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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.
I am really trying to focus on analytical arguments, rather than normative ones. I did not claim that Goldwater was racist, but rather was trying to explain why African Americans might be disinclined to vote for the Republican nominee in 1964. And, it is certainly not surprising that African Americans, and many others, myself included, might hear a candidate say, "free market principles are more important to me than ending Jim Crow," and conclude, "Gee, this candidate might be a wonderful person without a racist bone in his body, but nevertheless his priorities are misplaced; therefore, I will not vote for him."
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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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