Minority Control Quotes
The issue of who should vote in the new United States was a contentious one. Some thought that only people with a certain amount of property should vote because the poor did not have anything to protect. Franklin had even suggested that the House be elected by most men and the Senate by the rich. Actually, for many years Senators were perceived as the representatives of the wealthy compared to the house which represented the common people. The model most people knew then was the English Parliament where the House of Commons represented the common people and the House of Lords represented the nobility which was also an economic aristocracy.
In 1895, a Constitutional Convention was held in South Carolina in which there were no Republicans allowed and no Negroes despite the fact that 60 percent of the population at the time was Black. The constitution was do written that it would go into effect without being submitted to the people for any kind of ratification or approval. Essentially a tiny minority of wealthy white men of one particular persuasion not only determined the political future of the state, but also defined the requirements for voting so that this minority could perpetuate itself thereafter.
This is an important quotation because Buckley was the leading intellectual conservative of his day. And he held these racist views more than a decade after the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were passed. Buckley was an elitist with an Ivy League education, and he did believe that there was nothing inherent or permanent in the Southern Black inferiority, but there were few people of his educational level who had these racist beliefs. Not all conservatives of the time were as racist as Buckley. Even into the 21st century Conservative groups like the Tea Party had a strong but minority vestige of racism.
