Dissensus Politics
A strategy for winning economic rights
In the week after his death, Martin Luther King was memorialized as both leader and symbol of the Southern black confrontation with white America, a confrontation of such moral clarity and intensity that it moved a majority of Americans to unite in support of the civil rights legislation of 1964 and ‘65. This interpretation confirms the widely held belief that Negroes cannot obtain justice unless they coalesce with other groups in a majority alliance - which means, of course, the national Democratic coalition. According to this view, it is the wishes of a majority that finally impel political leaders to act. The task, therefore, is to identify the issues and exchanges by which a unified majority
But the political dynamics of the Southern phase of the civil rights movement may have been quite the reverse of what is commonly supposed. We would argue that its legislative victories were not the product of a majority consensus, but of cleavage in the North-South Democratic coalition. The political impact of non-violent protests, of “moral confrontations,” was to widen that cleavage. The legislative concessions of 1964 and ‘6^ owed less to the numbers of people committed to the civil-rights movement - whether blacks or their white allies - than to the sharply divisive impact the movement had upon an already strained North-South Democratic partnership. And if this theory is correct, it may be that blacks and other minorities can also compel future gains from the majority coalition by threatening to disrupt it.
Negroes have been part of the Democratic coalition for almost four decades - that is, beginning with the reorganization of the Democratic Party during the elections of 1928 and 1932, when an alliance was struck between urban ethnic groups in the North and the traditionally Democratic South. In 1936, a majority of blacks voted Democratic for the first time, As members of that coalition, blacks have obtained minor concessions. In 1940, for example, a Roosevelt-oriented Supreme Court declared the white primary unconstitutional and in 1941 FDR established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Each concession to Negroes was fiercely resisted by Southern Democrats who succeeded in warding off civil rights legislation of any significance for nearly three decades.
