LBJ: 'If You Can Convince the Lowest White Man He's Better Than the Best Colored Man ...'

In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference of interests” between “the rich and poor”—“those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”—and of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would com

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“White nationalist” comes closer. Throughout his adult life Trump was hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. He was an equal-opportunity bigot. In his campaigns and in the White House he aligned himself publicly with hard-core racists in a way that set him apart from

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Bill Moyers recalled Johnson saying that he had delivered the South to Republicans “for your lifetime and mine,” which would turn the whole structure of politics on a fulcrum of color. In their direst visions, after the Goldwater convention followed hard upon the civil rights bill, neither established experts nor shell-shocked Negro Republicans ant

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Lyndon was the guy to see if you wanted to get a bill off the Calendar, Lyndon was the guy to see if you were having trouble getting it passed in the House, Lyndon was the guy to see for campaign funds. There wasn’t anything Lyndon was using these facts for as yet. But in ways not yet visible, power was starting to accumulate around him—ready to be

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