This fails as a red herring fallacy.
Byrd is long dead and gone.
More than 60 years ago, before the Civil Rights movement, racist Southern conservatives belonged to the Democratic Party.
By the end of the Civil Rights Era, Southern Democrats joined the rest of the Democratic Party in opposing racism and hate and defending civil rights; racist conservative Southern Democrats fled the Party and became Republicans, where they were welcomed with open arms by the GOP.
"One of the biggest of the "
big lies" that have been wide-spread throughout history is that in the United States, the two major political parties, Democratic and Republican, switched sides on the issue of race. In Dan O’Donnell’s "
The Myth of the Republican-Democrat ‘Switch'," the writer offers a useful introduction to the issue:
When faced with the sobering reality that Democrats supported slavery, started the Civil War when the abolitionist Republican Party won the Presidency, established the Ku Klux Klan to brutalize newly freed slaves and keep them from voting, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, modern-day liberals reflexively perpetuate the rather pernicious myth—that the racist southern Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s became Republicans, leading to the so-called "switch" of the parties. This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked.
Because the Republican Party was founded to abolish slavery and has always been the party of Civil Rights—including the struggle for women’s suffrage—in the U.S.A, the Democratic Party seized the issue, turning racism into a Republican problem by claiming that the parties switched sides of race.
The big lie of the parties switching sides on race, however, is not the only falsehood that litters the political landscape. Various factions have filled historical reportage with inaccurate claims that persist; for example, a 2015
Washington Post headline blares, "
We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person."
Political ideologues and agenda-driven academics often claim that in establishing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers thought that blacks were only three/fifths human because of the ⅗ compromise; however, the "Three/Fifths Compromise" focused on
representation to congress not on the
humanity of each person.
Even
Condoleezza Rice, an educated, accomplished former secretary of state, fell for this lie: "In the original U.S. Constitution, I was only three-fifths of a person." Such a misstatement by a sophisticated and knowledgeable person just shows how widespread and deep some errors have been carved into the culture."
Republican failure to refute Democrats’ "big lie" that their parties switched sides on race has allowed that falsehood to become widely accepted.
lindasuegrimes.substack.com
www.c-span.org
