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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Affirmative Action and Helter Skelter: The through-line from Charlie Manson to the Woke White Liberal

Epistemic Status: stoned rant while half watching a Christmas movie. TLDR: Manson's insane racial theories were based on the prophecy of a great racial war, the whites would lose and be exterminated by the Blacks, the Blacks would find themselves incapable of ruling the world and pass power back to the surviving whites in the Manson family. Woke upper class whites who support affirmative action have the same beliefs, only instead of surviving in a giant underground city in Death Valley, they will hide behind wealth and class and ivory tower qualifications.

If you don't know the story of the Manson Family, I highly recommend Karina Longworth's podcast on the topic. It's very good, highly listenable, fairly objective, and gets into a lot of the cultural setting especially around Hollywood. If you want to hear the conspiracy takes, Chaos is extremely good and very extensive, but comes to no conclusions, even the author doesn't know what happened. (It also pairs well with Family of Secrets to follow JFK rabbit holes)

What a lot of people don't realize about Manson, that I think a study like Longworth's makes clear, is that Charles Manson's manipulations of the young women in the Family were mainly a witchy 60s psychedelic take on traditional mid-century Black pimping techniques. The kind of stuff Iceberg Slim wrote about, which is also a book I recommend. Manson manipulated young runaways into sleeping with who he told them to when he told them to, acquired male hangers-on by leveraging sexual access to his young female runaways. The male family members who worked and fought for him, drug suppliers who provided him with acid and speed, and rich men who provided him with housing and money and recording opportunities were all really just interested in fucking the Manson girls. A poorer, dirtier gentile Epstein with a guru bent.

Part of his act was this big Helter Skelter prophecy, much of which was a racial ideology that inherent white superiority will out. Manson, who spent much of his life in prisons and reform institutions, hated Blacks viscerally. He thought them animals, but physically superior and ferocious animals. The diminutive Manson was a frequent target of assaults and rapes in juvenile facilities as a teenager, many by Black inmates. He would famously carve a Swastika into his forehead, and join the Aryan Nation in prison after the Family trials; most thought this was a departure from popular portrayals as a peace and love hippy, but that kind of semi-mystical white supremacism was already the Family's ideological base.

Manson saw the racial conflicts of the 1960s and used that as the apocalypse that his followers would be protected from by following his teachings. He taught that a great racial war was coming, Helter Skelter, that the United States would break down into civil war over treatment of minorities, and that ultimately the militant Blacks would exterminate the white race, both the liberals and the conservatives. The only surviving whites would be the Manson Family, hidden in a bottomless pit/hidden city in Death Valley. The victorious Blacks would be unable to rule a sophisticated society without whites, and discovering the surviving whites they would gratefully pass power back to Manson and his followers, who would rule the new world. It was an insane fantasy, peddled to drug addled teenagers to explain why they should follow this shaggy ex-con who fed them acid and sodomized them. Whites were so superior to Blacks that even after the majority of Whites were exterminated, the handful of special white survivors would rule the world. Subtext: it is good that the Blacks will destroy all of white straight society for us, clearing out the dead wood so that we noble enlightened whites can rule. Stop me if this feels familiar.

A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harvard Law, like the Manson family, believes so firmly and mystically in his own superiority that no white loss in a racial conflict can rattle him. He believes in his superiority as a talented white kid as firmly as he believes in gravity. He is one of the Great and the Good, his talent got him here, giving tithes to those inferior to him will only enhance his stature. After all, if I'm a white kid with a 165 LSAT who can't get into a T14, every 160 LSAT Black kid who gets in is a spot that could have been mine, I coulda been a contenda if only things were different. But if I already got in, if I'm confident that my 179 LSAT is such that I always will get in to whatever I want, then I'd rather a less qualified kid got in than a more qualified one. If you're trying to get into a class of 800, ever non-merit spot is a spot you lose, I go from having 800 chances to get in to 600 chances to get in. If I'm already in a class of 800, every non-merit spot is a kid who isn't competing with me anymore for the top spot, I go from competing to be 1/800 to competing to be 1/600. Let the Blacks push out the whites and the Asians, the Blacks won't be able to compete with me anyway. If we're all at a firm together, my pedigree and my talent are worth more the fewer people exist with my pedigree and my talent. Affirmative action at top schools is a way to narrow the field of actual competitors from that school.

This is Manson warmed over, the parallels are striking, true white supremacy is the absolute faith that talent resides in the white and that talent will out, the beliefs that so many of my white classmates had after three beers. Let the race war happen, let the Blacks destroy the unenlightened whites, and at the end the enlightened whites will rule because they will be the only alternative left. This is woke racism, let less talented kids get in to competitive schools, it just makes the real spots that much more competitive. The more of the real competition is eliminated, the easier it will be for me. Rather than hiding in a bottomless pit in Death Valley, they believe they will hide in the ivory towers, too talented and too connected to be dislodged by unfair policies. Keep just enough of a meritocracy, and the really talented kids will succeed and have interest in changing the status quo to help those below them, and the less talented kids who fail under the fakakta meritocracy probably aren't talented enough to make a difference anyway. The great and the good will always be on the side of the status quo as long as the critical mass of talented kids are hoovered up.

They might find this strategy works less effectively than they think it will. Like Hezekiah in Isaiah 39:8, to whom in was prophesied that his sons would be eunuchs in a foreign court, and nonetheless replied that the Lord's prophecy was good for there would be "peace and truth in my days." Apres moi, le deluge. Their talent is less of a protection than they think it is. The affirmative action kids at my schools often blossomed just as well once they got there, the dirty secret isn't that AA lets in less talented kids, but that admissions criteria are mostly a farce anyway when it comes to real life talent. The white kids that got in are mostly just as good as the kids who didn't five years down the line.

I doubt this. AA defenders are not secret believers in HBD, they genuinely drink their own 'shine 'bout systemic racism. Call it willful ignorance or whatever you want.

As for why they're systemically ignorant, if you want to go searching for hidden motivations I'd wager it's more feeling threatened by red tribe elites and less actual belief in their own superiority. AA is a great tool for making admissions less meritocratic, after all, which appears to be the real goal.

Yea. Classical liberals like to float the "Baptists and bootleggers" thesis. Not everyone is secretly some kind of bootlegger. There are Baptists.

There's also people who find offending the baptists a pretty strong motivator in doing whatever it is that offends the baptists- the church of satan is basically an extreme form of this- too. Yes, the red tribe does the same thing it's just usually harder to distinguish from just being baptists compared to the church of satan.

Tribal hatred and personal convictions hold a huge percentage of our society's reasons for doing things and we don't like to acknowledge that.

By the way I'm not disagreeing with you. I just wanted to expand on your point.

Charles Manson's manipulations of the young women in the Family were mainly a witchy 60s psychedelic take on traditional mid-century Black pimping techniques.

Really? I guess Epstein was just doing cultural appropriation. You might as well describe securities fraud as an "early 20th century Italian technique." Or, hell, voter canvassing gets to be a "traditional Irish political technique."

Manson had a particularly dramatic implementation of the world's oldest patronage network. Like various other contemporary organizations, this involved copious amounts of sex and/or drugs. This does not, in fact, imply a cultural inheritance from black pimping to Manson to affirmative action.

Any theory relying on comparing your outgroup to history's villains should be subject to strict scrutiny. One that relies on "subtext" exactly opposing their stated beliefs? Stricter.

Enjoy your movie.

Really? I guess Epstein was just doing cultural appropriation. You might as well describe securities fraud as an "early 20th century Italian technique." Or, hell, voter canvassing gets to be a "traditional Irish political technique."

No, Manson himself in interviews and conversations with contemporaries talked about being fascinated by Black pimps he met in prison, and their systems of control. That one isn't just a matter of drawing parallels, it is literally that Manson said that was what he wanted to do when he got out of prison, and then he formed the Family, and pimped the women out. I highly recommend the podcast I linked and the book Pimp.

I stand corrected. Cognitive dissonance really wasn’t an obstacle to this man, was it?

Manson was clearly psychotic so of course he had little trouble avoiding cognitive dissonance.

But why would anyone have any dissonance on this particular issue? Acknowledging that your enemies, which have repeatedly bested and humiliated you, have at least some nifty techniques worth copying is adaptive and sane. In fact, it's ressentiment, reactive self-conceptualizing as the antithesis of everything your enemies stand for and practice, that isn't. Japan became a superpower (for a brief moment) by virtue of humility and aping Anglo-British institutions and the very Western epistemology. Russia, for a very long time one of the biggest players, has long been handicapped by the opposite ideology, and now is turning itself into a nuclear-armed Afghanistan. If you're committed to a life of crime, you've got to follow the lead of successful criminals. Manson couldn't really compete with major mafias, so Black pimps were an adequate role model, and one he was better-positioned to learn from.

A lot of online rightists find it insane that any white people support affirmative action. White students are evenly split on affirmative action, despite being its putative victims. This support only increases as one reaches more selective schools, where affirmative action is harshest in action. Why is this? Because a liberal white student at Harv

I am strongly opposed to AA on principle, but I think conservatives/rightists overestimate how much of an impact it has. Jews and Blacks are still only 2% and 13% of the country respectively, a figure that has not changed much in a long time. And of those blacks, maybe just a third are up for consideration for top spots in society anyway, so we're talking maybe 3-5%. So Most whites will be competing against other whites for those top spots, whether competitive schools or competitive jobs. you look at the racial composition of top companies. maybe a handful blacks out of hundreds of of non-blacks, figures consistent or lower than national average. Not many whites being displaced on an absolute basis. If you didn't get 'in', odds are a more qualified white took that spot, not an underqualified black.

The issue here is that we are talking about competition inside PMC class, which would be around 35% of the population and, also for the top jobs inside that class which may be around 1-5%. And I do not think it is solely about official AA legislation, there is also a push for more women and minorities in these positions without any legal pressure. I think there may be some merit to this theory, I have observed similar phenomenon of managers hiring mediocre people to prevent a situation when they basically rise their own replacement. If doing so even increases your prestige as a fighter for DEI initiative and a good ally, it has a lot of upsides.

Black and Jews are still only 2% and 13% of the country respectively

You've got your minorities backwards and this isn't India.

(Also, I assume Jews are the «Woke White Liberals who make it into Ivies regardless» in 5HP's framing).

fixed

I feel trapped in In Bruges, around the part with the cocaine and the Midget.

Charlie Manson was a man who believed in himself, right up to the end. To quote Chesterton from "Orthodoxy":

Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ` Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus."

Manson was exactly that type; part criminal, part con man, but with a belief in his own unrecognised worth that if only he could get the attention of those in power, would give him the life on easy street that he deserved. So he naturally jumped on the counter-culture bandwagon, but what made him stand out was that he did have a philosophy, crazy as it was, which he believed in (though it was at its foundation a belief that 'I am the greatest') and which gave him that aura of conviction that gurus need.

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't worry--they're coming for the lawyers, too.

The democrats aren't the real racists, you can't beat universalism with slightly-different-universalism, and progressives support AA mostly out of a genuine (even if incorrect, confused, or inverted) desire to help historically-oppressed black people. People who couldn't get into harvard still support affirmative action at harvard!

The democrats aren't the real racists

Yale researchers would like to have a word. White liberals basically dumb down their language when talking to minorities. I think that this take that white liberals have "white savior" complex, and that they see minorities basically as pets to be taken care of is nothing new. In fact, I think it is one of the worst forms of racism as it hides behind façade of supposed compassion and caring. The true vitriol is shown when pets disobey and go against what their masters want - as with infamous Biden's you ain't black if you don't vote for me take. It could also support the OP's thesis that white liberals may not see minorities as true competition.

The democrats aren't the real racists

:Doubt:

I've said this before but I'm going to keep saying it. Whether it's men in white hoods setting fire to minority neighborhoods in 1920 or men in black hoodies setting fire to minority neighborhoods in 2020 the Democratic party is and always has been the party of the lynch mob.

Whether it's "Jim Crow" or "Safe Spaces" the Democrat party is and always has been the party of segregation.

I suspect that if you were to ask progressives who believe that AA is necessary, why is it necessary? a good chunk of them would reply with something about "systemic inequality" and how blacks are not going to succeed on their own merits.

I don't know what your definition of racism looks like, but all of that sounds pretty damn "racist" to me.

Whether it's "Jim Crow" or "Safe Spaces" the Democrat party is and always has been the party of segregation.

Ignoring the notable shift in the composition of America’s two major political parties that took place under the Southern strategy paints a very inaccurate picture. ”Has always been,” only works if you want to stop time before the middle of the 20th Century.

You mention Jim Crow, but fail to mention that Goldwater and Nixon deliberately made appeals to the southerners who wanted to retain it, and successfully brought a significant portion under the Republican tent.

The alleged shift in the composition of America’s two major political parties is vastly overstated, see other comments in this thread.

By "Democrats aren't the real racists," OP obviously meant current Democrats, or, really, given the subject at hand, liberals. it is common knowledge that, decades ago, Democrats, or at least Southern Democrats, were racial conservatives. The Republican Party practically did not exist in states like Mississippi. It is just as obvious that, starting in the 40s and accelerating after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, conservatives began migrating to the Republican Party.

And, if you don't understand that Progressives support AA because they think that both current and past discrimination holds African Americans back, you need to check the relevant polling

It is just as obvious that, starting in the 40s and accelerating after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, conservatives began migrating to the Republican Party.

That is not obvious when you look at the actual voting patterns. Quickly sanity check by looking at the presidential election outcomes, and see how much support you find for this version of events. 20 of the 22 southern Senate seats that voted for the CRA stayed Democrat for the next 20 years. They didn't start flipping Red until Reagan appealed to them as evangelicals. And even then, Clinton carried the south in 1992. A lot of those old racists stayed Democrat voters until they died, or at least well into retirement age, because unions, or FDR won the war.

There was a story from the 2008 campaign, about a canvasser for Obama in rural Pennsylvania who knocked on a door in a rural home. An elderly woman answers. The canvasser asks who they're voting for. The woman calls out, "Honey, who are we voting for?", and the presumed husband is heard to holler back "The n*gger!" And the woman smiled sweetly at the canvasser and reiterated, "We're voting for the n*gger." This story was told in a tone of awe at the Nyarlotep-tier charisma of Barack Obama, that he could inspire even these racist, sexist old assholes to vote for Hope and Change. But I think it's pretty likely that they had just been voting for whoever was a [D] since double-ya double-ya two, and if a yellow dog, why not a black guy?

It is indeed obvious when you look at voting for President, and when you look at pcts for other races.

I don't understand your reference to 20 of the 22 southern Senate seats that voted for the CRA. Only 1 Southern Senator voted in favor, and he was from Texas.

Clinton most certainly did not carry the South in 1992. Certainly not the deep South. As I noted elsewhere, the deep South did not vote even once for the Republican Party from the end of Reconstruction through 1960. Not even during the Eisenhower landslide. Yet from 1964 till now, the have instead almost never voted Democratic.

Sorry, that is an annoying amount of imprecise language and memory drift on my part. The stat living in my head was "20 of the 22 Southern Democrat Senate seats stayed Democrat for 20 years after the CRA"; the bit about "voted for" is superfluous and doesn't even make sense. And of course, trying to look it up is hopelessly confounded by results for "2022 Senate election". So, doing this the awkward way and just looking up the maps for every Senate election from 64 onward, I think the general point weakly holds.

Georgia doesn't elect a Republican to Senate until 1980. SC elected a Democrat to Senate in 1964, then confirmed in a special election in 1965. Strom Thurmond won in 66 and stayed in office forever, but the other NC Senate seat was Democrat-held until 2004, the first time a Republican held that seat since Reconstruction.

North Carolina Goes Democrat in 66, 68, then a Republican in 72, and a Democrat in 74 (that seat flips in 80).

Alabama votes D in 66, 68, 72, 74, 78 (twice!), flips R in 80, but goes back to D in 84 and 86, 90, 92, before flipping R again in 96-98.

Mississippi votes D in 64, 66, 70, 72, and 76. Flips R in 78, but D again in 82. That D seat flips R in 88.

Louisiana doesn't send a Republican to the Senate until 2004.

Texas is split 1/1 until 1994.

Florida is D in 64, R in 68. The Democrat seat stays blue until 88. The R seat flips back and forth a few times until it stays blue for a 3 election stretch ending in the 00s.

Tennessee does some complicated flipping between both seats, but doesn't seem to settle on R until 94.

Arkansas doesn't elect a Republican to Senate until 1996.

Missouri elects it's first Republican in 76, and seems to lock into that side during the 80's.

Overall, it looks like the "switch" happens in the late 70s into the mid-90s.

In presidential elections, only a few deep south states vote for Goldwater in 64. 68 is hopelessly confounded by Democrat-cum-Independent George Wallace. 72 Nixon carries basically everything, but in 76 Jimmy Carter takes the entire South. Reagan only loses GA in 80, and crushes in 84, which Bush replicates in 88; these wins, like Nixon's are so generally decisive that it's hard to chalk them up to regional-specific trends.. In 92 and 96 Clinton is at least strongly competitive in the South, winning about half the Southern states each time, and coming within 5ish points for most of the others. The South only really locks in as "Red States" with GWB.

This article takes a deeper look. Some money quotes:

This is why we see such little change from the general trend post-1964, even with the end of Jim Crow's strange career. Republicans picked up a few Congressional seats. J. Strom Thurmond became a Republican, and a few other prominent Democrats followed suit. But the Southern Congressional delegations continued to be dominated by Democrats. Almost all of the signatories to the Southern Manifesto remained Democrats until they left Congress. Some, like Russell Long and John Stennis served as Democrats into the 1980s. When Haley Barbour ran against Stennis in 1982, he lost by a nearly 2:1 margin. George Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama as a Democrat in 1982.

Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the South, but this was hardly exclusively about race -- McGovern was to the left of you average Southern voters on just about every issue imaginable. Four years later, Jimmy Carter was still able to carry every Southern state except for Virginia in 1976. As late as 1988, the South was still considered something of a swing region (the reason that Lloyd Bentsen was included on the ticket). Bill Clinton carried four Southern states in 1992, and came within five points of carrying four others. Republicans didn't make real progress in the Congressional delegations until the 1990s; even then the transformation continued into the 2000s.

In the statehouses, the transformation was likewise slow. Table I shows the percentages of Republicans in the state legislatures from 1962 through 2002. Some states' Republican parties grew significantly in the 1960s, but for the most part, big gains for the Republicans don't come until the 1980s and 1990s:

Regardless, it is indisputable that it was his generation, and not Thurmond's, that finally changed the political complexion of the South. Did race still have something to do with it? Almost certainly. But you also can't ignore that the South was by that point aligned with the national Republican Party on a wide expanse of issues relating to taxes, anti-communism, school prayer, abortion, the counterculture, Vietnam . . . the list goes on. Chalking everything up to the Civil Rights Act is overly simplistic, to the point of being incorrect.

So, yes, there is definitely something to this story, the Southern Strategy clearly had some effect, even if it seems like it was mostly alienating black voters. But this story Democrats tell themselves that "And then one day, for no reason, all the good people and all the bad people switched teams" is mostly copium and deflection from their party's history, which by their normal standards ought to utterly damn them.

But this story Democrats tell themselves that "And then one day, for no reason, all the good people and all the bad people switched teams" is mostly copium and deflection from their party's history, which by their normal standards ought to utterly damn them.

Well, that is not the story I told, and more generally, this does not address the very clear reality that, while in the past social conservatives were Democrats, that is obviously no longer the case, so, whatever the specific details, the claim that "Democrats are the racists because most racists were Democrats sixty years ago" is not a very honest claim. So, no, the party's history should not "damn them," because both parties have different compositions than they did in the past.

Well, that is not the story I told

Then we are watching two very different movies. That's the story I imbibed growing up and there may still exist the cringy teenaged political rants on LiveJournal to prove it. I get annoyed at this discussion because I'm coming with the embarrassed energy of the deconverted. More generally, I think if I rephrased it less snarkily, something like "After the CRA, basically all of the racists immediately switched to the Republican party and stayed there ever since", the median Redditor would agree, and further agree that all educated people know this is true history.

while in the past social conservatives were Democrats, that is obviously no longer the case, so, whatever the specific details, the claim that "Democrats are the racists because most racists were Democrats sixty years ago" is not a very honest claim.

At this point we're a little deep in the woods, in terms of multiple people jumping into a conversation. The "newest posts" feed is great for murdering time, but contributes to this sort of situation. To clarify, I'm not saying the quoted bit above, but I am saying that many of the racist Democrats from 60 years ago stayed Democrats in the wake of the CRA, and many who did switch did so more for other reasons ranging from religion to foreign policy, over the course of that 60 years. Hlynka, by contrast, was making a separate claim that Democrats are a party of public disorder and violent race baiting, and that this is core enough to the meme cluster "Democrat Party" to be common between old social-con Klansmen and new woke-prog antifa.

So, no, the party's history should not "damn them," because both parties have different compositions than they did in the past.

This is a very isolated demand for rigor. Dems damn the Republicans for the Southern Strategy and the United States in general for slavery and historical racism, but BlushingFlowerMeme.jpg regarding their own party's history as the party of slavery, the party of the Klan, and the party of Jim Crow. I'm certainly amenable to "the past is a different country" arguments, but the folks who toppled statues of abolitionists because they don't actually know who the person was don't get a free dodge for that accusation of hypocrisy.

More comments

In case you didin't catch the references to "safe spaces" and "men in black hoodies setting fire to minority neighborhoods in 2020", I am also talking about current Democrats.

Furthermore I'm going to have to object to your casual conflation of conservatism with racism. I get that it's kind of the default here, but still...

...All this nonsense about the "parties switching sides" is horseshit. A lie spread by liberal college professors and a complicit media. The coalition business-owners and preachers that defeated segregation and backed the civil rights act was largely Republican and has remained so. Likewise it's not modern conservatives who are pushing segregation, trying to get MLK canceled or claiming that "color blindness is the real racism", it's progressives. Conservatives didn't migrate to the republican party, as most of them had been republican from the start. What happened was that the old southern democrats died off and the new democrats realized that they needed to change their image if they wanted to remain relevant.

I am also talking about current Democrats.

I know you are talking about current Democrats. That's the point.

Furthermore I'm going to have to object to your casual conflation of conservatism with racism

I did not once accuse anyone or being racist. I used the term "racial conservatives" for a reason, to distinguish that from economic conservatives, but if you would prefer, we can say "social conservatives," who are obviously more at home in the Republican Party nowadays.

All this nonsense about the "parties switching sides" is horseshit

Yet, somehow, the states of the Deep South, which did not vote even once for a Republican from the end of Reconstruction until 1960, suddenly in the first election after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed have voted Republican and have done so in virtually every election since then (of course, in 1968, they voted instead for George Wallace, who ran on a segregationist platform). And, somehow, leading segregationists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms moved from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Moreover, somehow, at the same time, African American support for Republican presidential candidates plummeted. . Either they were too stupid to know where the parties stood on racial issues, or you are mistaken.

Yet, somehow, the states of the Deep South, which did not vote even once for a Republican from the end of Reconstruction until 1960, suddenly in the first election after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed have voted Republican

Except this is simply not true. In 64 the south voted for LBJ, in 68 George Wallace split the Democratic party vote between strict segregationists and not, handing Nixon the presidency. In 72 the Southern States voted for Nixon, but then so did every other state in the union with the exception of Massachusets. In 76 the south votes for Carter, a democrat. In 80 the southern electorate ends up split between Reagan and Carter with Reagan eeking out a narrow victory. In 84 Reagan wins reelection handily, repeating Nixon's trick of winning 49 out of 50 states (this time with Minnesota as the hold-out). In 88 the south votes for Bush Sr. who runs as Reagan's heir apparent. In 92 the south ends up split again with Bush winning AL, MS, and SC and Clinton winning GA, LA, and NC.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. It's actually not until the 2000 election (by which point the Democrats had already rebranded themselves as the party for secular urban liberals) that the south begins to vote consistently "red".

As for waning black support for republican candidates, I would point to the great migration as a likely confounder. As the black population became more urban and secular it became more democrat. The rest is easily explained by a hopelessly compromised media and education establishment within democrat-controlled cities.

I said the Deep South, not the South. Again, those states had not once voted R since the end of Reconstruction, yet from 1964 to 2020 they suddenly have voted almost exclusively R. And note that they did so in 1964, despite that being as big a landslide for LBJ as '72 was for Nixon.

As for waning black support for republican candidates, I would point to the great migration as a likely confounder.

Please read the link and what I said. Black support for Republican candidates did not decline during the Great Migration; moreover, I said that it plummeted in 1964, which is exactly what happened; it dropped from the 25-30 pct it had been from 1936-1960 to something like 5% in 1964, and has stayed in the 10-11% range ever since. A drop that sudden and sustained obviously was not caused by the Great Migration, nor by the "hopelessly compromised media and education establishment within democrat-controlled cities."

I said the Deep South, not the South.

If Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina are not the "Deep South", who is?

Why should I bother reading your link to a democratic party advocacy group when your central claim is so easily refuted by a cursory examination of past election results? The claim that the deep south has voted solidly republican since the 1964 Civil Rights act is just plain false. As such your accompanying claim that racism is the reason that the south votes republican stands unsupported.

I said that it plummeted in 1964, which is exactly what happened; it dropped from the 25-30 pct it had been from 1936-1960 to something like 5% in 1964

That brings the interesting question of what did cause that drop. The usual answer I see is the Nixon's Southern Strategy, but this is too early for that. The CRA is an obvious thing to look at, but Republicans voted for it in significantly higher margins than Democrats, albeit as the minority party in both chambers. Is it something plausibly chalked up to the 64 election being Johnson vs Goldwater, and then lock-in effects from there?

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It seems like the big African American move to Dems happened with FDR, and it would be the most easily explainable by Dems firmly becoming the "party of the poor" with New Deal, and African Americans happening to be poorer than whites. LBJ just brought the rest (middle-class AAs) into the fold.

Also, I wonder how much the white South's transition to Republicans was affected by Republicans firmly becoming the party of the aggressive foreign policy, and Dems (somewhat undeservedly) becoming associated with anti-Vietnam-War pacifism. If there seems to be one constant in American politics, it is that the South is the most belligerent region of the US, seemingly never finding a war it didn't like (in WW2 it was the region with by far the lowest support for America First, if I remember right).

Of course Trump's occasional sops to anti-interventionism and the framing of "the first president to not start new wars" would confound this, but I'd say the image of anti-interventionist Trump was never really one Trump particularly relied on and lived far more in the heads of the sort of Trump supporters who very much would have wanted him to be an anti-interventionist and interpreted his words and actions to that purpose.

It seems like the big African American move to Dems happened with FDR, and it would be the most easily explainable by Dems firmly becoming the "party of the poor" with New Deal, and African Americans happening to be poorer than whites. LBJ just brought the rest (middle-class AAs) into the fold.

That strikes me a solid theory, honestly a it's probably a better one than mine. Sadly though the discourse is so dominated by social justice activists that there's probably no way to get a clear view.

As for Southern White's shift towards the GOP, anecdotally I think a lot of it had to do with Democrats becoming more explicitly secular after Carter's loss. Prior to Clinton there had been a sizable conservative Christian sub faction within both parties. Socially conservative economically liberal "blue dogs" on the democratic side, and old-school Evangelicals and Revivalists on the republican. A lot of the current culture war, specifically with the Democrats being the part of Globalism, Abortion, Gay Marriage, Political Correctness, etc... can be tracked back to choices made by Clinton in the early-mid 90s. To hear my parents, grandparents, oldsters at the VFW, Et Al tell it that's when their support in the south really started to collapse.

that's kind of a weak man. they are going to say that blacks can't succeed with AA because of the systematic racism and that is why they need affirmative action. not because of something intrinsic to blacks but rather something that society is doing to blacks.

"Their merits are not enough to beat fair odds" and "their merits are not enough to beat unfair odds" is the exact difference between being the common definition of "racist" and being your definition of "racist".

Some progressives did, I assume, come to believe the former but it doesn't look like they're a majority.

Haha no, I was never ever going to go to Harvard. I'm just sick of being blamed for things that aren't my fault (and if they pass unqualified personnel the blame will still continue!), and I don't want to be operated on by unqualified surgeons.

I didn't complain until "progressives" decided everything in the whole world is my fault and that "merit" was "white supremacist."

I am not 94 IQ, but I am enough of a redneck to have no illusions as to my chances of getting into Harvard(or for that matter most other selective universities. Obviously Texas Tech is a different story, but I'm pretty sure they've admitted at least one literal monkey at some point.). I find AA threatening because it's a tool for ensuring that our society's elites are less than perfectly meritocratic which biases the pool in an anti-red tribe direction.

Now the orientals who are getting used as catspaws in the effort to ban AA don't share this concern- they're more concerned with the matter of AA making it harder for them to get into highly selective universities- but you'll note that the people leading the effort to ban AA are not themselves orientals, they're using Chinese and Japanese Americans as tools to pretend AA is harmful to minorities. And, TBF, I don't believe for a second that the plight of japanmen with high SAT scores is what's motivating them, nor do orientals in general seem particularly worked up about the issue of selective colleges biasing their admissions against them. They mostly seem to just go to community college for two years and then transfer into regionally prominent selective universities after the pure AA admits have flunked out.

To some extent the only reason places like this care a lot is because there are a lot of smart people who (believe they) just missed out on going to elite colleges here, as illustrated by the stories in many threads on the topic.

By "places like this" do you mean the Motte? If so, can you cite evidence? I honestly never even thought once in my life that I missed out on an opportunity because of AA. But I'm still pretty opposed to AA because it goes against the core principles I was raised with, to view people as individuals, to be colorblind. Also, I could see it leading to a bad world, in part because it has no limiting principle, and is unfalsifiable. Not to mention, it's the laziest, stupidest, bandaid solution to the notion that we need to get blacks out of a cycle of poverty: just let them into college in greater numbers, into a world the underclass and poorly educated are probably not well equipped to deal with.

Isn't there an org that gets high-IQ people born into the underclass career training and matches them up with employers which has an article/interview about this- that they realized they needed to add a course about "how to hold a professional job" teaching things like opening bank accounts to get direct deposit?

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