PreciousRoi t1_jadwaib wrote
Reply to comment by FuschiaKnight in TIL that the first woman to serve in the United States Senate was also the last member of Congress to be a slaveowner. by addemup9001
OK, but the way you word it, you make it sound like the Democrats didn't have the South on virtual lockdown after the Civil War until Nixon.
It is also a complete slander to say that the Republicans "gradually" became more opposed to Civil Rights...they were never opposed. It was Democrats vs. Other Democrats, until LBJ/Nixon. Republicans voted in favor of Civil Rights, and only two elected Democrats "switched" in the 60s.
Also, LBJ said plenty of other things about Civil Rights...the question isn't if he lied, the question is, which version was the lie? Was he lying to his closest friends and colleagues, or to everyone else? The "inconsistencies" (i.e. racists) in the Democratic Party were never "pushed out", they died and were honored as Democrats. The Democrats never attempted a purge of anyone (with any power they could use) just because they were a leader of the local KKK, for example. Even when I was a kid in the 70s/80s, the overt racists weren't relatively wealthy Republicans, they were working class Union Democrats, living through White Flight. Trump changed a lot of that, and post-Trump, everything looks different, but Republicans used to be less opposed to "Civil Rights" and other "Social Justice" issues and more utterly indifferent...they drifted from being the "Anti-slavery"/"pro-Union" party, to being the pro-business party, not because they "gradually opposed" Civil Rights, but because they were mostly powerless to do Civil Rights because racist Democrats were in control. Once enough racist Democrats became convinced by their friend LBJ that if they didn't pass Civil Rights, some Yankee Federal Judge would impose something worse and passed it, the Republicans voted overwhelmingly in favor.
You also allude to Wilson as a step towards Civil Rights...that is gross. Like disgusting. Wilson is like the poster child for Intellectual Racism at the turn of the century. Buy into Good Guy Lyndon OK, maybe it was all "locker room talk" (nah, fam, but you do you)...but Woody...come on, man!
FuschiaKnight t1_jaemt12 wrote
I mentioned Wilson as a step towards Republican/Democrat realignment. The alignment wasn’t purely a civil rights thing, it was also about coalitions. And he laid some important foundations to what became the administrative state and progressivism. He did some horrible stuff & “progressive” doesn’t always mean correct (eg eugenics was considered a part of the progressive movement at the time), and it’s not something we should honor. I only mentioned him as part of the coalition shifting. It shouldn’t be surprising that a racist Democrat (who also did things for the administrative state) was a bridge between the two eras.
As for post-Nixon, when I say “gradual” I mean that we’ll into the 90s and even 00s, there were still conservative Southerners that identified with Democrats. I agree they weren’t pushed out & I didn’t say the people were. It’s the ideas that were the inconsistencies in the coalitions. As everyone sorted more, the parties became further and further polarized, culminating in the South becoming deep red in places it used to be deep blue.
PreciousRoi t1_jaev1n2 wrote
Can you explain "White Southerners wouldn’t be Democrats for generations"? Because that's where you went completely off the rails...
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