Comment by rayiner

You made a much broader point than what you've retreated to:

> Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as today, Democrats were the party of social welfare, regulation, big government, higher taxes, etc. And republicans were the party of big business, tax cuts, religion in schools, etc. Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx haven't voted for a Republican since the 1920s.

Apart from that, the way you phrased it makes it seem like southern democrats defected to the Republican Party because the democrats supported the 1964 civil rights act. That misleadingly implies that republicans didn't support the 1964 civil rights act (even more strongly)--otherwise, why would southern democrats defect to the Republican Party? Standing alone, it's an assertion that makes no sense, and it subtly tars Republicans as somehow having opposed civil rights.

What happened instead is that the issue changed. "Civil rights" in 1964 meant eliminating discrimination at lunch counters and on busses. That victory was won decisively. By the 1980s and early 1990s, the front had moved to things like affirmative action and racal quotas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/01/15/q.... That triggered a realignment, based on pre-existing ideological lanes. The same republicans who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could, entirely consistent with their ideology, oppose affirmative efforts to eliminate racial disparities.