COLUMN LEFT / LINDA R. HIRSHMAN : GOP Strategists Shouldn’t Be a Bit Surprised : Riots result from 25 years of crafting a party for white people.

Months before the Rodney King trial began, civil-rights activists contacted the Justice Department to ask its participation in prosecuting the policemen, as the federal civil-rights laws give them ample reason to do. Instead, the Bush Administration put the matter on the back burner.

In back-burnering a civil-rights issue, the Bush Administration was merely following a Republican policy, now 25 years old, of being the national party of white America. It is a policy that has served the GOP well. Since people figured out that Republicans were not associated with fair treatment for blacks, the Republicans have won every presidential election, save 1976.

The Republicans knew exactly what they were doing. Before they drew the cloak of coded language over their race-driven agenda, Richard Nixon’s campaign strategist Kevin Phillips said it straight: It was the “Negro socioeconomic revolution”--blacks’ newly voiced claims to a share of American life--that broke up the Democrats’ New Deal coalition.

By the time George Bush ran for President, the racial strategy was more offensive than defensive, with Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater promising to “put that Willie Horton guy” on the Democratic ticket. Polled in 1988 by the frustrated Democrats, whites defecting from the party revealed that their switch to the GOP was almost entirely driven by race.

George Bush started his political career years ago in Texas with a moderate position on race. But, as the winning strategy became clear, Bush, who has said repeatedly that he would do anything to win an election, moved steadily to the racial right. With a majority of Republican appointees, urged on by Bush’s Justice Department, the Supreme Court has essentially dismantled the agencies of racial justice, in recent years even lifting court bans on school segregation that started the quest for racial justice almost 40 years ago. This year, the Democrats, starved for a victory after a generation of Republican racial triumphs, have also sought to turn away from the claims of black Americans. It is small wonder that 12 jurors in a largely white-populated suburban county thought they were free to find that there was nothing the police could not do to a black man in their power.

The Republican racial strategy has well served George Bush and most wealthy Americans, who are disproportionately represented in the Republican Party. Riding the wave of racial realignment of the electorate during the last decade of Republican national governance, the wealth of the top 1% of American almost doubled, while the white working and middle classes advanced almost not at all.

These are ill-gotten gains. The day after the jury verdict in the King case, George Bush extolled the “rule of law” and “our system of jury trial.” Not so. The King verdict and the ensuing destruction of life and property in Los Angeles shows that fragile liberties like the rule of law and jury trial don’t succeed on their own. Nor can they depend on the common people alone.

They require leaders of virtue, to use an old-fashioned word, who would not use race, even disguised with coded language, as the shaping force of a political party. The rule of law and jury trial are too fragile to save a society pervasively sick with the disease of race, governed by men who will do anything to win an election.