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: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.
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.
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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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To clarify, I meant the story that I told in this thread, not the story that I was told as a child.
Not a claim I made.
I don't see how that is relevant to the issue. which is whether the Democratic Party is "the real racist party" today. Just because statute-topplers are morons who make moronic claims does not mean that is it ok for us to do so.
I have no patience for claims of racism in general, and specifically not for claims that "Republicans are racist," but it is very clear that that parties have changed on issues of relevance to African Americans. In 1960, if you were a real honest-to-goodness racist, you were almost voted Democratic. Today, you almost certainly vote Republican. (I am of course assuming two parties). The Democratic Party tends to support affirmative action, while the Republican Party tends to oppose it. The Democratic Party appoints judges who tend to reign in police civil liberties violations; the Republican Party appoints judges who are "law and order" judges who tend to do the opposite. Etc, etc. This has been true for thirty years
The fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party, at least, is a vastly different party on these issues than it was 70 years ago. In contrast, the Republican Party, has drifted in the other direction. More generally, once upon a time the Republican Party was the more liberal party, not just on race, but on many other issues; meanwhile, the Democratic Party was the more conservative party, especially on race. That is obviously no longer the case.
Did not quite say you did. What I am claiming is that it is a very common understanding of events, and the first comment of yours that I replied to was in that ballpark.
I think we're into 3 or 4 different issues, talking past each other, and I have a feeling that if I go into responses for a bunch of the parts of the next two paragraphs I have problems with, it's going to keep happening.
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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 know you are talking about current Democrats. That's the point.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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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?
Well, the CRA was very much a signature initiative of a Democratic administration, and Democratic leadership in Congress (including Hubert Humphrey, who was instrumental in getting the civil rights plank added to the Democratic platform in 1948, leading to Southern segregationists walking out and [running their own candidate for President[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_presidential_election]). Note also that the Wikipedia page you link to indicates that Southern Republican representatives (not that there were many) unanimously voted no. So, being pro-Civil Rights was
And, as for Goldwater, he rather famously voted no on the CRA. So, when you have an election in which the candidate for one party pushed hard for the CRA, was promised to enact the Voting Rights Act if reelected, and the candidate for the other party voted against the CRA, it is not surprising that African American support for the latter party plummeted. As for why it was locked in, the Johnson Administration followed up by pushing through the Voting Rights Act, a campaign highlighted by this speech, which famously used the civil rights movement's refrain, "We shall overcome." Moreover, in the wake of the Voting Rights Act, it is hardly surprising that African American voters, especially newly enfranchised ones (this states that the pct of African Americans registered to vote went from 23% before the VRA to 61% in 1969), it is also unsurprising that the new support levels became permanent.
Finally, just as white voters in the Deep South continued to vote for Democratic (often segregationist) candidates at the state level even as they shifted to supporting Republicans for President, it is certainly possible that African Americans in the Deep South did not support Democratic candidates at the local level at the same rate that they supported Democratic candidates for President.
It was on free market principles, not hatefully standing against regulation of hateful exclusion, that Goldwater voted against it. Every time you fill out a form for employment or credit which asks your ethnic heritage, it’s because of a vast bureaucracy of statistics and lawyers enabled by the CRA working in the background for statistical fairness, and more lawyers ready to pounce on and destroy anyone who doesn’t agree.
Of course he handed the Democratic Party a huge PR win by standing on principle, and we’re now about halfway through LBJ’s predicted century of control of the Black vote.
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That is a good question, but as I was saying to @Stefferi it's one of those things that so hopelessly compromised by politics that it's unlikely that anyone will be able to deliver a straight answer.
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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.
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.
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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.
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"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.
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