By Vetoing Civil Rights Bill, Bush Signals Return of Intolerance : Race: The President abandoned 25 years of enlightened federal leadership on civil rights and exploited increased economic frustration.

President George Bush’s vetoing of the Civil Rights Act of 1990 in the middle of a protracted budget impasse is no coincidence. It was an economic act, seeking to restore legal rules prohibiting employment discrimination against blacks, women, immigrants and religious groups that were eviscerated by the Supreme Court in six recent cases.

But the veto reveals the GOP’s political efforts to exploit race as an answer to economic frustration, offering popular new meanings to old words and pushing the country to a point of racial division unimaginable just 20 years ago. By focusing on blacks in vitriolic sound bites that obscured the bill’s scope and meaning, the Bush Administration’s strategy signaled the return not of enlightened leadership in a time of pain, but the return of ugly.

On one level, Bush’s veto appears to follow his party’s Southern Strategy--an appeal to lower-middle- and working-class white voters, supporting their biases against public policies that favor blacks. With national elections near and faced with the damaging reversal of his pledge of “no new taxes,” Bush needed to secure the loyalties of the social conservatives and business groups responsible for his--and Ronald Reagan’s--presidencies. A firm stand against “quotas”--despite explicit language in the bill prohibiting them--may work like an electoral charm.

But on a deeper level, the veto represents a 10-year march backward in which Republican candidates have pounded the theme that blacks are largely responsible for the country’s economic downfall. Democrats were soft on race, spending lavishly on preferential policies that created the budget deficit, increased the payroll for public employees, brought crime to cities and subsidized the lazy. In historical terms, this is “backlash.”

In economic terms, these are hard times. Even before the savings-and-loan crisis and the current recession, U.S. voters have seen companies move overseas, the near destruction of unionism and the displacement of manufacturing workers ill-equipped for high-tech efficiency. Amid the rising costs of education, college campuses have battled over the inclusion of ethnic curricula, the eruption of overt racism and the withdrawal of funding for black-studies programs. Amid the cutbacks in federal aid to cities, homelessness and white flight have left them dangerous and penniless. The nation’s fiscal indebtedness is owed to efficient Japanese and West German competitors, whose homogeneity inspires envy. Voters everywhere talk about tossing out the incumbent bums. There is fear and anger in the land of plenty.

Hard times deserve harsh words, and Republicans have given old ones new meaning with great success at the polls. You don’t even have to say “black” anymore. Voters understand. “Redistribution,” once a policy term for investing equally in the disadvantaged, now represents “welfare.” “Welfare” means the “underclass.” “Underclass” now means undeserving black people. “Rehabilitation,” once a strategy for reforming criminals, now represents the evil of protecting the inhuman--presumably black. Call someone a “liberal” and prepare to fight. Call something “right wing” and you’d best be speaking of white folks. “Affirmative action” is “reverse discrimination,” pure and simple.

Translated into black, “racism” means “white supremacy.” Hating blacks is becoming politically fashionable again.

Enter David Duke. The appearance on the national stage of the Louisiana senatorial candidate and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan should not have surprised the GOP--though its repudiation of his candidacy suggested this. Duke speaks the language and understands the themes that reward white politicians in our time. He rallied voters against the “black welfare underclass” and sought “equal rights for the majority.” He attacked tax increases, affirmative action and lax criminal penalties. After running a grass-roots campaign, garnering$2 million in largely private donations, Duke lost with fully 44% of the vote--60% of all whites. Because of Duke’s ability to lure middle-class voters, as well as lower-income whites, “populists” similar to Duke might emerge in any of the political markets GOP strategists target in national contests.

Few of those markets include big cities, focus of much racism as official policy. Cities are associated with black residents, black leadership, black crime (mostly against other blacks) and Democratic strength. As whites have retreated to suburban enclaves, protected by zoning, politicians on the local and national level have attacked the urban drain on state and federal funds. After decades of black powerlessness at the hands of white political machines, and unable to penetrate suburbia, blacks are inheriting the spoils. Through massive cuts in social services and housing funds, first Reagan, and now Bush would have them pay dearly for the privilege.

The irony, however, is that civil-rights leadership has always looked to the federal government for equal rights, because local government is often hostile to the interests of the minority. Federal laws, like those envisioned in the Civil Rights Act of 1990, have worked to secure “protected classes” against discrimination by the majority. Such was the faith in the federal system until roughly 1980.

But if many white voters may say of blacks, “They get everything,” the current Supreme Court--in the language of the six cases meant to be overturned by the act--thundered back, “not anymore.”

Revising doctrines of employment discrimination established in the 1866 and 1964 Civil Rights Acts, the court told black plaintiffs to either put up (often irretrievable evidence) or shut up--admonishing them that, in cases of continuing racial harassment, there may be no remedy at all.

The court told women to sue fast or get lost, while encouraging white men to take their time before challenging affirmative-action plans. And the court counseled employers that, if they want to discriminate in hiring, they should remember to mix a few good reasons with their evil.

The ensuing tide of lawsuits by white men and the frequent dismissal of those by blacks and women is washing away the meaning of civil rights that so many fought for.

Something is wrong with the picture of reality painted by Bush, Duke, the Supreme Court and GOP strategists. Pick your economic indicator: joblessness, homelessness, health-care access, tax burdens, business enterprise. What we’re seeing in African-American communities since 1980 is calamity, not prosperity. Discrimination is still rampant at all job levels, as the presumption against black competence is fueled by hostile courts, insensitive media and inflammatory politicians. Even the heralded black middle class, which once benefited most from civil-rights laws, is disappearing from classrooms, boardrooms and living rooms across the nation. Far from kinder or gentler, Bush’s veto has taken blaming the victim to new heights of cruelty.

If during the 29 revisions of the Civil Rights Bill of 1990, voters had debated the meanings of its provisions, all would have appreciated what a historic bill it was. Rather than a “legalistic maze,” the bill protected women against the intentional discrimination so many work with every day. It honored the identities of religious minorities in the workplace and removed some of the vulnerability faced by immigrants on the job.

It was an economic bill designed to hold the line on principles and to celebrate, rather than castigate, the richness of our people--even during hard times. As the American public did 25 years ago, we must again assert, this time to Bush, “you ain’t gonna turn us ‘round.”