Don’t blame me. I’m a Democrat. I grew up in it, just like I grew up in the Methodist Church. Everybody was a Democrat. There weren’t any Republicans, except for Cousin Nita next door, who taught us history in high school, smoked cigarettes, wore her husband’s old shirts and trousers to go fishing in her pond and drove a Studebaker.
The Democratic primary decided elections. The general election was irrelevant. The county unit system gave political power to the least populated counties in the state—the same ones that are now solidly for Trump. Eugene Talmadge was our Trump. Starting back in the 1930s, Talmadge built a political machine based on the belief that he was for the little man: the farmers on ruined land; the underpaid, unorganized mill workers; the people whose chief claim to self-respect was that they were white.
While championing the underclass, Talmadge took care of Georgia Power and the big Atlanta corporations and himself while continuously promising his adherents that Black people (not his words) would never be better than them.
While there were no Republicans except for a few liberals in the cities—Talmadge said he didn’t care if he never got a vote from any place where streetcars ran—there was an anti-Talmadge faction in the Democratic Party, people who were offended by Talmadge’s autocratic control of the state. They usually lost—big. The Talmadge dynasty was bequeathed to his son, Herman, and down through several lieutenants until the county unit system succumbed to the one man/one vote principle handed down by a pre-Trump Supreme Court.
Talmadge enjoyed the Trump-like reverence of his followers, expressed in the joke current at the time:
“Hey, I heard they gonna move Stone Mountain.”
“Sheeit. They cain’t move Stone Mountain.”
“Old Gene says they are.”
“Where they gonna put it?”
After Democratic President Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin and strengthened voting rights, the Talmadge Democrats in Georgia, along with their counterparts throughout the South, became Republicans, giving birth to that party’s “Southern strategy,” which has continued to be the implicit assurance to white Southern Republicans that national government policies will support their control of their states and their way of life.
That assurance was already working pretty well when Trump came along and was able to elevate that political principle to an article of faith, echoing what my Uncle Lawton’s friend Tack Torbert told him years ago: ”Lawton, what used to be considered crooked is now considered good bidness.”
It is astounding how pervasively Trump’s legitimization of undemocratic, bullying tactics has sifted down and become OK not only with national Republicans but also with state and local Republicans.
Here in Athens we live with the perfect example of that undemocratic bullying. I have written about it often because what happened here reflects what happened on the state level, where Republicans blatantly tried to steal the 2020 presidential election. Here in Athens, “our” local Republican legislators, abetted by a couple of our ACC commissioners, overturned the will of our people as expressed in democratic elections and redrew our election districts, making three of our most progressive commissioners ineligible to run for re-election. You know the mantra well. Republican State Sens. Bill Cowsert and Frank Ginn, along with Republican State Reps. Houston Gaines and Marcus Wiedower, tossed out three democratically elected Athens-Clarke County commissioners because local Republicans disagreed with their politics.
One of those commissioners, Melissa Link, outsmarted them by winning an open seat in her new district when the opportunity arose, though now the Republicans are running another candidate against her and against Carol Myers and for the empty seat in District 6, where Rashe Malcom appears to be the better candidate.
“Our” Republican state senators and representatives have gerrymandered their districts so that although they “represent” Athens, they are elected by district majorities in the heavily Republican counties surrounding Athens, and Athens can go to hell for all they care.
Wherever we have the opportunity, we should vote for candidates opposing Cowsert, Ginn, Wiedower and Gaines on principle, even if there is little chance at present of removing them from their safe and cushy seats. We can’t vote against “our” legislators until November, but early voting has started for the May 21 nonpartisan election, in which we can vote for Melissa Link, Rashe Malcom and Carol Myers to slow the Republican takeover of our local government. Under the circumstances, that’s a strategy that would even have been approved by Cousin Nita.
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