap discrimination on them.
A perverse success of the African American civil rights movement is that now, in the United States, there is no more grievous insult than to call someone a racist. Republicans now depend on the very human desire to avoid hurting people’s feelings to scream in highest dudgeon when anyone points out their obvious racism in order to forestall any real discussion of the important issue of racism in our society.
Mark Meadows (!), loyal Trump toady, vividly illustrated this cheap tactic during a hearing in the House of Representatives in 2019. Poor Mark then had to disavow his overtly racist comments alleging that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Um, whoops.
But this is just theater. Republicans owe essentially all of their political success since 1964 to the historical accident that it was a Democratic president who finally got major African American civil rights legislation passed, with Republican help, which pushed the “white supremacists” out of their historical home in the Democratic Party, over to the Republican Party, where Richard Nixon welcomed them with open arms and taught his fellow Republicans to win national elections by using dog whistle racism, a lesson they then relied on with gusto.
Until Trump came along. Trump used the racism part, but forgot the dog whistle part. But by that time, Republicans were stuck. They had spent forty years teaching their base that the federal government was useless for any purpose but national defense and that it only took money from poor, beleaguered white people and gave it to those supposedly lazy Black people. This was always an idiotic, obviously false claim. Numerically, white people were always the chief beneficiaries of any federal program, even if African Americans used them disproportionately because of lingering racism. This lie Republicans fed to their base allowed them to enact policies that actually harmed the very people who voted for them, but such was the power of the “white supremacist” logic that the ploy worked.
Every advance for African Americans meets with backlash. The election of Barack Obama looked like it might have been, and still does look like it was, the end of the “white supremacist” bargain’s efficacy. Trump was the backlash. Even Republicans who deplored Trump could not stop him, because doing so would require them to admit to the lie they had been telling for forty years and they had grown so intellectually and morally lazy that they could not think up an actual policy program to win elections without “white supremacy,” so they were stuck. They could have said loudly that they would not tolerate a candidate who picked on Mexican and Muslims as their Party’s nominee, but no one did. They could not afford such honesty.
Obama got Congress to enact the single biggest domestic policy reform since the Great Society of the 1960s with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which Republicans have excoriated for no good reason since it was just a bill on Capitol Hill. One obvious explanation for Republican opposition to the ACA was the fact that everyone identified it with our first Black president. But the more subtle reason they hate it is that it benefits African Americans disproportionately because they still fall out, as a class, at the bottom of every metric of social well being, including access to health care, so racist Republicans despise it. Trump is not the only indication of Republican racism. He is just the most obvious indication.
Trump lost the popular vote and only became president because of the good offices of an archaic, ineffective feature of our Constitution. But he was doomed to serve only one term because the demographic changes that had been underway since 1970, combined with the enormous incompetence of him and everyone who worked for him, ensured that, by 2018, his name was mud in American politics among the smart white people and the African Americans, who voted for him at the lowest rate of any identifiable group, and the manifest suffering he inflicted on the republic inspired anyone who had looked with indifference on his campaign in 2016 to hie themselves to the polls with alacrity, making his 2020 campaign a loser.
But, of course, his particular mental illness being what it is, he refuses to go quiet into that good night. So Republicans are still in the same bind as in 2016. Certainly, some prominent Republicans have publicly denounced Trump, but even they still seem to see some value in the Republican Party without Trump and are not willing to denounce as well the obviously racist efforts in multiple states to change election laws to make voting harder for Democrats in general, meaning harder for Black voters in particular, as the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party and the easiest subset of the population to identify and target with discriminatory election laws.
This is all perfectly grotesque and all thinking people should denounce it loudly. It is self limiting, however. Republicans have nothing that appeals to thinking white people. They offer only “white supremacy,” which no smart person wants to endorse. White people are pretty evenly divided between the “white supremacist” rump and the smart people. African Americans, obviously, but also Hispanics, Asians, and all other “minority” groups have no reason to vote for Republicans. They are a growing percentage of the population. The “white supremacist” rump will lose in the long run.
Culture is inherently conservative. That humans have survived this long means our ancestors must have done something right. Culture changes slowly, and it can cause the retention of practices that are noxious as well as those that are beneficial. We’ll be stuck with undue deference to racist white men for some time, despite the overwhelming historical evidence that they are selfish and bad for everyone else, and even bad for themselves.
The smart white people can only stand with our African American, Hispanic, Asian, Jewish, etc. neighbors and keep pushing the racist white men to the side. And not vote Republican.