still others of this tradition left in positions of key influence: for example, Congressman
Jack Brooks of the ninth district of Texas, the salty chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee, who dared to subpoena Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to appear
before his committee with a ducis tecum of the documents of the Department of Justice
theft of computer software in the Inslaw case.
One of the continuing projects of George Bush's life has been the extirpation of precisely
this populist and sometimes dirigist group of Democrats, and their replacement with "free
enterprise" Republican ideologues, or financier Democrats of the Lloyd Bentsen variety.
The Texas and Oklahoma populist Democrats must be distinguished from their
colleagues of the Old South of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But for the Eastern
Liberal Establishment, it has proven more convenient to lump them all together under the
purveyed image of the racist, bourbon-swilling southern Congressional committee
chairman conspiring in cigar-clouded rooms to defy the popular will as expressed by the
television networks. All southern Democrats of the old school tended to have crippling
weaknesses on the race issue and on the question of union-busting. But on the other side
of the ledger, many southern Democrats had an excellent grasp of infrastructure in the
broadest sense: internal improvements like highways, canals, water projects, rural
electrification, quality accessible public education, health services, electric power
generation.
The nascent southern Republicans of the fifties and sixties, by contrast, were generally as
bad or worse than the Democrats on race and labor relations, and were at the same such
fanatics of Adam Smith's "free market" mystification that all government committment to
maintaining infrastructure, health care, and education went by the boards. The only
positive point left for some of these emerging southern Republicans, such as those who
folllowed Barry Goldwater in 1964, was a patriotic rejection of the machinations of the
Eastern Liberal Establishment as embodied most graphically in the figure of New York
Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Bush was indeed a Goldwater man in those days, as we
will see. But since Bush was himself an organ of that same hated Eastern Liberal
Establishment, he stood utterly bereft of redeeming grace.
The enterprise in which we now find Bush engaged, the creation of a Republican Party in
the southern states during the 1960's, (including the so-called post-1961 "two-party
Texas") has proven to be an historical catastrophe. In order to create a Republican Party
in the south, it was first necessary to smash the old FDR New Deal constitutent coalition
of labor, the cities, farmers, blacks, and the Solid South. As Bush complains in his
campaign autobiography:
"The state was solidly Democratic, and the allegiance of Texans to the 'party of our
fathers' became even stronger during the lean years of the Depression. The Democratic
campaign line in the 1930's was that the 'Hoover Republicans' were responsible for
unemployment and farm foreclosures; Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party
were said to be the only friends the people had." [fn 1]