On polls being kept open so black people waiting in line could vote:

"This is an outrage!"

- - Senator Kit Bond, pounding the podium, November 7, 2000
Later, Bond alleged massive fraud by St. Louis voters

Anecdote is not the singular of data, just as a focus group is not a nationwide poll. But anecdotes and focus groups are useful. They provide a human clarity that raw numbers sometimes lack. They are the music to what would otherwise be only lyrics.

When the chair of a Republican committee in a small northern state quits the party, it means little by itself. It is an anecdote. But Ivan Marte's reasoning says something about what the GOP faces.

The Research 2000 poll comes out each week and is sponsored by a left leaning blog that conservatives love to hate. The Daily Kos is openly partisan and blatantly ideological. They are close to my heart. But their poll has gradually been seen as thorough and mainstream. It shows President Obama as steadily popular. The Democratic party is fairly unpopular, in a 5 to 4 split. The Republican Party is wildly unpopular by a 3 to 1 margin.

There is a bright spot for the GOP in one, and only one, part of the country. More southerners embrace the GOP than disapprove of it, by 50 to 37%. The problem with this is that the GOP remains an increasingly regional party.

This has two effects. First, it concentrates the electoral power of the party in one section of the country. In the west, the margin for the GOP is abysmal: 14% to 75%. In the Midwest it is absurd: 13% to 78%. In the Northeast, it has become comical: 7% to 87%. The immediate future is cloudy. Each election carries its own dynamic, and the bumps and storms of the moment provide uncertainty. Republicans may surge in the next midterm election, where rage can more easily prevail over popular support.

But the longer term trend has been going on for more than a decade. Basic attitudes have been shifting. The private scandal of President Clinton swung voters to support him in 1998, and to support Bush in 2000, although Gore still got a majority. The 9/11 attacks pulled Republicans to lopsided victories in 2002 and 2004. There were other factors through the years. But, beneath the surface, a series of incremental shifts have produced a tide.

Ivan Marte has been the chairman of Rhode Island Republican Hispanic Assembly. He has been an important member of the national central committee. He was prompted to resign because of South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's disrespectful screaming during President Obama's address to Congress. But his dissatisfaction goes back to a more general disrespect toward Hispanics. Xenophobia extends beyond immigrants.

As the Republican Party becomes captive to extreme conservative elements, moderates are leaving. As moderates leave, the party becomes more extreme. It is a vicious downward spiral. Ivan Marte's departure is not earthshaking. Rather, it is one small effect of an already growing earthquake.

It is an anecdote that explains the data.

On GOP condemnation of "extremist views" and "coarse rhetoric":

Well, if we’re going to eliminate extremist views and coarse rhetoric, those House GOP caucus meetings are going to become so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

- - Jay Bookman, in Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 5, 2009

The historical narrative was simple, and easy to understand. Slavery was evil. A Civil War was fought. Slavery ended. National reconciliation, disturbed from time to time by political opportunists who wanted to take advantage of a beaten and downtrodden region.

That is how textbooks read when I was a kid. The heroic Abraham Lincoln, the best President in our history, was assassinated. His chosen successor, Andrew Johnson, tried to carry out Lincoln's moderate, healing, policies. He was thwarted by radical Republicans led by New York Representative Thaddeus Stevens. They oppressed the South for many years. They impeached Johnson on bogus charges and failed by a single Senator's vote to remove him from office. A healing track continued after that. Slavery was replaced by lynchings and violence, which moderated into Jim Crow oppression. It took until the 1960s, but discrimination disappeared after that.

It is a wonderful story. And it is largely untrue, a caricature of what actually happened. Andrew Johnson was a relentless foe of racial tolerance. The idea of equality between former slaves and former slave owners was an abomination to him. The Freedman's Bureau was an administrative structure set up by Lincoln to safeguard the rights of black people. One of the major "oppressive" measures of the Bureau was allowing black people to testify in court. Johnson tried to abolish the agency, but he was overridden by Congress. Johnson spoke out against equality at every opportunity. His fiery speeches were sometimes followed by the strange fruit of later song: black bodies swinging from nooses off the branches of trees.

The Freedman's Bureau was ended as part of a deal in 1876 to install Rutherford B. Hayes as President, in spite of the fact that the other fellow, Samuel Tilden, got more votes. In the 1880s, slavery was re-established in the south. The institution of involuntary servitude, slavery, petered out in the 1940s. It survived that long by being ignored by the federal government. The unrefined fuel was a public craving for an end to the issue of war and slavery.

That craving accounts for the false history we were taught. Historians were captives of the same slavery fatigue. They provided the raw material for what ended up in the textbooks of the next generation. And so we were taught polite lies. Only now is diligent historical research digging up the truth.

We have a new national narrative, building on the old falsehoods. America has entered into a post-racial period. The original sin of slavery and racial injustice is gone. All that are left are small little puddles of mild prejudice.

We don't want to see the truth. It is hard to admit the degree to which current right wing rage, the sort which drowns out reasoned conservative voices, is fueled by the same raw racism that has been with us since the beginning.

Not all, to be sure. But one hell of a lot of it.

Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude.

Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel Corp.—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

- - Douglas A. Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name, March 25, 2008

Conservative Christians rally in Washington this weekend. They believe themselves and their pronouncements to be firmly rooted in the Bible. Lower taxes on the wealthy, opposition to the science of climate change, and even military strategy are said to be endorsed by Jesus. God loves you and joins in your hatred of Obama, Government, and Gays.

Part of it comes from upbringing. When one is told from childhood that something is so, it takes a rare courage to challenge it later in life. It is easy to think it comes from God. Mark Twain wrote of his mother:

...compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it, but if there were any that disapproved it they had not been quoted by her pastors; as far as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity, and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.

The right has long recognized the utility of conflating personal politics with the Will-Of-God. The effect has been amplified by technology. Cable stations frequently present bigots as representatives of our faith. This delights conservatives and repels good people who are tempted to believe such presentations. While studies show America becoming more spiritual, worship attendance shrinks. This emotional reaction also has its roots. Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and eventual friend of Abraham Lincoln:

The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors ... They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings...

The practice of self-congratulatory belief has become a tradition. In 1928, Will Rogers reacted to the GOP anointing itself as the Party of God. "If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it's been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking."

There are signs that more Christians are turning away from the preachings of political bigotry. If those now outside the walls see that they can of toss out the hatred, but grasp the message of Jesus, fellowship may grow again.