Comment by Larrikin
5 years ago
You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
5 years ago
You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue.
Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights.
The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
> First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue.
I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.
I think if you use the term southerners you'd be good. We've consistently opposed civil rights and affirmative action. And we were more Democratic in the 60s and more Republican today.
That's still inaccurate. Republicans in the 1930s-1960s were ideologically conservative. Southern democrats, meanwhile, were in many respects ideologically liberal, for example supporting the New Deal: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-rep....
> There were conservative tendencies in American politics before the 1930s, but the modern conservative movement was founded on opposition to the New Deal. The segregationist Democrats, on the other hand, were for the most part eager supporters of the New Deal—provided it was administered in a way that would exclude African Americans from most of its benefits. You do not have to take my word for it—consider the votes: on labor reform, on entitlements, on financial regulation, etc. If the southern Democrats were “conservatives,” then the New Deal was passed on conservative support, which is a very odd claim to make.