The rest of this post really didn't follow, it's a separate issue altogether but....
But to people like that, they try to say conservatives are racist and always have, I've debunked the southern strategy many times.
So my question is if conservatives were the racists, and they came to the republican party in the late 60s/early 70s (they didn't, but I humor the left), then tell me when the last time the democrat candidate was more conservative than the republican?
--- at the risk of self-indulgence I'll repost one from recently that is more or less on this tangent:
--- the Republicans of 1860 weren't the Democrats obviously, but they were (a) the Liberals, considerably to the left of Democrats, and (b) the party of activist central government, a legacy of the Whigs that populated them (Lincoln for one) while the Democrats were the Conservatives and the party of "states rights" or "smaller government".
Obviously that's not where we are today, but that didn't shift in 1964. It shifted as the 19th century became the 20th, when the RP gradually abandoned its Liberalism and took on the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and the DP absorbed the Populist movement, culminating in FDR, which is exactly where the black population started voting Democratic and has been ever since. If there's a magnetic reversal of the parties, that's where it is, and deserves to be observed as such.
Now 1964 was simply the final straw in that North-South conflict that aforementioned magnetic pole reversal created and exacerbated; while the DP had moved significantly to the left in the '30s, it still had the bipolar problem of the conservative South hanging on, who hated "Liberals" but hated even more the idea of having anything to do with the "party of Lincoln" that had vanquished and humiliated them (and the only reason they were hanging on), so they teetered in an uneasy alliance often broken by the aforementioned split in 1948 (and a less dramatic breakdown in 1924), and of course George Wallace's endless ranting against "liberals", even putting off a similar run in 1964 at the request of Barry Goldwater, which would have taken all the support Goldwater had (and then offered to be Goldwater's running mate).
So these opposing forces had always been there unresolved, and stayed unresolved until LBJ dispensed with the jellyfish-think and signed the CRA. This prompted Strom Thurmond to do what was for exactly 99 years unthinkable, and become a Republican, far more in line with the South's conservative values anyway. In effect it was simple traditional spite that had kept them hanging on some thirty years to a party that was increasingly foreign to their perceived interests.
Thurmond's move, sudden as it was, was not without a prior indicator --- he had dipped a toe in the water in 1952 when he endorsed Eisenhower, and in retaliation the Democratic Party kicked him off the ballot -- he had to run in his next re-election as a write-in (which he won) --- which is yet one more indication that, even if it was unthinkable to be a Republican, it was more important to be a Son of the South than to be a Democrat.
Sorry but it's never easy to recount this in a quick sound bite. Can't be done.
I'm not sure it's possible to articulate how strongly this emotional tide, the one against "the party of Lincoln", the North in general, and "liberals" --- held on in the South. I saw it in my own lifetime, in no uncertain terms, not so much in my Southern relatives (they were after all relatives) but absolutely in the population surrounding them. When I was little I seriously wondered if we would get shot for being "yankees". The tension was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. And this is nearly a century after the Civil War, which was still even then a topic of everyday conversation.
That's no longer the case today but the significance of the positions Johnson and Thurmond took in 1964 as a cultural purge, aside from the superficially political, probably cannot be overemphasized.
(/offtopic)
The problem with that, is it's more complicated. WHY?>
Conservatism in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Because there were conservative republicans under Lincoln, watch the movie.
Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected by the newly formed
Republican Party, and Lincoln has been an iconic figure for American politicians of both parties. According to historian Striner, "...it is vain to try to classify Lincoln as a clear-cut conservative or liberal, as some historians have tried. He was both, and his politics engendered a long-term tradition of centrism..."
During the war, Lincoln was the leader of the moderate Republicans who fought the
Radical Republicans on the issues of dealing with slavery and re-integrating the South into the nation. He built the stronger coalition,
holding together conservative and moderate Republicans
They had considered Carnegie. Rockefellar and the like as the conservative wing of the party.
WH Taft was the conservative wing of the republicans in 1908.
Bob Taft was a staunch conservative
All this time far better than democrats on civil rights, even in the 60s the conservative republicans were better.
BUT, conservatives oppose affirmative action, a form of racism and other laws forcing people to fill quotas. Republicans tend to be right to work. You business is your business.
And I could go into the democrats, but I've done it before. Only one dixiecrat became a republican, Strom Thurmond. The rest of the gang that opposed the 64 civil rights act on race (Goldwater opposed it on the forcing you to do stuff, different reason) never became republicans.
And if you think I'm full of shit, just let me know the last time the democrats ran the more conservative candidate.
"Wanted Republicans out of office"? In 1865 there weren't any Republicans in office in the South.
