It's irrefutable that Democrats were against the civil rights act even though they had the majority they wouldn't pass it. Republicans finally had to step in and show the democrats that our constitution is for all people.
Incorrect.
Conservatives opposed the CRA, both democratic and republican, just as conservatives oppose the comprehensive civil rights of women and gay Americans today, and for much the same reasons.
After the CRA was enacted, Southern democrats began to abandon their racist position and became advocates for civil rights, republicans did not; and democrats who did not abandon their racist positions became republicans.
That there were racist democrats in 1964 who opposed the CRA is not at issue; at issue is the fact that republican racists who opposed the CRA in 1964 adhered to their racist positions thereafter, and welcomed with open arms former democrats who wished to adhere to their racist positions as well.
Either this guy from the American Thinker is crazy or you guys are crazy.
"It wasn’t until Reagan in 1980 that the Republicans finally took hold of the South. Race had nothing to do with the shift, though. Over the span of 12 years and three presidential elections, racial sentiments had drastically changed in the South. The last of the vocal, segregationist Democrat governors had retired into irrelevancy or ridicule. Orval Faubus was managing the Li’l Abner theme park, Dogpatch USA, in Arkansas; Lester Maddox was reduced to a nightclub comedy act with a black busboy, Bobby Lee Fears, who had once worked in his restaurant; and Wallace was crippled, born again, and seeking to make up for his racist past.
What finally drove the South into the hands of the Republican Party was, as ironic as it sounds today, the media. The South has always been a more conservative region of the nation. As such, every night, Southerners would watch the evening news and be shocked at what they saw. Rioters and looters destroying entire neighborhoods in liberal-run cities, liberal feminists seeking to deconstruct the traditional family structure, liberal students colluding with liberal faculty to take over college campuses, liberal civil rights leaders shamelessly stoking racial envy for profit, and liberal politicians demanding an unending flow of welfare benefits to lazy, able-bodied people and the irresponsible.
Small wonder, then, that Southerners began abandoning the Democratic Party – not just on the presidential level, but up and down the ticket. The Republicans just happened to have the right candidate, Ronald Reagan, who had the right message at the right time that was very attractive to disaffected Southerners.
By focusing on the nation’s social, moral, economic, and spiritual ills caused by liberal policies, the media had inadvertently done the heavy lifting for Reagan, who espoused the antidote: responsibility, traditional values, economic growth, low taxes, law and order, peace through strength, etc. That’s what Southerners found appealing about the Republican Party."
Articles: The Media, not Racism, Turned the South Republican
Next time you're in the grocery store, go to the cereal aisle and check the ingredients label on a box of Grape Nuts. See if you can find in there anything remotely resembling grapes. Or for that matter, any kind of nut.
The point: you can call something any name you want; it doesn't make it take the characteristic. So just because a guy writes in "The American Thinker" doesn't mean he's either one.
Unfortunately we can shoot his premise down easily on dates alone. The shift from monolithic Democrat to monolithic Republican -- an unthinkable act before the CRA -- began in 1964 when Strom Thurmond made the switch in September. In that year's presidential election, the Republican nominee, an opponent of the CRA, carried his own state, and no other states --- except in the South:
(Keep in mind the usual colors we use now where red = Repub and blue = Dem are reversed here)
So we see most of the South going for the Republican -- and all of the deep South. No state in the deep South had done that in all the elections going back to
at least 1876. Let alone an entire swath of them -- this was clearly a turning point.
In 1968, you had George Wallace pulling a Thurmond-48 and running his own campaign outside the two parties and pulled much the same territory as Goldwater four years earlier:
1968:
(Notice the fringe Southern states that Wallace did not get -- went to Nixon, the Republican)
1972: the South goes entirely Republican, along with most of the country:
We already have a pattern here; the Solid South has denied electoral preference to the Democrat three elections in a row.
Now in 1976, and after the Watergate scandal deeply tarnished the Republican brand, AND you had a Southerner on the ticket, there was a brief return:
-- an aberration that would partially recur the next time a Southerner ran -- but other than that, the shift clearly was established in the 1960s.
Now your boy here agrees with us when he sez:
The South has always been a more conservative region of the nation.
True. We're on the same page here.
-- But then he goes off the rails injecting his own agenda of causal speculation:
As such, every night, Southerners would watch the evening news and be shocked at what they saw. Rioters and looters destroying entire neighborhoods in liberal-run cities, liberal feminists seeking to deconstruct the traditional family structure, liberal students colluding with liberal faculty to take over college campuses, liberal civil rights leaders shamelessly stoking racial envy for profit, and liberal politicians demanding an unending flow of welfare benefits to lazy, able-bodied people and the irresponsible.
He presents no evidence that any paradigm shift occurred as a result of media; moreover he's full of fallacies here ("liberal-run cities"; "out to deconstruct the family"; "shamelessly stoking racial envy for profit", etc). None of this is given any basis beyond his own say-so.
And we've already shown in the maps that the trend was already established in the 1960s.
So I agree with you -- this writer is crazed.
What we're objecting to here is revisionism -- pretending the past went down differently than it actually did. That's what your writer here is doing with his Monday Morning quarterbacking that pretends to look into the minds of 1960s Southerners, even to the point of injecting his own moralistic bases into their heads retroactively.
Racists exist/have existed in both parties. Does either of these mean we can define either party as a bunch of racists?
What we have ideologically is basically three broadly defined players:
1- The Democratic Party;
2- The Republican Party;
3= The racists in the South
Both (1) and (2) have at different times courted the votes of (3), however they could get away with it. But in order to do that a political organization has to develop a bipolar character (unless it's willing to overtly embrace racism). So (1) turned a blind eye to the nature of (3) for a long time in a hybrid of liberals in the north/west and conservatives in the South. That schism started widening in the 1940s with Truman's desegregating the military and Thurmond's bolting the party to run himself as a segregationist (1948), but when that failed the conservative fear of diverting from tradition brought him and his ilk back in to the DP, and on went the schism. A Democrat in the New York and a Democrat in Mississippi were two different animals who ended up voting for the same guy for vastly different reasons.
Comes the CRA and with Thurmond the first crack in that solidity ('64), at which time LBJ surmised his party had lost the South for "a generation" (his analysis was correct but underestimated the time span). This was followed by two renegade campaigns by Wallace ('68 and '72, the latter abbreviated by attempted assassination). Clearly there was a restlessness in (3), who were more and more dissatisfied with this marriage to the DP, an entity that had been more and more opposing their core conservative values. And a circumstance that did not go unnoticed by (2), who sought to exploit the opportunity via Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and Reagan's kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia --- the one in Mississippi.
Now the RP had the same problem the DP had had: baiting bad people (with euphemisms like "states rights") while not really intending to fulfill the bait, just stringing them along for the vote. Pandering opportunism, same as the DP had been practicing, for the purpose of not any particular ideology but simply to acquire power.
So now you have a world where a Republican in Alabama is an altogether different animal from a Republican in Maine, two voters voting for the same guy for vastly different reasons. And here in a nutshell is the modern schism of the same kind as before, two entities pulling the party in two different directions, but now it's party (2) instead of party (1). We've been through this movie before. It usually doesn't end well, but there we are.