Sigh. Where to begin?
Let’s start with this:
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, combined with the musings of one particular individual. There were several Civil Rights Acts before the 1964 act. The interesting thing is that many who supported all the previous acts opposed that particular one, and many who opposed all the previous acts supported that particular one.
Whining about the Southern Strategy sounds more like Sour Grapes than anything else.
And this:
If you want to talk about race in particular then I can assure you the Democrats really haven't moved their position. They show particular ire to minorities who leave the plantation, believing their votes are owed to the Democrats. Having grown up brown and poor I know the different attitudes the two parties have towards people who are brown and poor. Republicans say "you need Jesus". Democrats say "I am Jesus". Not literally, but in essence. Republicans want you to listen to a sermon while giving you your handout. Democrats want your obedience while giving you your handout. Either way there are strings attached, but one set of strings is far more condescending.
I mean, just … please. Here,
Southern Strategy. I know, you’ll probably dismiss it because its Wikipedia and Wiki isn’t run by Libertarian zealots, and it is justly maligned sometimes for other reasons. But Wiki gets a lot of stuff right and everything in there is independently confirmed by many, many sources and historians.
Oh, and I commend to your attention
Ehrlichman’s confession.
Boy! That there is some party for minorities to want to vote for, ain’t it?
Maybe you’d like to explain why in presidential election after presidential election from the end of the Civil War through the 1950s, the old confederacy consistently supported Democratic presidential candidates over Republican ones, until … 1964. What happened in 1964? The Civil Rights act was passed, and Barry Goldwater, who opposed it, carried the old confederacy over LBJ., who was a white southerner no less!
After that, the south remained solid
for Republicans, with a couple of exceptions, when the Democrats nominated southerners Carter and Clinton. And while Carter carried much of the south in 1976, he got wiped out there by Reagan in 1980. The south today is, for Republicans, what it was prior to 1964 for Democrats — a bastion of support. That’s an objective fact of history and you can’t hand-wave it away with empty Libertarian polemics.
When asked in 1964 whether he would pursue black votes, Goldwater replied, “I go hunting where the ducks are,” meaning he would pursue white southern voters specifically. So much for the party of Lincoln! Which is my point exactly — the two parties flipped places, with race being the real pivot point, but another key pivot point was 1933, when FDR became president and ushered in the New Deal which was an extension of the Whigs’ American System and Lincoln’s big-government activism. Thus did the Democrats take over the mantle of centralized activist government, leaving their old commitment to states’ rights in the ditch. The only reason the white South didn’t ditch the Democrats after FDR got elected was because the New Deal
specifically omitted black people from most of its benefits. This was done to get the votes needed to pass the legislation from white southern racist Democrats, the ones who back then were still the heirs to the traitors Jeff Davis et al.
After signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964, LBJ said, “There goes the south.“ He knew it. Goldwater knew it. Nixon knew it. And they all knew why. Why don’t you?
Also, please don’t tell me about other civil rights acts. There was a minor one in 1957, and before that … bupkis, since the days of Reconstruction, when those civil rights reforms were supported by Republicans and opposed by almost all Democrats, certainly virtually all southern Democrats, who of course also opposed ending slavery and plunged the country into Civil War.
This stuff about the modern Democratic Party being a plantation for blacks is standard Libertarian/right-wingnut boilerplate and is deeply offensive and flat-out nuts. The vast majority of blacks vote for Democrats over Republicans because they understand quite clearly their own self-interest in the matter, particularly now, when the Republicans have become the party of MAGAts who quite obviously would take the country all the way back to 1859 if they could.
This is not to say by any means that the Democratic Party is perfect, certainly not to say that it is “Jesus,” but it is the only viable option for anyone who is not white, male, Christian, heterosexual, and suffering a serious case of psychotic entitlement, like their hero Marmalade Mussolini. As the old rap song from the early 70s says, “the white man’s got a God complex.”
Of course there are Democrats too who are white, male, Christian, and heterosexual, but the modern MAGAt party appeals pretty much exclusively to those demographics, which is why the Republicans are going to get their asses whupped again next year by Joe Biden.
I’d also add that Goldwater later in life recanted his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights act, came out strongly for gay rights, and dismissed the modern Republican Party as a bunch of religious loons. And this was in the late 90s, when the party was not nearly as nuts as it is now.
Tell me — do
you support the Civil Rights act of 1964, the voting rights act, and other civil-rights era legislation?
The other stuff I’ll get to later. It’s also either wrong, or irrelevant.
