Written for teleSUR English, which will launch on July 24

Many scholars and journalists agree that the largest single impediment to democracy in the USA has been racism. Black slavery, one of the foundations of the country’s wealth, was gradually confined to the southern states. After the alleged emancipation of the slaves, however, the southern white elites managed both to re-subordinate African Americans (as sharecroppers and low-wage laborers) and to limit the expansion of democracy in the US. Keeping black people politically and economically powerless allowed white southern rulers to limit what could be accomplished by progressives, not only in the southern states but nationally. The southern bloc in Congress prevented people of color from access to the welfare state created in the 1930s, helped capitalists confine and then shrink labor unions, and supported American military build-up.

All that is widely understood by most historians of the US. But few have registered how much a similar suppression of women’s rights has undergirded the reactionary force of racism. The alliance of sexism and racism is foundation in ultra-conservative politics today.

But before I get to the “tea party,” let me go back 150 years to look at earlier manifestations of that alliance, which laid down a residue upon which further conservative politics built. In the first half of the 19th century, the northern US movement for the abolition of slavery was disproportionately composed of women. The early women’s-rights advocates, such as Susan Anthony, Sara and Angelina Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Maria Stuart, were abolitionists first. Moreover, they were usually allied with the radical sector of abolitionism, associated with William Lloyd Garrison, which called for immediate emancipation and full political and civil rights for the freedpeople.

In fact, the first US women’s-rights movement arose from male abolitionists’ attempts to prevent women from participating in the anti-slavery movement. In the 1830s the more conservative white male abolitionists charged Maria Stuart and the Grimke sisters with unwomanly conduct because they sought to speak out publicly. In 1840 the same group of white men prevented women from participating in an international anti-slavery convention in London. It was women’s need to defend their right to participate that, literally, forced them to first articulate a women’s-rights perspective. Twenty years later, during the Civil War in the US (1861-65), female abolitionists agreed to suspend temporarily their agitation for women’s rights in order to devote themselves exclusively to work on behalf of emancipation and the welfare of the freedpeople. In return, they expected Lincoln’s Republican Party to support women’s right to full citizenship when the war ended.

After the war, the radical stream in the women’s-rights movement called for universal adult suffrage. Instead the Republican Party adopted the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, which enfranchised only black men. Women, black and white, were excluded, creating anger and embitterment among the abolitionists who supported women’s rights. Ugly clashes and name-calling developed between those who saw men-only suffrage as appropriate and those who supported full democracy. The ill feelings then solidified among the first group the view that women’s rights were a distraction, a divisive issue. In fact the divisiveness was created by the leading white men of the Republican Party, but many African Americans also came to see women’s claims as dividing their supporters.

Consider, however, the outcome: after a brief interlude in the 1870s, during which black men struggled to assert political power, disenfranchisement of African Americans continued for another century, until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Unraveling the anti-slavery coalition contributed to the withdrawal of the federal government from the south, leaving southern whites free to reassert a violent system of white supremacy. I am not suggesting that the exclusion of women was the main factor in the continuation of reactionary southern power, but it was surely a factor. Women’s rights would not only have doubled the black vote, but would have empowered women to do in the south more of what they were able to do in the north: building social citizenship through establishing educational and welfare institutions.

During the great depression of the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt built another powerful political coalition, composed of the working class and the urban middle class, including northern people of color, who could vote. But the Congress over-represented the white south, and those legislators formed a bloc that severely limited progressive legislation. Roosevelt’s dependence on the southern Congressmen stopped an anti-lynching bill and universal medical care, made the Social Security Act exclude most Americans—the vast majority of all women and all people of color—and weakened labor unions. Women who worked in Roosevelt’s administration were, in a pattern that would increase through the 20th century, pushing for more inclusive, more democratic legislation, but were marginalized and at times overruled in the political processes.

Now to the present situation. America’s “tea party” is the latest and most extreme iteration of a “New Right” designed in the late 1960s. All readers are surely aware that this conservative coalition has exploited the abortion issue with enormous success in its rise to power. It has created a small but disproportionately vocal constituency that considers abortion a greater evil than the hundreds of thousands the US has killed in its military interventions, the millions of children who live in poverty without decent education or medical care, the unnumbered adults who have suffered illness and death because they lack medical insurance, the millions of those without jobs who have exhausted their unemployment compensation, the secretaries and salespeople and waiters who often pay taxes at a higher rate than their billionaire employers.

The anti-abortion propaganda has, moreover, increasingly taken on a woman-hating tone. It calls abortion clients sluts, whore, frivolous, heartless, unwomanly. It charges that abortion destroys families, when in fact it probably protects them—the majority of aborting women are already mothers who have determined that they cannot afford more children. It treats abortion—and often, birth control too—as a women’s issue, when it is almost always a joint decision by women and men.

I said this strategy was “designed,” and that is literally true. The “New Right” was a strategy planned and articulated in the late 1960s, a strategy to crack open the 30-year-old Roosevelt coalition. Republican strategists, with their base in the south, understood that they could not elect a president without persuading some poor, working-class, and middle-class people to desert the Democratic party. This meant persuading them to ignore or overlook the Republican policies contradicted their economic interests. Republican leaders saw two issues that would help them distract voters from economic issues: racial desegregation and women’s rights.

By 1970 two overlapping social movements—civil rights and women’s liberation—had radically shifted the political terrain and threatened traditional white male interests. After school desegregation became law, thousands of southern white parents removed their children from public schools and created private, segregated Christian academies for them. Many of these people were evangelical Protestants. President Nixon ruled that segregated schools were not eligible for tax exemptions, so these parents could be mobilized to defend their schools. Republican activists Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie grasped this opportunity and developed an alliance with evangelical preachers Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones, arguing that this federal policy was an attack on religion and Christian values. (Jones argued that racial segregation was prescribed in the bible.)

Previously most Christian evangelical leaders had avoided politics; it was secular conservatives who drew them into politics. Moreover, more they were enlisted by these secular Republicans, evangelicals were by no means hostile to abortion. Starting in the late 1960s, 18 of the states in the US had repealed their prohibitions on abortion. As more and more women were in the labor force, and the majority of families came to depend on women’s earnings, reproduction control was necessary to family economies. Then in 1973 the Supreme Court invalidated bans on abortion. The Catholic hierarchy protested, but at first the evangelical leadership accepted these changes. In 1968 Christianity Today, the main evangelical magazine, labeled abortion as an acceptable means of maintaining family wellbeing. In 1971 and again in 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention, the most conservative evangelical group, encouraged its members to work for abortion rights in cases necessary to “the emotional, mental and physical health of the mother.” Tim and Beverly LaHaye, then the leading evangelical authors of marriage books, accepted abortion in their 1976 The Act of Marriage. As late as 1980, Ronald Reagan addressed evangelicals without mentioning abortion.

Weyrich and others persuaded the evangelical ministers to preach the evils of abortion. (Voluminous correspondence between Weyrich and Falwell illustrates this.) The Christian Right coalition they jointly created hit the jackpot with their slogans about the “unborn child” and his “right to life.” They were able to mobilize millions into a set of new beliefs, which symbolically expressed their anxiety about women’s freedom.

But it was the combination of anger about civil rights and feminism that gave this coalition its explosive and enduring force. That combination remains. Civil rights advances forced racist rhetoric intro private, but the election of Barak Obama re-energized it. From the moment Republican Congressman Joe Wilson shouted “you lie!” in the midst of Obama’s first Presidential address to Congress, two things were clear: that Obama would not be treated with the respect paid to all the white Presidents, and that the Right would oppose everything he tried to do.

Just as many conservatives simply cannot tolerate a black leader, so a heavily overlapping group cannot tolerate a world in which women make fundamental decisions. I do not suggest that racism and sexism are parallel. They are entirely different forms of domination. But they combine well.

That combination, of course, points directly to strategies for contesting it. The struggle born in North Carolina, “Moral Mondays,” is an example of bringing together a combination that rejects both racism and sexism and promotes. Led by an African American Christian minister, William Barber, this alliance has brought in both working-class and middle-class people, blacks and whites and Latino/as, college professors, high-school students, Christians, Muslims, Jews and atheists; but most importantly for this article, feminists and civil rights activists. In fact, its rank and file is disproportionately female. It may not be able to overturn North Carolina’s current Republican ascendancy, but it demonstrates the potential of an anti-racist and anti-sexist alliance—to be explored further in my next post.

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