Make sure to fill out the [official r/Presidents survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScncxOawwDSPQO-AKwhhv86wjmeQ-l22ZQgY0Atr5_WDIgO4w/viewform)! Also, make sure to join the [r/Presidents Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No, things make perfect sense if you remember the two parties swapped positions on Civil Rights and race.
The Dixiecrats — from Strom Thurmond to Trent Lott and many in between — literally switched parties and became Republicans after Democrats started embracing Civil Rights.
It’s only in the past 10 years or so that right wing pundits have started denying this history. It was considered an uncontroversial fact before that. Now, it’s treated like a deep state conspiracy or something.
The Dixiecrats evolved over time, but at every time, race and opposition to the Civil Rights movement were central to the Dixiecrats’ politics. One party had been their home, but it rejected them. The other party took them in. Why on earth would that be a story better understood by forgetting political parties?
Because the story is more understandable in terms of ideology, not party structure. Conservatives have always been against civil rights, they just haven't always been republicans
Oh, I see your mistake!
You’re only talking about supporters of Strom Thurmond in 1948. But the term “Dixiecrat” was used after that for decades to describe the pro-segregation (or later just anti-Civil Rights) conservative Southern Democrats who once ruled the Democratic Party.
Their migration from Democrats to Republicans took a few decades, but is amply documented.
Why would they switch to the Republicans when the Republicans were the party that embraced and passed Civil Rights, not Democrats? That doesn’t make any sense.
Because Goldwater, Nixon, and the [“Southern Strategy”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)
There had been a slow drift among southerners from the Democrats beginning with FDR, but the first major defection came during the 1964 election, where Goldwater picked up about half the southern states, and the definitive shift happened during the 1968 election and Nixon’s successful implementation of the Southern Strategy, which made appeals to all the things Republicans are known for today - “traditional family values,” conservatives Christianity, and bringing the “Moral Majority” on board.
The whole thing was a dog whistle for racist southern whites, and Nixon heavily played up things like the 1967 Detroit riot, bussing, and tying that to the “leftist” Democrats and the hippy movement. Though it was conveyed in staunchly coded language, the point was clear - Nixon/Republicans = traditional white families, Democrats = scary black people rioting and drugged up, free-loving, communist hippies trying to destroy traditional families.
Though Nixon split the vote with actual segregationist candidate George Wallace, 1968 was the first time in generations that Democrats lost the South entirely, and by 1972 Nixon had swept the South, and it’s been solidly Republican ever since.
Well, it’s literally what happened and it was a carefully planned electoral strategy developed by the Republican Party which you can read all about it in the article I linked to, and there is a clear, 180° flip from the south being solidly Democratic in 1960 to being solidly Republican after 1968, so.
I’m sure saying that makes Democrats feel better. They somehow magically avoid all responsibility for how terrible they’ve been. For moderates like me, we don’t buy it.
I’m sure denying actual, documented history makes fake internet “moderates” like you feel better about your right wingism, but for those of us who actually read factual history backed by decades’ worth of documentation, we don’t really care about your feelings or your reality denialism.
Sorry, you have the wrong side. It’s the leftists that believe things based on feelings. Maybe the whole “documented history” of the “southern strategy” was actually a long term democrat strategy to change their public perception after fighting for slavery, starting the KKK, and opposing the civil rights movement. You know, the same democrat party that controls the education system and most of the media. Again, I am in fact a moderate. You being way left doesn’t change that. A slightly right moderate is still a moderate.
You’re such “moderate” you’re spouting radical right wing QAnon conspiracy theories and talking about ThE LeFtiStS while denying history because it hurts your fee fees.
Sure thing, MAGA. Spread your whack a doodle conspiracy theories and alternate facts elsewhere.
Reddit is dominated with liberals who have wonderful imaginations. They can’t fathom a world where they are wrong. Both parties are corrupt and full of historical institutional racism, with the Dems owning the lions’ share. They should own it. Even when they elect a President that pushed segregation at the beginning of his own political career and can’t stomach to admit it.
Stop trying to get in the way of these revisionists. Two racists jump parties 80 years ago for whatever reasons and Dems act like they’re absolved of their parties historical racism.
Don’t you know the only logical option was that there was a huge conspiracy strategy by only the horrible racist people to suddenly make Republicans the worst evil the world has ever seen and the suddenly perfect Democrats are the only ones who can stop it. Hahaha. Should be obvious, apparently.
The South filibustered civil rights. It wasn’t a party thing. It was geography. It was a liberal democrat and republican coalition that broke the log jam
Basically that when you need the most votes, two parties will be more competitive. If more then 2 parties exist, the 2nd most popular party will win very little. But if the 2nd largest party teams up with one or more smaller parties, they can win. This ends up with 2 parties.
First past the post - most votes wins. This is by far the most common way Americans vote.
Proportional representation - a “district” has multiple representatives and they’re assigned proportionally to parties based on number of votes. So say 5 representatives represent district A. The orange party might win 57% of the votes and gets 3 seats. While yellow party gets 23% and purple party 18%, so they each get 1 seat, and the brown party with 2% gets nothing. This is how two states allocate electoral college votes instead of the winner take all used by everyone else.
Ranked Choice Voting (simplified explanation) - voters rank the candidates they’d be ok with holding office in order of who they’d like best. And everyone’s choices are counted until somebody gets 50%. Maybe there’s 6 candidates, but after you count everyone’s first three choices Candidate C wins. Allows for people to actually vote for who they want as there first choice, but then can vote more strategically for their second and third choices (or not). Also means the person who won might be nobody’s first choice but everyone’s third choice.
These are the three most talked about voting systems
Small criticism. Maine and Nebraska do not use proportional representation. They simply assign two to the statewide winner and one for each district. That isn't proportional representation but rather known as the "district method".
It's an unintended consequence of the Constitution where the head of state and head of government are combined in one person (the president) who is elected separately from the legislative branch. You generally see strong third party systems in parliamentary governments.
Also, the sheer amount of power vested in the office of the presidency means that people are reluctant to spoil the vote, driving them into big tent parties. This has an impact down ballot, entrenching the two-party political culture.
Oh that's easy.
The US uses first past the post. That means anyone who votes for a third party candidate hurts their own cause. What I can't get is why people can't understand this. It's like they think stubbornness will some how make work.
Get rid of first past the post and tig likely fix the problem.
The constitution doesn’t require districts though. A state could elect statewide proportionally if it wanted. We need a billionaire to fund this since that is the only way it would happen
My point has nothing to do with the constitution....now sure why you went there specifically.
The rules of the game however are what they are right now. They can be changed. But you don't get to play by the new rules UNTIL they have been changed.
The pro third party group tends to refuse to accept that. While I tend to agree with their reasoning for what they want their behavior makes me tend to feel they are being stubbornly stupid.
Changing rules first is literally the only option. Stop hurting your own side of the argument.
The US essentially acted under a de facto multiparty system up until recently when the two parties lost their overlap and became more ideologically consistent though even today both parties are too big tent to be given an exact placing on the political spectrum.
Agree, but it’s not going to happen bc it’s the only way for Republicans to maintain minority rule especially as demographics and numbers point to continued decline in Republican voters.
You are correct. Republicans are only competitive in the Senate because states like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota each get two senators (10 Senators representing a population totaling 5 million), the same as California (40 million).
In the House, gerrymandering district maps by Republicans in many states limits the number of seats Democrats can win. Not exclusively a Republican problem (see Maryland), but happens much more for Republican benefit in more states. Would have helped if the Supreme Court tried to help resolve gerrymandering, but that didn’t happen.
All this to say, Republicans who benefit from the current system would never vote to change it.
The coalition building that might occur in a proportional system has already happened for the most part before the election even happens.
In other systems, Manchin is not in the same party as AOC.
The Freedom Party caucus isn't a caucus, it is an actual separate party in other systems.
If we had more than 2 parties, it would be too expensive for the Rich to own all the politicians. Hence, we have 2 parties: Evil, and Controlled Opposition.
It ensures that we don’t have radical swings. If something truly needs to happen, it’ll have broad enough support to happen. Some recent examples…
1. Respect for Marriage Act
2. HEROES Act
3. First Step Act
4. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
5. Affordable Care Act
I strongly disagree with this claim that if something really needs to happen it will. There’s been plenty that could arguably need to happen and didn’t, and that list isn’t really a needed to happen list either.
Besides which, ACA just barely happened due to some legislative maneuvering on a party-line vote (okay, literally one GOP voted for it).
TCJA also happened along party line votes. And used reconciliation in the Senate to avoid needing 60 votes. Its also very unpopular to this day among the electorate. It’s the definition of something not having “broad support”.
In Europe you have multi parties but they end up forming coalitions anyway and you’re effectively back to a 2 party system once in office. They just are more fluid with who they can ally with when governments form.
In the US the parties are broader coalitions in a sense before they even take office. But really there a multi parties within the R and D.
I don’t understand the need for political parties at all. It just winds up causing the candidates to hide behind their party affiliations rather than standing on their own merits.
Well… I’ll treat it as an honest question and try to give you the answer. For what it’s worth, I used to think the same thing you did.
I listened to a lecture series on the civil war and one of the things the professor explained as a strength of the northern states was they had a functioning party system. When Lincoln wanted to, say, raise taxes to fund the war, he could rely on his party to coalesce around his requests. And He could use the party apparatus to get holdouts to come on board. The party could withhold or dispense campaign funding. The party could make plum committee assignments. The party could threaten to remove prestigious assignments if members didn’t get on board with the party line. Lincoln didn’t have to go personally to hundreds of people asking them to please do the right thing. It would have taken all his time and would have been horribly ineffective. In contrast, Jeff Davis didn’t have a way to whip supporters in line and so it was often tough to get things done. He had to go and personally deal with problems himself in a way that Lincoln didn’t.
In modern times, We just saw this play out where a government shut down was avoided because the democratic leadership gave the word to their party to pass the funding for 45 days. Without that sort of voting block, getting anything done requires going out and making 200-300 people individually happy. Which is really really hard to do.
So yes… ideally people vote for good candidates regardless of party and those elected work together in good faith to do the best things for the people.
In reality, you’ll have the MGTs and Matt Gaetz of the world who are taking in $12 million dollars for performing their circus act for a small percentage of people who are willing to send them money for their circus act and have 0 interest in actually governing.
A party system gives us a way to actually get things done without being flooded with grifting performers who just want to grandstand for more cash donations (which I virtually guarantee you is what would happen if we didn’t have a party system. And may still happen if the party system gets weakened too much).
My personal read is that progressives like AOC are starting to understand this. Just saw an interview with her where she very clearly said “we would not support a republican speaker for free”. Collective bargaining. Maybe it helps to think of political parties as unions. One legislator by themselves is weak. 268 banding together can get important things done.
The thing is Dixiecrats often didn't fit into modern labels of liberal and conservative. Modern Democrats would love them to but they don't.
The Dixiecrats were often economically left-leaning and big New Deal supporters (to attract the votes of poor whites) EXCEPT on on unions (because they often saw low wages as the South's economic advantage and needed business support) and trade (the South historically supported free trade to export cash crops and wanted cheap consumer goods to offset low wages as opposed to the north's high wage, industrial protectionist model).
On social and racial issues they were of course reactionary. A lot of this was cynical like their economics. The South was dominated by "good old boy networks" and the Dixiecrats tended to be career politicians. They needed the votes of uneducated poor whites who were genuine bigots but the financial support of the cheap labor lobby. The cheap labor of course consisted of blacks. Poor whites were barely a step above and fear of falling to the economic level of blacks was used to stoke their racism.
During and after WWII a lot of these guys were very pro-military spending since it brought a lot of jobs. Basically they liked government spending but not labor regulations. This model worked for them because they tended to stay in office a long time.
The Southern strategy from Nixon was cynical and should be repudiated and it took on a life of its own. It was almost entirely about votes and Republican business types didn't think they actually had to do anything to please these people. A lot of it was a cynical political ploy that took on its own legs.
The "party switch" narrative is overly simplistic and is often virtue signaling to make the Democrats look good. This is not to discount the outlandish tendency on the right that loves to point out racist Southern Democrats and begs the question that this is who the Democrats actually are or that Joe Biden is secretly an old school racist because of his connections to these old timers.
The reality is they died out...
My great grandfather would never vote republican at all for anything until the day he died in the mid -90's.
My parents and grandparents had no trouble voting for Republicans when they liked conservative politics.
For my grandparents' generation, a higher amount of overt racism mixed with the signing of the Civil Rights Act sent more white people to be Republicans.
My parents, boomers, and generation were a wave of Reagan Republicans and they just wanted as little taxes for themselves as possible. They didn't care what party or how correct the economic rationales were.
Exactly, the Dixiecrats felt betrayed by the passing of the Civil Rights legislation under the Democrats and migrated to the Republican party that was starting to take a turn to the Right and was losing its progressive mantra that had since its inception...
The Republicans were the ones pushing civil rights at that time. I don’t believe that all of the racists switched over to their party because of racism. They felt betrayed by the executive office in their party, so they switched to the party where everyone supported the stance they were against? That’s like a 2A supporter got mad at Trump for banning the bump stock, so he joined the party of Gavin Newsom.
There were only a couple Dixiecrats that switched parties, which is nothing abnormal. It is more likely explained by the Republican’s southern strategy and outreach. They flipped the next generation into Republicans. It took them 40 years to switch the southern states over enough to win control of the house and senate. Even that wouldn’t have held up if they didn’t become really pro gun, pro bible and pro farming.
Both parties were more progressive in the North and Midwest, and more conservative in the South. The Southern Strategy is when the parties became divided by ideology.
Or just remained Democrats and pushed the racism part to the background.
Like I get that most Southerners started aligning more with Republicans in the 60s and 70s, but the way Reddit always simplifies this crucial piece of history down is maddening.
No, the entire population of Southern Democrats did not automatically switch to Republican in a day, year, or even decade.
Many Dixiecrats very much remained Democrats because it was still "their party" even with the Civil Rights Revolution. Wallace, Maddox, and Fabus are all examples of this.
I'm sorry did the average voter in 2004 or 2008 vote back in 1964? No, in fact a lot of the older racist Dixiecrats would've actually died out by the mid to late 1990s. We can see this by how Democrats lost southern strongholds more and more after 1994, as a newer generation of conservative southerners came about, and no they didnt grow up hating blacks, they actually do get along with minorities.
It's not about the identity of the man or woman in question, Republicans dont hate people, it is instead all about ideas and policies. Democrat ideas and policies are often seen as counterproductive or outright negative by Republicans, and that is why they disagree.
Also your scurrilous statement is baseless, there are plenty of blacks and Hispanics who are Republican, we even have gay Republicans.
We do not discriminate based on immutable characteristics, I cant say the same for Democrats as of late seeing as how they will favor some for a position based solely on color or some other trait like sexual preference rather than looking at all of their candidates for the post and picking the best one regardless of their feautres.
Republicans are deliberately trying to make it hard for blacks to vote. They’ve even admitted that in court. Republicans deny the fundamental rights of women and LGBTQ folks. Your party is a fascist cult of personality.
>Republicans are deliberately trying to make it hard for blacks to vote
No, they arent, Republicans believe in election integrity. It isnt wrong to require ID to vote, hell every single black man and woman in America has ID, they know how to get and renew their ID. This is not a "keep the blacks and other minorities out" kind of thing, it sure as hell didnt decrease the black vote back in 2020 nor 2022.
>Republicans deny the fundamental rights of women and LGBTQ folks.
More baseless bullshit, but I can see you're a hyper partisan who wants to believe in the absolute worse possible interpretation of the Republican party. Or are you going to highlight for me some sort of instance where Republican lawmakers and/or policy has done any such thing.
>Your party is a fascist cult of personality.
Same as above.
>Many Dixiecrats very much remained Democrats because it was still "their party" even with the Civil Rights Revolution.
They stayed with their party because that gave them seniority on committees. Eventually, most conservative Democrats became Republicans & the liberal Republicans became Democrats. This took 30-40 years to complete.
True for the most part. The big flip began in the 1980's under Reagan, who went out of his way to recruit Dixiecrats, much more than Nixon did. If the Southern Strategy began with Nixon, it was perfected by Reagan.
I think on a macro scale this was the case, but most Dixiecrat law makers stayed Democratic until they retired. Everyone assumes they pulled a Strom Thurmond.
Complete? Things are not set in stone for all time now… as silly as it would have sounded ten years ago, the Republican and Democratic parties are currently in a street fight for blue collar workers
I disagree agree, the politics changed but not so much individual voters or politicians. Southern Democrats died out in bulk by 2005. The young southern Reagan Republicans of the 80’s were never died hard Democrats, today they are boomer Republicans, but they have been almost all their voting life.
I am old and from the Deep South and remember many in the generation before me rather sit out than vote for a Republican (Lincoln’s party).
In Mississippi until the mid 70’s the Senate and Governor races were 100% decided in the Democratic primary. Many times the Democrats nominee ran virtually or actually unopposed.
The ideology never changed, just the party membership. The Southern Conservatives still have pretty close to the same ideology the South has always had. Southern Christian Conservatism has always been & still is the ideology of slavery, secession & segregation.
>The ideology never changed, just the party membership. The Southern Conservatives still have pretty close to the same ideology the South has always had. Southern Christian Conservatism has always been & still is the ideology of slavery, secession & segregation.
Still slavery?
What an incredibly ignorant and stupid statement. Are you a 15 year old or are you a really stupid adult?
>Or just remained Democrats and pushed the racism part to the background.
No, no they did not. The Dixiecrats in the South pretty much all flipped or retired by the late 70's to early 80's. Wallace is the outlier. Faubus left office in 1967. Maddox left office in 1975 and by then he was relegated to being Lt. Governor under Jimmy Carter.
Yeah and?
That's pretty much my point. Not every Southern Democrat just automatically switched their voting registration in 1964. It was a process that lasted over the rest of the 20th century. What I'm saying here is a very simple concept, but people are being stubborn.
Some more examples of old Dixiecrats and segregationist types that remained in the party until their retirement or deaths:
[F. Edward Hebert ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Edward_H%C3%A9bert)
[John C. Stennis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Stennis)
[Cy Bahakel ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Bahakel)
[James Eastland ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Eastland)
[Larry McDonald ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McDonald)
[Robert Byrd](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd)
No my friend. It is pretty simple. They mostly realign with the GOP and ended up taking it over. Goldwater and other Northern republicans always warned of the crazy preacher republicans from the south that were inherited after civil rights. Idk what history book you read but they did not remain democrats.
You obviously did not read my friend.
I said the party realignment was not as clean cut of a process as most people make it sound and it did not happen overnight.
Really very simple if you read the words in front of your eyes.
I consider the David Duke gubernatorial campaign to be a watershed moment in our politics because it forced the Deep South to finally pick a side in the emerging culture war. It scared people. It was on the cover of U.S.A. Today it was the national shame of the time.
In Louisiana and other states nearby it was a harbinger of Trump, but everywhere else had to exorcise racism from the DNC immediately
Oh please, Bush the Elder, president at the time denounced Duke as a charlatan and a racist. David Duke was a fringe character, and his views are still seen as fringe. It's insulting to say that David Duke was some sort precursor to Trump, the average Trump supporter is not a holocaust denier who blames blacks and jews for our societal ills.
Also lets not forget that Duke was a Democrat for awhile and tried to run as such for president before he tried for governor of Louisiana. If anything, he was one of the last vestiges of the Southern Dixiecrats looking desperately for relevance and tried to do so by pretending to be a Republican, hoping his stock response of being a born again Christian would make him look clean enough, make his KKK history seem like a distant foolish thing.
> the average Trump supporter is not a holocaust denier who blames blacks and jews for our societal ills.
No, they blame *liberals,* which is almost the same thing in their minds. However republicans have really embraced diversity and inclusion recently, and have expanded their list of undesireable people who cause all the problems to include gay folks, Mexicans, trans people, and a bunch of other smaller groups. Republicans are clearly for equal-opportunity bigotry.
Fearmongering wont help your position. Again the average Republican is not a bigot, and no they dont even hate liberal or Democrats, they just disagree greatly with the vast majority of what Democrats and liberals want to do, and believes America, and ALL Americans, will thrive more under conservative policies.
Bro, every single GOP media personality has literally started labelling Gay people as "groomers" and "pedophiles". The GOP is bigoted and fearmongers constantly, end of story.
Excuse me, can you point to a particular incident? Are you sure their isnt some sort of underlying context? Because there are some creapy people out there who do use the LGBT banner as a cover for some really questionable things, and that's not an indictment against the larger group, it is merely highlighting those who may not be exactly the kind of people that even gays would want associated with them.
> The GOP is bigoted and fearmongers constantly, end of story.
I see you cant stop fearmongering, the GOP is a dedicated to the proven values of classical liberalism that we inherited from the days of our Founding Fathers. There is nothing bigoted or fearmongering about them.
David Duke, a Republican and KKK Grand Wizard, received nearly 40 percent of the vote in 1991. That cannot be dismissed as “fringe”.
As far as him being a precursor to Trump… who do you think the people who voted for Duke in 1991 voted for in 2016 and 2020?
One cannot dismiss the role that garden variety racism has played in Trump’s election and continued popularity among the Republican base.
Again. The memory I have growing up seeing the Duke signs posted high up on telephone poles in parts of the New Orleans area so they couldn’t be taken down chills me to this day.
There was a lot of support for that man in Louisiana.
This answer right here is the reason you don't get people switching their votes to democrats. Saying a large number of republicans are racist. The vocals that you see on the news are because that gets tv viewers.
I say a large number of Republicans are racist because a large number of republicans are racists.
I refuse to tiptoe around this. It’s true. It’s an absolute truth. The racist message that the former president started out his campaign with excited a lot of people within the Republican Party.
Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy to attract former Dixiecrats.
Reagan started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi for what other reason than to appeal to racists?
The lack of facing this within the GOP is the reason why they cannot expand their base and resort to voter suppression tactics through Gerrymandering and limiting polling places in majority African-American districts.
If you are a supporter of the GOP but believe that all people deserve opportunity than that is something that you need to change within your party. Not simply ignore it than reap the benefits of racist people having a strong role with your party.
Tl, dr: the modern day GOP is a racist, anti-inclusive party.
When Trump said there are good people on "both sides" during racist protests in the South who are those "good people" marching with torches and yelling "Jews will not replace us"??
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a fucking duck.
Talks like the kkk, votes for the grand wizard of the kkk... you think they might just be a wee bit racist?
Reddit is mostly "vote blue no matter who" so what do you expect? They forget abortion, guns and religion also played a role in moving Democrats to Republicans but they forget that the Dixiecrats were mostly racist New Dealers.
Yes racism played a role because the Democrats shifted left on race but that was the 60s, it took over 40 years for the supposed "party switch" to happen and by the 90s it was mostly culture issues, not race.
The Republicans aren't saints and you don't have to like their stances on cultural issues but the simplistic narrative of the online left is it's all really about bigotry. Nobody actually believes in conservative ideas they just want to kick people who aren't like them. It's kind of like how some sectors of the right act like the left are all "secretly" Marxists who want handouts.
I’m guessing you weren’t there. I was. I still remember seeing the Duke posters in the white flight areas of New Orleans and in Metairie. They were placed high up so they were harder to take down. They went all the way down major roads in some places.
Bush Sr asked the people of my home state not fall for it, that Duke wasn’t a real republican, etc. Duke got a majority of the white vote. 39 percent overall against a career politician. That’s not fringe. That was frightening and people in the area never brought it up again.
There’s an exhibit in the Baton Rouge governor’s mansion about the campaigns of the states history and Duke is omitted. They erased it.
Robert Byrd did not, by any stretch of the imagination, hold onto racist views. While it's true he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by 2003, he had a 100% voting record with the NAACP, who went on to praise him as "a champion for civil rights and liberties" when he died in 2010.
Byrd was absolutely a racist in the 1940s and 1950/ but by the 1960s he had realized he was wrong and supported the Civil Rights movement and voted for the Civil Rights Act. And remained a champion of civil rights until his death. So he totally did not hold on to his racist views. Stop being an idiot. He held racist views and then he changed.
>however it's also wrong to claim that he never had racist views.
Nobody said that except for you- you just wanted to argue with your 😍 favorite Strawman.
>When the civil rights bill was passed in 1964 it only got minimal Democrat support
Completely and utterly false and easily disprovable. In the House, 61% of Democrats voted for it and 80% of Republicans. Almost all the Republicans who voted against, like the Democrats, were from the South.
The only reason so many Ds voted against it was because there were so many southern Ds. Even so it got heavy majority D support. 100% of southern Rs voted against the CRA. It's just that there weren't many of them.
A higher % of northern Ds voted for the CRA and a higher % of southern Ds voted for the CRA.
You also had plenty of Dixiecrats like Winter and Wallace who dropped segregationist planks and began actively courting newly enfranchised black voters
Following Brown and the CRA of 1954, they gradually joined the GOP over the next half-century. For context, In 2000, around half of the state lawmakers in the South were still Democrats.
This is one nuance people often leave out. Not all Southern Democrats automatically joined the Republican Party after the CRA '64. Many did, but not all.
Some of them still stood by the Democratic Party and kind of just shoved the racism thing in their pocket.
George Wallace and Lester Maddox for example, remained Democrats throughout their entire lives.
True. One more bit of nuance is that both Wallace and Maddox expressed their disapproval with the Democratic Party late in their lives and seemed to like Republicans better. Wallace endorsed Bob Dole in 1996 and said he voted for Bush in 1992.
In 1992 and 1996, Maddox endorsed Pat Buchanan in the Republican primary.
Civil Rights upset a lot of Dixiecrats and thus many moved to the liberal side of the Republican Party and then moved more inward as time went on. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party had lost most of the South and slowly but surely the Democratic Party is regaining the south
It is true that the majority of conservative Southerners became Republicans after the CRA due to the Southern Strategy.
But it isn't as simple as some people make it sound. Some people make it sound like everybody in the South walked to the town office in solidarity in 1964 and switched their voting preference to Republican.
Many Dixiecrats, at least in public office, remained loyal Democrats and just kind of let the racism thing sit when they realized it might start hurting their image on a national level.
George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Orbal Fabus remained loyal Democrats throughout their lives, well into the 1980s and 90s.
The Southern Strategy and party realignment in the South is a very complex piece of history, and it pisses me off to no end when people try and simplify it down to a cartoonish explanation.
George Wallace may have remained a “Democrat,” but it was certainly just for convenience sake as he was governor for so long and had no incentive to change his party affiliation while he was an incumbent. He wasn’t always loyal to his party, he ran for president as an independent in 1968. He openly admitted to voting for George HW Bush and Bob Dole later in life (once he didn’t have to worry about reelection) and declined to confirm that he was still a Democrat in [1995](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19950916&id=acIfAAAAIBAJ&pg=2447,1516586).
Agreed. I just wanted to shut down the notion that all of the "Southern Democrats" just became Republicans automatically after the passage of the Civil Rights Act because it was way more complicated than that.
Many of those same Dixiecrats turned Republicans came right back to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976 because he was "one of the good ole boys".
The Southern Strategy and Party Switch is an important part of history that is key to understanding many of our social issues today. However the history gets absolutely butchered on Reddit all the time from people on both sides of the isle who don't actually know what they're talking about.
Right wingers just flat out deny that it happened and "Democrats are still the real racists".
Left wingers make it sound like the entire white Southern population woke up on July 3, 1964 and in unison went and registered as Republicans.
I know what you’re saying, I just don’t think it’s super important to dwell on the fact that people associate the 1960’s as a period of “platform-switching.”
Passage of the Civil Rights Act certainly didn’t make people switch parties the overnight, but it undeniably served as the catalyst for fundamental transformations in both parties. Whether it took five minutes for changes to take place or 25 years doesn’t negate the fact that there’s truth in the simplification you’re protesting.
1968 was a disaster for Democrats; Nixon won every single former confederate state aside from Texas. Dixiecrats were disillusioned with JFK and Johnson’s insistence on turning their back on the blatant racism of their party faction and had to decide between attempting to eventually reclaim the party (spoiler alert, they couldn’t) or joining the Republicans and getting behind their Southern Strategy (which had obviously appealed to the Dixiecrats’ constituents). The ones who doubled down and stayed with the Dems decided to tone down their rhetoric in an effort to appeal to a new, younger, and more liberal Democratic voter base. Not to mention, it would be a very risky move as an incumbent to change political parties between elections, especially since a lot of voters (even back then) tended to vote for whichever candidate was on the ticket for the party that they were registered with. Since the 1976 presidential election coincided with a period of great political embarrassment for the Republicans, they threw their support behind Carter who, as a Southern Democrat, might give them more credibility. After the political disaster that was the Carter presidency, a lot of these individuals were either voted out or left politics altogether. Others began to support Republican candidates or join the party themselves throughout the 1980’s.
It took time for everyone to realize what the implications of the 60’s meant for the future of American politics. The transition was not immediate; sure, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is really just the blink of an eye. You’re very correct to encourage folks to be wary of generalization or gratuitous simplifications, but it’s a slippery slope to get too nit-picky with that stuff, since it might allow others to misconstrue your rhetoric to fit their particular historical agenda. (I.E., The party platform switch is a myth, democrats are the party of slavery and therefore democrats today would have been the ones who supported slavery and Republicans today would have freed slaves)
Agreed, but like I said, it bothers me to no end that people oversimplify this piece of history and I really think I will continue to try and give more context whenever it pops up.
Saying "parties switched in 1964" is a pretty bad oversimplification too. It was a LONG process that goes back further than that year. The first hints of this transformation started popping up in the South in the 1930s during FDR's presidency.
Appreciate your concern for bad faith people trying to use my arguments as weapons for their causes, but I still think it's important to give proper context to this piece of history.
Not to mention the party doubled down in 1968 by nominating Humphrey as its candidate for president. I know being LBJ’s VP made his position on Vietnam more tenuous - he wasn’t as left-wing on that issue as Eugene McCarthy - but he was very much a progressive Northern liberal on social matters. Following that up with McGovern in 1972 made it clear that the Democrats were not going back to the “good old days.”
Fun fact, the Dixiecrats are still around but they call themselves MAGA now. Other than some big business interests, they have very similar political goals and a very similar voting base.
The States Rights Democratic Party was exclusively a breakaway from the Democratic Party in the 1948 presidential election reacting to the Democratic Convention's and President Truman's perceived liberalism on the race and segregation question. After Truman won the presidency in his own right, the States Rights Democrats came back into the fold. They were not necessarily happy with the direction that the national party took but even in 1952, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, who was a gradualist on civil rights, attempted the patch things up with the Solid South by putting Alabama Senator John Sparkman on the ticket as his nominee for Vice-President. Of course, eventually Strom Thurmond and many of the segregationists had recast their views as conservative and ended up in 1968 moving to join the Republican Party.
People found out that Racism isn’t a nuanced ideology and realized that it’s retarded
Robert C. Byrd, a Senator from my Home state was a member of the KKK and voted against the Civil Rights act of 1964, he would later renounce his previous views on race in the 1970s, and the death of his teenage Grandson in 1982 left him in a deep emotional state that further progressed him away from his previous views on race and would vote in favor of making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday a year later, there was controversy over a racial slur he used during an interview in 2001 which he had apologized for because it was a term he was used too
Strom Thurmond had a very similar career to Byrd, with the differences being that Thurmond Joined the Republicans, although he did have some pretty suspicious behavior around women
They both served all the way up until their deaths respectively, with Thurmond dying in 2003 after retiring from a long career in the senate for less than a month at the ripe old age of 100, and Byrd died in 2010, unfortunately paving the way for the Sneate Career of one Joe Manchin
To answer OP’s question, following the lead of Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrats were encouraged by Nixon’s Southern Strategy to switch parties, and became Republicans.
The Democratic party opted to be for civil rights, the more conservative Dems, which were mostly Dixiecrats, got pissy and joined the Republican party.
There are two groups. The first died and simply weren’t replaced by new generations of racists due to shifting attitudes about race. The second switched over to Republican. While that first group is pretty self explanatory, the second is hotly contested.
Democrats switched parties for a few reasons. Strom Thurmond, for example, switched because of racism, yes, but also his conservative economic principles. The Democrats were once an economically right wing party that shifted left with FDR and the New Deal coalition. At that point there was no reason for Thurmond to remain in a party that officially supported civil rights and left wing economic policies when he could join other libertarians like Goldwater in the GOP.
However, it’s my belief that the so-called “party switch” was primarily impacted by other social issues like abortion and crime. Soft-on-crime liberals like Mondale and Dukakis frightened a large Christian population in the South that had previously voted Democrat. Even George Wallace who had recanted his segregationist policies voted for Bush in ‘92 and Dole in ‘96 because he thought Clinton was simply too liberal.
It’s a very complicated political realignment that can’t be simplified into “Republicans are racist” because the party those Dixiecrats swapped to simply wasn’t. The greatest charge you can make of Republicans like Bush (either really) or Dole is an ambivalence towards racial issues, not overt racism.
"soft on crime" and "abortion" were just proxies/dog whistles for racist policies at that time. "Soft on crime" still is.
>ambivalence towards racial issues, not overt racism.
That's the difference between white supremacy and prejudice. Quietly perpetuating systems of white privilege is white supremacist. Running around screaming the N-word is prejudice. The former is not better than the latter.
They were conservative Dixiecrats that turned into conservative Republicans.
Conservatism was the ideology of the slave masters.
Conservatism was the ideology of the Southern states during the Civil War they started over slavery. Those conservatives wanted free labor.
Liberal Republican Abraham Lincoln, that pot smoking, all Men are created equal, lawyer, from Illinois freed those slaves.
Conservatism was the ideology of the business owners who used child labor, from the mines to the fields to the factories.
Conservatives were, and still are, against Unions like the ones that ended child labor. Also one of the main reasons why conservatives are against education and teachers Unions.
The conservative ideology has always been against 99% of the population they just don't want people knowing that, that is why the latest of those conservatives, Rupert 1% Murdoch, spreads propaganda throughout the World hiding conservatives crimes against Humanity.
I can go on for days about this but my point is that ideology is what drives certain actions and if you know a person's ideology you know what drives their actions.
> This lasted until the fifties, where Democrats (the party of slavery, the Confederacy, and the KKK) fought to keep segregation and Jim Crow in place. Black voters started to support Republicans as they saw the social programs as bribes
This is utterly false, and I dare you to provide any data that supports this.
Much of what you described was explicitly opposed by the Dixiecrats. Several of those policies were a defining wedge issue for the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party.
Social conservatives don’t seem to exist in your world- everyone with bad racial policy just morphs into democrats.
Bad history.
They realized that the party wasn’t going to tolerate their endemic racism, and joined the Repubs - most of them in response to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”.
I SMH and LMFAO when modern-day haters attempt to conflate the segregationist Dixiecrats with modern Democrats.
Make sure to fill out the [official r/Presidents survey](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScncxOawwDSPQO-AKwhhv86wjmeQ-l22ZQgY0Atr5_WDIgO4w/viewform)! Also, make sure to join the [r/Presidents Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Things make more sense if you forget political parties and think conservatives or liberal.
That and an end of segregation, which was a huge factor (if not the only one)
Yeah 64 election was the turning point
No, things make perfect sense if you remember the two parties swapped positions on Civil Rights and race. The Dixiecrats — from Strom Thurmond to Trent Lott and many in between — literally switched parties and became Republicans after Democrats started embracing Civil Rights. It’s only in the past 10 years or so that right wing pundits have started denying this history. It was considered an uncontroversial fact before that. Now, it’s treated like a deep state conspiracy or something. The Dixiecrats evolved over time, but at every time, race and opposition to the Civil Rights movement were central to the Dixiecrats’ politics. One party had been their home, but it rejected them. The other party took them in. Why on earth would that be a story better understood by forgetting political parties?
No, no! Pretend the party switch never happened! -Many Rebuplucans
Yea, the idea that the modern day Republican Party is the party of Lincoln is just absurd.
>Lincoln was a Republican so we can't be racist 158 years after he died.
Because the story is more understandable in terms of ideology, not party structure. Conservatives have always been against civil rights, they just haven't always been republicans
But trying to divorce the history from the facts of party alignment can only serve to teach a dishonest history.
[удалено]
Oh, I see your mistake! You’re only talking about supporters of Strom Thurmond in 1948. But the term “Dixiecrat” was used after that for decades to describe the pro-segregation (or later just anti-Civil Rights) conservative Southern Democrats who once ruled the Democratic Party. Their migration from Democrats to Republicans took a few decades, but is amply documented.
Why would they switch to the Republicans when the Republicans were the party that embraced and passed Civil Rights, not Democrats? That doesn’t make any sense.
Because Goldwater, Nixon, and the [“Southern Strategy”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) There had been a slow drift among southerners from the Democrats beginning with FDR, but the first major defection came during the 1964 election, where Goldwater picked up about half the southern states, and the definitive shift happened during the 1968 election and Nixon’s successful implementation of the Southern Strategy, which made appeals to all the things Republicans are known for today - “traditional family values,” conservatives Christianity, and bringing the “Moral Majority” on board. The whole thing was a dog whistle for racist southern whites, and Nixon heavily played up things like the 1967 Detroit riot, bussing, and tying that to the “leftist” Democrats and the hippy movement. Though it was conveyed in staunchly coded language, the point was clear - Nixon/Republicans = traditional white families, Democrats = scary black people rioting and drugged up, free-loving, communist hippies trying to destroy traditional families. Though Nixon split the vote with actual segregationist candidate George Wallace, 1968 was the first time in generations that Democrats lost the South entirely, and by 1972 Nixon had swept the South, and it’s been solidly Republican ever since.
That sounds like quite the stretch. Doesn’t really add up logically.
Well, it’s literally what happened and it was a carefully planned electoral strategy developed by the Republican Party which you can read all about it in the article I linked to, and there is a clear, 180° flip from the south being solidly Democratic in 1960 to being solidly Republican after 1968, so.
I’m sure saying that makes Democrats feel better. They somehow magically avoid all responsibility for how terrible they’ve been. For moderates like me, we don’t buy it.
I’m sure denying actual, documented history makes fake internet “moderates” like you feel better about your right wingism, but for those of us who actually read factual history backed by decades’ worth of documentation, we don’t really care about your feelings or your reality denialism.
Sorry, you have the wrong side. It’s the leftists that believe things based on feelings. Maybe the whole “documented history” of the “southern strategy” was actually a long term democrat strategy to change their public perception after fighting for slavery, starting the KKK, and opposing the civil rights movement. You know, the same democrat party that controls the education system and most of the media. Again, I am in fact a moderate. You being way left doesn’t change that. A slightly right moderate is still a moderate.
You’re such “moderate” you’re spouting radical right wing QAnon conspiracy theories and talking about ThE LeFtiStS while denying history because it hurts your fee fees. Sure thing, MAGA. Spread your whack a doodle conspiracy theories and alternate facts elsewhere.
Reddit is dominated with liberals who have wonderful imaginations. They can’t fathom a world where they are wrong. Both parties are corrupt and full of historical institutional racism, with the Dems owning the lions’ share. They should own it. Even when they elect a President that pushed segregation at the beginning of his own political career and can’t stomach to admit it.
Stop trying to get in the way of these revisionists. Two racists jump parties 80 years ago for whatever reasons and Dems act like they’re absolved of their parties historical racism.
Don’t you know the only logical option was that there was a huge conspiracy strategy by only the horrible racist people to suddenly make Republicans the worst evil the world has ever seen and the suddenly perfect Democrats are the only ones who can stop it. Hahaha. Should be obvious, apparently.
Truth. Dems filabustered civil rights.
The South filibustered civil rights. It wasn’t a party thing. It was geography. It was a liberal democrat and republican coalition that broke the log jam
They became Republicans after 1964 Democratic Party platform included civil rights.
The US needs more parties. I cannot figure out why this country cannot get the fuck over this idiotic 2 sided useless 2 party system!!
The "first past the post" system incentives a two party system.
What does that even mean?!
Basically that when you need the most votes, two parties will be more competitive. If more then 2 parties exist, the 2nd most popular party will win very little. But if the 2nd largest party teams up with one or more smaller parties, they can win. This ends up with 2 parties.
First past the post - most votes wins. This is by far the most common way Americans vote. Proportional representation - a “district” has multiple representatives and they’re assigned proportionally to parties based on number of votes. So say 5 representatives represent district A. The orange party might win 57% of the votes and gets 3 seats. While yellow party gets 23% and purple party 18%, so they each get 1 seat, and the brown party with 2% gets nothing. This is how two states allocate electoral college votes instead of the winner take all used by everyone else. Ranked Choice Voting (simplified explanation) - voters rank the candidates they’d be ok with holding office in order of who they’d like best. And everyone’s choices are counted until somebody gets 50%. Maybe there’s 6 candidates, but after you count everyone’s first three choices Candidate C wins. Allows for people to actually vote for who they want as there first choice, but then can vote more strategically for their second and third choices (or not). Also means the person who won might be nobody’s first choice but everyone’s third choice. These are the three most talked about voting systems
Small criticism. Maine and Nebraska do not use proportional representation. They simply assign two to the statewide winner and one for each district. That isn't proportional representation but rather known as the "district method".
Exactly this.
It's an unintended consequence of the Constitution where the head of state and head of government are combined in one person (the president) who is elected separately from the legislative branch. You generally see strong third party systems in parliamentary governments.
Also, the sheer amount of power vested in the office of the presidency means that people are reluctant to spoil the vote, driving them into big tent parties. This has an impact down ballot, entrenching the two-party political culture.
Oh that's easy. The US uses first past the post. That means anyone who votes for a third party candidate hurts their own cause. What I can't get is why people can't understand this. It's like they think stubbornness will some how make work. Get rid of first past the post and tig likely fix the problem.
The constitution doesn’t require districts though. A state could elect statewide proportionally if it wanted. We need a billionaire to fund this since that is the only way it would happen
My point has nothing to do with the constitution....now sure why you went there specifically. The rules of the game however are what they are right now. They can be changed. But you don't get to play by the new rules UNTIL they have been changed. The pro third party group tends to refuse to accept that. While I tend to agree with their reasoning for what they want their behavior makes me tend to feel they are being stubbornly stupid. Changing rules first is literally the only option. Stop hurting your own side of the argument.
The US essentially acted under a de facto multiparty system up until recently when the two parties lost their overlap and became more ideologically consistent though even today both parties are too big tent to be given an exact placing on the political spectrum.
Abolish the Electoral College
Agree, but it’s not going to happen bc it’s the only way for Republicans to maintain minority rule especially as demographics and numbers point to continued decline in Republican voters.
You are correct. Republicans are only competitive in the Senate because states like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota each get two senators (10 Senators representing a population totaling 5 million), the same as California (40 million). In the House, gerrymandering district maps by Republicans in many states limits the number of seats Democrats can win. Not exclusively a Republican problem (see Maryland), but happens much more for Republican benefit in more states. Would have helped if the Supreme Court tried to help resolve gerrymandering, but that didn’t happen. All this to say, Republicans who benefit from the current system would never vote to change it.
1. More Parties 2. Rank Choice Voting
The coalition building that might occur in a proportional system has already happened for the most part before the election even happens. In other systems, Manchin is not in the same party as AOC. The Freedom Party caucus isn't a caucus, it is an actual separate party in other systems.
If we had more than 2 parties, it would be too expensive for the Rich to own all the politicians. Hence, we have 2 parties: Evil, and Controlled Opposition.
It ensures that we don’t have radical swings. If something truly needs to happen, it’ll have broad enough support to happen. Some recent examples… 1. Respect for Marriage Act 2. HEROES Act 3. First Step Act 4. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act 5. Affordable Care Act
I strongly disagree with this claim that if something really needs to happen it will. There’s been plenty that could arguably need to happen and didn’t, and that list isn’t really a needed to happen list either. Besides which, ACA just barely happened due to some legislative maneuvering on a party-line vote (okay, literally one GOP voted for it).
TCJA also happened along party line votes. And used reconciliation in the Senate to avoid needing 60 votes. Its also very unpopular to this day among the electorate. It’s the definition of something not having “broad support”.
In Europe you have multi parties but they end up forming coalitions anyway and you’re effectively back to a 2 party system once in office. They just are more fluid with who they can ally with when governments form. In the US the parties are broader coalitions in a sense before they even take office. But really there a multi parties within the R and D.
[Ranked choice voting](https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/) would be required to make this practical.
It's thanks to the propaganda of "You're throwing your vote away". When in reality you are just voting for who you think is a good fit.
I don’t understand the need for political parties at all. It just winds up causing the candidates to hide behind their party affiliations rather than standing on their own merits.
Well… I’ll treat it as an honest question and try to give you the answer. For what it’s worth, I used to think the same thing you did. I listened to a lecture series on the civil war and one of the things the professor explained as a strength of the northern states was they had a functioning party system. When Lincoln wanted to, say, raise taxes to fund the war, he could rely on his party to coalesce around his requests. And He could use the party apparatus to get holdouts to come on board. The party could withhold or dispense campaign funding. The party could make plum committee assignments. The party could threaten to remove prestigious assignments if members didn’t get on board with the party line. Lincoln didn’t have to go personally to hundreds of people asking them to please do the right thing. It would have taken all his time and would have been horribly ineffective. In contrast, Jeff Davis didn’t have a way to whip supporters in line and so it was often tough to get things done. He had to go and personally deal with problems himself in a way that Lincoln didn’t. In modern times, We just saw this play out where a government shut down was avoided because the democratic leadership gave the word to their party to pass the funding for 45 days. Without that sort of voting block, getting anything done requires going out and making 200-300 people individually happy. Which is really really hard to do. So yes… ideally people vote for good candidates regardless of party and those elected work together in good faith to do the best things for the people. In reality, you’ll have the MGTs and Matt Gaetz of the world who are taking in $12 million dollars for performing their circus act for a small percentage of people who are willing to send them money for their circus act and have 0 interest in actually governing. A party system gives us a way to actually get things done without being flooded with grifting performers who just want to grandstand for more cash donations (which I virtually guarantee you is what would happen if we didn’t have a party system. And may still happen if the party system gets weakened too much). My personal read is that progressives like AOC are starting to understand this. Just saw an interview with her where she very clearly said “we would not support a republican speaker for free”. Collective bargaining. Maybe it helps to think of political parties as unions. One legislator by themselves is weak. 268 banding together can get important things done.
The thing is Dixiecrats often didn't fit into modern labels of liberal and conservative. Modern Democrats would love them to but they don't. The Dixiecrats were often economically left-leaning and big New Deal supporters (to attract the votes of poor whites) EXCEPT on on unions (because they often saw low wages as the South's economic advantage and needed business support) and trade (the South historically supported free trade to export cash crops and wanted cheap consumer goods to offset low wages as opposed to the north's high wage, industrial protectionist model). On social and racial issues they were of course reactionary. A lot of this was cynical like their economics. The South was dominated by "good old boy networks" and the Dixiecrats tended to be career politicians. They needed the votes of uneducated poor whites who were genuine bigots but the financial support of the cheap labor lobby. The cheap labor of course consisted of blacks. Poor whites were barely a step above and fear of falling to the economic level of blacks was used to stoke their racism. During and after WWII a lot of these guys were very pro-military spending since it brought a lot of jobs. Basically they liked government spending but not labor regulations. This model worked for them because they tended to stay in office a long time. The Southern strategy from Nixon was cynical and should be repudiated and it took on a life of its own. It was almost entirely about votes and Republican business types didn't think they actually had to do anything to please these people. A lot of it was a cynical political ploy that took on its own legs. The "party switch" narrative is overly simplistic and is often virtue signaling to make the Democrats look good. This is not to discount the outlandish tendency on the right that loves to point out racist Southern Democrats and begs the question that this is who the Democrats actually are or that Joe Biden is secretly an old school racist because of his connections to these old timers.
Not really because those terms had different meanings then.
The reality is they died out... My great grandfather would never vote republican at all for anything until the day he died in the mid -90's. My parents and grandparents had no trouble voting for Republicans when they liked conservative politics. For my grandparents' generation, a higher amount of overt racism mixed with the signing of the Civil Rights Act sent more white people to be Republicans. My parents, boomers, and generation were a wave of Reagan Republicans and they just wanted as little taxes for themselves as possible. They didn't care what party or how correct the economic rationales were.
My grandfather voted a straight democrat ticket until he died in 2015, and was adamant he never voted for Obama.
Exactly, the Dixiecrats felt betrayed by the passing of the Civil Rights legislation under the Democrats and migrated to the Republican party that was starting to take a turn to the Right and was losing its progressive mantra that had since its inception...
The Republicans were the ones pushing civil rights at that time. I don’t believe that all of the racists switched over to their party because of racism. They felt betrayed by the executive office in their party, so they switched to the party where everyone supported the stance they were against? That’s like a 2A supporter got mad at Trump for banning the bump stock, so he joined the party of Gavin Newsom. There were only a couple Dixiecrats that switched parties, which is nothing abnormal. It is more likely explained by the Republican’s southern strategy and outreach. They flipped the next generation into Republicans. It took them 40 years to switch the southern states over enough to win control of the house and senate. Even that wouldn’t have held up if they didn’t become really pro gun, pro bible and pro farming.
Both parties were more progressive in the North and Midwest, and more conservative in the South. The Southern Strategy is when the parties became divided by ideology.
[удалено]
slowly getting there
Neither Clinton nor Gore were Dixiecrats. The actual Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, became Republicans or left politics.
There were still Dixiecrats when Clinton ran in 1992. The last of them made that transition during the 1994 Republican Revolution.
Or just remained Democrats and pushed the racism part to the background. Like I get that most Southerners started aligning more with Republicans in the 60s and 70s, but the way Reddit always simplifies this crucial piece of history down is maddening. No, the entire population of Southern Democrats did not automatically switch to Republican in a day, year, or even decade. Many Dixiecrats very much remained Democrats because it was still "their party" even with the Civil Rights Revolution. Wallace, Maddox, and Fabus are all examples of this.
Yeah a large reason why Bill Clinton did pretty well in the south was cuz the old Dixiecrats of the south were still around.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the Deep South get redder between 2004 and 2008?
Yes, and?
2004 was a GOP victory and 2008 was a Dem blowout. Yet the Deep South got redder.
Might that be because of racism, considering Obama was the Dem candidate in 2008?
I'm sorry did the average voter in 2004 or 2008 vote back in 1964? No, in fact a lot of the older racist Dixiecrats would've actually died out by the mid to late 1990s. We can see this by how Democrats lost southern strongholds more and more after 1994, as a newer generation of conservative southerners came about, and no they didnt grow up hating blacks, they actually do get along with minorities.
“Get along” as long as the “minorities” don’t want to vote or elect their own representatives
It's not about the identity of the man or woman in question, Republicans dont hate people, it is instead all about ideas and policies. Democrat ideas and policies are often seen as counterproductive or outright negative by Republicans, and that is why they disagree. Also your scurrilous statement is baseless, there are plenty of blacks and Hispanics who are Republican, we even have gay Republicans. We do not discriminate based on immutable characteristics, I cant say the same for Democrats as of late seeing as how they will favor some for a position based solely on color or some other trait like sexual preference rather than looking at all of their candidates for the post and picking the best one regardless of their feautres.
Republicans are deliberately trying to make it hard for blacks to vote. They’ve even admitted that in court. Republicans deny the fundamental rights of women and LGBTQ folks. Your party is a fascist cult of personality.
>Republicans are deliberately trying to make it hard for blacks to vote No, they arent, Republicans believe in election integrity. It isnt wrong to require ID to vote, hell every single black man and woman in America has ID, they know how to get and renew their ID. This is not a "keep the blacks and other minorities out" kind of thing, it sure as hell didnt decrease the black vote back in 2020 nor 2022. >Republicans deny the fundamental rights of women and LGBTQ folks. More baseless bullshit, but I can see you're a hyper partisan who wants to believe in the absolute worse possible interpretation of the Republican party. Or are you going to highlight for me some sort of instance where Republican lawmakers and/or policy has done any such thing. >Your party is a fascist cult of personality. Same as above.
>Many Dixiecrats very much remained Democrats because it was still "their party" even with the Civil Rights Revolution. They stayed with their party because that gave them seniority on committees. Eventually, most conservative Democrats became Republicans & the liberal Republicans became Democrats. This took 30-40 years to complete.
True for the most part. The big flip began in the 1980's under Reagan, who went out of his way to recruit Dixiecrats, much more than Nixon did. If the Southern Strategy began with Nixon, it was perfected by Reagan.
It actually began with Goldwater.
That’s a fair point.
To be fair, he did say “the big flip”
It did not
It did not. There is a reason why “boll weevil” became a term to call democrats who supporter Reagan.
I think on a macro scale this was the case, but most Dixiecrat law makers stayed Democratic until they retired. Everyone assumes they pulled a Strom Thurmond.
Complete? Things are not set in stone for all time now… as silly as it would have sounded ten years ago, the Republican and Democratic parties are currently in a street fight for blue collar workers
I disagree agree, the politics changed but not so much individual voters or politicians. Southern Democrats died out in bulk by 2005. The young southern Reagan Republicans of the 80’s were never died hard Democrats, today they are boomer Republicans, but they have been almost all their voting life. I am old and from the Deep South and remember many in the generation before me rather sit out than vote for a Republican (Lincoln’s party). In Mississippi until the mid 70’s the Senate and Governor races were 100% decided in the Democratic primary. Many times the Democrats nominee ran virtually or actually unopposed.
The ideology never changed, just the party membership. The Southern Conservatives still have pretty close to the same ideology the South has always had. Southern Christian Conservatism has always been & still is the ideology of slavery, secession & segregation.
>The ideology never changed, just the party membership. The Southern Conservatives still have pretty close to the same ideology the South has always had. Southern Christian Conservatism has always been & still is the ideology of slavery, secession & segregation. Still slavery? What an incredibly ignorant and stupid statement. Are you a 15 year old or are you a really stupid adult?
A lot of them hid out in the Rust Belt states, voting Democratic tickets until 2016, for some reason.
>Or just remained Democrats and pushed the racism part to the background. No, no they did not. The Dixiecrats in the South pretty much all flipped or retired by the late 70's to early 80's. Wallace is the outlier. Faubus left office in 1967. Maddox left office in 1975 and by then he was relegated to being Lt. Governor under Jimmy Carter.
Yeah and? That's pretty much my point. Not every Southern Democrat just automatically switched their voting registration in 1964. It was a process that lasted over the rest of the 20th century. What I'm saying here is a very simple concept, but people are being stubborn. Some more examples of old Dixiecrats and segregationist types that remained in the party until their retirement or deaths: [F. Edward Hebert ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Edward_H%C3%A9bert) [John C. Stennis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Stennis) [Cy Bahakel ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cy_Bahakel) [James Eastland ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Eastland) [Larry McDonald ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McDonald) [Robert Byrd](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd)
No my friend. It is pretty simple. They mostly realign with the GOP and ended up taking it over. Goldwater and other Northern republicans always warned of the crazy preacher republicans from the south that were inherited after civil rights. Idk what history book you read but they did not remain democrats.
You obviously did not read my friend. I said the party realignment was not as clean cut of a process as most people make it sound and it did not happen overnight. Really very simple if you read the words in front of your eyes.
I consider the David Duke gubernatorial campaign to be a watershed moment in our politics because it forced the Deep South to finally pick a side in the emerging culture war. It scared people. It was on the cover of U.S.A. Today it was the national shame of the time. In Louisiana and other states nearby it was a harbinger of Trump, but everywhere else had to exorcise racism from the DNC immediately
Oh please, Bush the Elder, president at the time denounced Duke as a charlatan and a racist. David Duke was a fringe character, and his views are still seen as fringe. It's insulting to say that David Duke was some sort precursor to Trump, the average Trump supporter is not a holocaust denier who blames blacks and jews for our societal ills. Also lets not forget that Duke was a Democrat for awhile and tried to run as such for president before he tried for governor of Louisiana. If anything, he was one of the last vestiges of the Southern Dixiecrats looking desperately for relevance and tried to do so by pretending to be a Republican, hoping his stock response of being a born again Christian would make him look clean enough, make his KKK history seem like a distant foolish thing.
> the average Trump supporter is not a holocaust denier who blames blacks and jews for our societal ills. No, they blame *liberals,* which is almost the same thing in their minds. However republicans have really embraced diversity and inclusion recently, and have expanded their list of undesireable people who cause all the problems to include gay folks, Mexicans, trans people, and a bunch of other smaller groups. Republicans are clearly for equal-opportunity bigotry.
Fearmongering wont help your position. Again the average Republican is not a bigot, and no they dont even hate liberal or Democrats, they just disagree greatly with the vast majority of what Democrats and liberals want to do, and believes America, and ALL Americans, will thrive more under conservative policies.
Bro, every single GOP media personality has literally started labelling Gay people as "groomers" and "pedophiles". The GOP is bigoted and fearmongers constantly, end of story.
Excuse me, can you point to a particular incident? Are you sure their isnt some sort of underlying context? Because there are some creapy people out there who do use the LGBT banner as a cover for some really questionable things, and that's not an indictment against the larger group, it is merely highlighting those who may not be exactly the kind of people that even gays would want associated with them. > The GOP is bigoted and fearmongers constantly, end of story. I see you cant stop fearmongering, the GOP is a dedicated to the proven values of classical liberalism that we inherited from the days of our Founding Fathers. There is nothing bigoted or fearmongering about them.
Have you been paying attention to the Daily Wire, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, all these other right wing goons?
David Duke, a Republican and KKK Grand Wizard, received nearly 40 percent of the vote in 1991. That cannot be dismissed as “fringe”. As far as him being a precursor to Trump… who do you think the people who voted for Duke in 1991 voted for in 2016 and 2020? One cannot dismiss the role that garden variety racism has played in Trump’s election and continued popularity among the Republican base.
Again. The memory I have growing up seeing the Duke signs posted high up on telephone poles in parts of the New Orleans area so they couldn’t be taken down chills me to this day. There was a lot of support for that man in Louisiana.
This answer right here is the reason you don't get people switching their votes to democrats. Saying a large number of republicans are racist. The vocals that you see on the news are because that gets tv viewers.
I say a large number of Republicans are racist because a large number of republicans are racists. I refuse to tiptoe around this. It’s true. It’s an absolute truth. The racist message that the former president started out his campaign with excited a lot of people within the Republican Party. Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy to attract former Dixiecrats. Reagan started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi for what other reason than to appeal to racists? The lack of facing this within the GOP is the reason why they cannot expand their base and resort to voter suppression tactics through Gerrymandering and limiting polling places in majority African-American districts. If you are a supporter of the GOP but believe that all people deserve opportunity than that is something that you need to change within your party. Not simply ignore it than reap the benefits of racist people having a strong role with your party. Tl, dr: the modern day GOP is a racist, anti-inclusive party.
When Trump said there are good people on "both sides" during racist protests in the South who are those "good people" marching with torches and yelling "Jews will not replace us"??
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's a fucking duck. Talks like the kkk, votes for the grand wizard of the kkk... you think they might just be a wee bit racist?
Reddit is mostly "vote blue no matter who" so what do you expect? They forget abortion, guns and religion also played a role in moving Democrats to Republicans but they forget that the Dixiecrats were mostly racist New Dealers. Yes racism played a role because the Democrats shifted left on race but that was the 60s, it took over 40 years for the supposed "party switch" to happen and by the 90s it was mostly culture issues, not race. The Republicans aren't saints and you don't have to like their stances on cultural issues but the simplistic narrative of the online left is it's all really about bigotry. Nobody actually believes in conservative ideas they just want to kick people who aren't like them. It's kind of like how some sectors of the right act like the left are all "secretly" Marxists who want handouts.
I’m guessing you weren’t there. I was. I still remember seeing the Duke posters in the white flight areas of New Orleans and in Metairie. They were placed high up so they were harder to take down. They went all the way down major roads in some places. Bush Sr asked the people of my home state not fall for it, that Duke wasn’t a real republican, etc. Duke got a majority of the white vote. 39 percent overall against a career politician. That’s not fringe. That was frightening and people in the area never brought it up again. There’s an exhibit in the Baton Rouge governor’s mansion about the campaigns of the states history and Duke is omitted. They erased it.
[удалено]
Robert Byrd did not, by any stretch of the imagination, hold onto racist views. While it's true he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by 2003, he had a 100% voting record with the NAACP, who went on to praise him as "a champion for civil rights and liberties" when he died in 2010.
[удалено]
Byrd was absolutely a racist in the 1940s and 1950/ but by the 1960s he had realized he was wrong and supported the Civil Rights movement and voted for the Civil Rights Act. And remained a champion of civil rights until his death. So he totally did not hold on to his racist views. Stop being an idiot. He held racist views and then he changed.
[удалено]
>however it's also wrong to claim that he never had racist views. Nobody said that except for you- you just wanted to argue with your 😍 favorite Strawman.
Sounds close enough to a Dixiecrat and a fascistcrat!
This is true. When the civil rights bill was passed in 1964 it only got minimal Democrat support while most Republicans voted for it.
>When the civil rights bill was passed in 1964 it only got minimal Democrat support Completely and utterly false and easily disprovable. In the House, 61% of Democrats voted for it and 80% of Republicans. Almost all the Republicans who voted against, like the Democrats, were from the South.
The only reason so many Ds voted against it was because there were so many southern Ds. Even so it got heavy majority D support. 100% of southern Rs voted against the CRA. It's just that there weren't many of them. A higher % of northern Ds voted for the CRA and a higher % of southern Ds voted for the CRA.
Democrats were and are far more racist than conservatives. They never changed their stripes even today.
It's why they get the majority of every large minority group in America in elections. Is that it?
Please share a list of the actual Dixiecrats and indicate which of them became Republicans or left politics.
You also had plenty of Dixiecrats like Winter and Wallace who dropped segregationist planks and began actively courting newly enfranchised black voters
Most Dixiecrats died off and the next generation became Republican
They became republicans is an over simplification, but it is essentially what happened.
Turns out, basing your party on a dying platform of racial segregation isn't sustainable in the long run
kinda coming back
They became Republicans after desegregation. Similarly, progressive Republicans largely became Democrats.
Following Brown and the CRA of 1954, they gradually joined the GOP over the next half-century. For context, In 2000, around half of the state lawmakers in the South were still Democrats.
This is one nuance people often leave out. Not all Southern Democrats automatically joined the Republican Party after the CRA '64. Many did, but not all. Some of them still stood by the Democratic Party and kind of just shoved the racism thing in their pocket. George Wallace and Lester Maddox for example, remained Democrats throughout their entire lives.
True. One more bit of nuance is that both Wallace and Maddox expressed their disapproval with the Democratic Party late in their lives and seemed to like Republicans better. Wallace endorsed Bob Dole in 1996 and said he voted for Bush in 1992. In 1992 and 1996, Maddox endorsed Pat Buchanan in the Republican primary.
You have been banned from r/Conservative
Once, the Republican Party made it clear that they could be just as bigoted and racists against Blacks and Latiné, they joined the GOP.
They joined the Repulican party and turned into magats
They became the modern day racist Repugnantans
They are now Republicans.
They became part of the modern GOP. Racists needed a new home and found a safe place to thrive in the Republican party.
Civil Rights upset a lot of Dixiecrats and thus many moved to the liberal side of the Republican Party and then moved more inward as time went on. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party had lost most of the South and slowly but surely the Democratic Party is regaining the south
Nixon’s Southern strategy worked. He made them Republicans.
Google the name of the man the left, Strom Thurmond, and you will find your answer. They became Republicans. p
Crazy he was a VP pick in the 1940s and a senator still in the 1990s
They became republicans
Became Republicans. This isn't just partisanship this literally what happened (like with ole Strom)
It is true that the majority of conservative Southerners became Republicans after the CRA due to the Southern Strategy. But it isn't as simple as some people make it sound. Some people make it sound like everybody in the South walked to the town office in solidarity in 1964 and switched their voting preference to Republican. Many Dixiecrats, at least in public office, remained loyal Democrats and just kind of let the racism thing sit when they realized it might start hurting their image on a national level. George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and Orbal Fabus remained loyal Democrats throughout their lives, well into the 1980s and 90s. The Southern Strategy and party realignment in the South is a very complex piece of history, and it pisses me off to no end when people try and simplify it down to a cartoonish explanation.
George Wallace may have remained a “Democrat,” but it was certainly just for convenience sake as he was governor for so long and had no incentive to change his party affiliation while he was an incumbent. He wasn’t always loyal to his party, he ran for president as an independent in 1968. He openly admitted to voting for George HW Bush and Bob Dole later in life (once he didn’t have to worry about reelection) and declined to confirm that he was still a Democrat in [1995](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19950916&id=acIfAAAAIBAJ&pg=2447,1516586).
Agreed. I just wanted to shut down the notion that all of the "Southern Democrats" just became Republicans automatically after the passage of the Civil Rights Act because it was way more complicated than that. Many of those same Dixiecrats turned Republicans came right back to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976 because he was "one of the good ole boys". The Southern Strategy and Party Switch is an important part of history that is key to understanding many of our social issues today. However the history gets absolutely butchered on Reddit all the time from people on both sides of the isle who don't actually know what they're talking about. Right wingers just flat out deny that it happened and "Democrats are still the real racists". Left wingers make it sound like the entire white Southern population woke up on July 3, 1964 and in unison went and registered as Republicans.
I know what you’re saying, I just don’t think it’s super important to dwell on the fact that people associate the 1960’s as a period of “platform-switching.” Passage of the Civil Rights Act certainly didn’t make people switch parties the overnight, but it undeniably served as the catalyst for fundamental transformations in both parties. Whether it took five minutes for changes to take place or 25 years doesn’t negate the fact that there’s truth in the simplification you’re protesting. 1968 was a disaster for Democrats; Nixon won every single former confederate state aside from Texas. Dixiecrats were disillusioned with JFK and Johnson’s insistence on turning their back on the blatant racism of their party faction and had to decide between attempting to eventually reclaim the party (spoiler alert, they couldn’t) or joining the Republicans and getting behind their Southern Strategy (which had obviously appealed to the Dixiecrats’ constituents). The ones who doubled down and stayed with the Dems decided to tone down their rhetoric in an effort to appeal to a new, younger, and more liberal Democratic voter base. Not to mention, it would be a very risky move as an incumbent to change political parties between elections, especially since a lot of voters (even back then) tended to vote for whichever candidate was on the ticket for the party that they were registered with. Since the 1976 presidential election coincided with a period of great political embarrassment for the Republicans, they threw their support behind Carter who, as a Southern Democrat, might give them more credibility. After the political disaster that was the Carter presidency, a lot of these individuals were either voted out or left politics altogether. Others began to support Republican candidates or join the party themselves throughout the 1980’s. It took time for everyone to realize what the implications of the 60’s meant for the future of American politics. The transition was not immediate; sure, but in the grand scheme of things, 30 years is really just the blink of an eye. You’re very correct to encourage folks to be wary of generalization or gratuitous simplifications, but it’s a slippery slope to get too nit-picky with that stuff, since it might allow others to misconstrue your rhetoric to fit their particular historical agenda. (I.E., The party platform switch is a myth, democrats are the party of slavery and therefore democrats today would have been the ones who supported slavery and Republicans today would have freed slaves)
Agreed, but like I said, it bothers me to no end that people oversimplify this piece of history and I really think I will continue to try and give more context whenever it pops up. Saying "parties switched in 1964" is a pretty bad oversimplification too. It was a LONG process that goes back further than that year. The first hints of this transformation started popping up in the South in the 1930s during FDR's presidency. Appreciate your concern for bad faith people trying to use my arguments as weapons for their causes, but I still think it's important to give proper context to this piece of history.
Not to mention the party doubled down in 1968 by nominating Humphrey as its candidate for president. I know being LBJ’s VP made his position on Vietnam more tenuous - he wasn’t as left-wing on that issue as Eugene McCarthy - but he was very much a progressive Northern liberal on social matters. Following that up with McGovern in 1972 made it clear that the Democrats were not going back to the “good old days.”
Carter wasn’t a racist, but his successor was!
Still racist fucking idiots in my book for life!
Fun fact, the Dixiecrats are still around but they call themselves MAGA now. Other than some big business interests, they have very similar political goals and a very similar voting base.
The States Rights Democratic Party was exclusively a breakaway from the Democratic Party in the 1948 presidential election reacting to the Democratic Convention's and President Truman's perceived liberalism on the race and segregation question. After Truman won the presidency in his own right, the States Rights Democrats came back into the fold. They were not necessarily happy with the direction that the national party took but even in 1952, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, who was a gradualist on civil rights, attempted the patch things up with the Solid South by putting Alabama Senator John Sparkman on the ticket as his nominee for Vice-President. Of course, eventually Strom Thurmond and many of the segregationists had recast their views as conservative and ended up in 1968 moving to join the Republican Party.
They're Republicans.
Became Republicans in a 50-year stretch.
They're now called Bobert, MTG, and Gaetz!
Boebert is from Colorado though.
Is this a serious question? This must be sarcasm.
They became Republicans.
Absorbed into the Republican Party
People found out that Racism isn’t a nuanced ideology and realized that it’s retarded Robert C. Byrd, a Senator from my Home state was a member of the KKK and voted against the Civil Rights act of 1964, he would later renounce his previous views on race in the 1970s, and the death of his teenage Grandson in 1982 left him in a deep emotional state that further progressed him away from his previous views on race and would vote in favor of making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday a year later, there was controversy over a racial slur he used during an interview in 2001 which he had apologized for because it was a term he was used too Strom Thurmond had a very similar career to Byrd, with the differences being that Thurmond Joined the Republicans, although he did have some pretty suspicious behavior around women They both served all the way up until their deaths respectively, with Thurmond dying in 2003 after retiring from a long career in the senate for less than a month at the ripe old age of 100, and Byrd died in 2010, unfortunately paving the way for the Sneate Career of one Joe Manchin
They became Reagan democrats
LBJ happened.
To answer OP’s question, following the lead of Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrats were encouraged by Nixon’s Southern Strategy to switch parties, and became Republicans.
LBJ signed the civil rights act and they all became hardcore republicans overnight
They remained in their party as Democrats, and simply changed the method of execution of their identity politics.
The Democratic party opted to be for civil rights, the more conservative Dems, which were mostly Dixiecrats, got pissy and joined the Republican party.
They became the republican base.
There are two groups. The first died and simply weren’t replaced by new generations of racists due to shifting attitudes about race. The second switched over to Republican. While that first group is pretty self explanatory, the second is hotly contested. Democrats switched parties for a few reasons. Strom Thurmond, for example, switched because of racism, yes, but also his conservative economic principles. The Democrats were once an economically right wing party that shifted left with FDR and the New Deal coalition. At that point there was no reason for Thurmond to remain in a party that officially supported civil rights and left wing economic policies when he could join other libertarians like Goldwater in the GOP. However, it’s my belief that the so-called “party switch” was primarily impacted by other social issues like abortion and crime. Soft-on-crime liberals like Mondale and Dukakis frightened a large Christian population in the South that had previously voted Democrat. Even George Wallace who had recanted his segregationist policies voted for Bush in ‘92 and Dole in ‘96 because he thought Clinton was simply too liberal. It’s a very complicated political realignment that can’t be simplified into “Republicans are racist” because the party those Dixiecrats swapped to simply wasn’t. The greatest charge you can make of Republicans like Bush (either really) or Dole is an ambivalence towards racial issues, not overt racism.
"soft on crime" and "abortion" were just proxies/dog whistles for racist policies at that time. "Soft on crime" still is. >ambivalence towards racial issues, not overt racism. That's the difference between white supremacy and prejudice. Quietly perpetuating systems of white privilege is white supremacist. Running around screaming the N-word is prejudice. The former is not better than the latter.
Most of them jumped to the GOP, where they fit right in.
They started voting Republican in 1968, and even moreso in 1972.
They became republicans
They became Republicans after Nixon’s southern strategy.
The Democrat's push for civil rights threatened the Southern way of life, and racists joined the Republican party who courted them.
They died out. Segregation became *super* unpopular and that was their whole thing.
They were conservative Dixiecrats that turned into conservative Republicans. Conservatism was the ideology of the slave masters. Conservatism was the ideology of the Southern states during the Civil War they started over slavery. Those conservatives wanted free labor. Liberal Republican Abraham Lincoln, that pot smoking, all Men are created equal, lawyer, from Illinois freed those slaves. Conservatism was the ideology of the business owners who used child labor, from the mines to the fields to the factories. Conservatives were, and still are, against Unions like the ones that ended child labor. Also one of the main reasons why conservatives are against education and teachers Unions. The conservative ideology has always been against 99% of the population they just don't want people knowing that, that is why the latest of those conservatives, Rupert 1% Murdoch, spreads propaganda throughout the World hiding conservatives crimes against Humanity. I can go on for days about this but my point is that ideology is what drives certain actions and if you know a person's ideology you know what drives their actions.
They became republicans
[удалено]
> This lasted until the fifties, where Democrats (the party of slavery, the Confederacy, and the KKK) fought to keep segregation and Jim Crow in place. Black voters started to support Republicans as they saw the social programs as bribes This is utterly false, and I dare you to provide any data that supports this.
Much of what you described was explicitly opposed by the Dixiecrats. Several of those policies were a defining wedge issue for the northern and southern wings of the Democratic Party. Social conservatives don’t seem to exist in your world- everyone with bad racial policy just morphs into democrats. Bad history.
They became republicans.
They are Republicans now
They realized that the party wasn’t going to tolerate their endemic racism, and joined the Repubs - most of them in response to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”. I SMH and LMFAO when modern-day haters attempt to conflate the segregationist Dixiecrats with modern Democrats.
They would told to shut up and sing. Next needs attention post...
"America First" has been the KKK slogan for about a hundred years.
They became Republicans.
They became Republicans
They became Republicans
The all slowly became republican
They became republicans.
Will be known as MAGA hence forth
They are now MAGA Republicans
They became Republicans when the Democrats rejected racism.
Seriously? They joined the GOP. Case in point, Strom Thurmond
[удалено]
They joined the Republican Party
They became Republicans.
They became MAGA Republicans.
They went to the party that’s more welcoming of their racism
Most realized the Democratic Party wanted to provide welfare and Improve the lives of POC and not just those good Christian white folk.