THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THERE'LL COME A TIME | 2004-09-18

The white population is moving right and giving Republicans all their victories. Meanwhile the Republican Party is desperately trying to prove it isn't "racist" by knocking itself out to get some non-white votes it will never get.

The Whig Party tried to do the same thing in the middle of the last century as the issue of the expansion of slavery into the Western territories became central. The Whigs avoided the issue. They held the White House in 1853 and they were not even on the national ballot in 1856.

It won't happen that fast this time. But this time, it is happening to BOTH parties. When the Whig Party disappeared, the Democrats survived.

But if you look at "the white shift right," you begin to see that the white Democratic leadership depends more and more on the abject obedience of their faithful colored companions. If the Democratic Party wins a majority in Congress again, its leadership will be heavily black on the committees. And those Tontos might not forever settle for a white face at the top.

Can a party that is really run by minorities hold together? The NAACP has been taken over by blacks -- the NAACP never had a BLACK president until the 1970s! - and it has not exactly thrived. The NAACP is out fighting Confederate flags while even blacks admit they have far more pressing problems that organization is not in any way dealing with.

So let's face it. Soon there will be a white party and a party for the OTHER minorities. Republicans scream this cannot be true. Democrats scream that Republicans are not "appealing to" minorities, so they're racists.

In the real world our system becomes more racial every day. In the world that is coming, neither Republicans nor Democrats have any place.