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Watergate matters only because the current president seems to be doing a Watergate 2.0. Nixon means less to current day politics that Robert Byrd does.
The right wing can't keep bringing up the racist past of people like Byrd to stain Democrats today while at the same time telling us Democratic Party hate white men. These arguments go against each other.
Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there.
That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
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Johnson did not spring up from the Democratic soil ex nihilo. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fourteenth Amendment. Not one Democrat in Congress voted for the Fifteenth Amendment. Not one voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Eisenhower as a general began the process of desegregating the military, and Truman as president formalized it, but the main reason either had to act was that President Wilson, the personification of Democratic progressivism, had resegregated previously integrated federal facilities. (“If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it,” he declared.) Klansmen from Senator Robert Byrd to Justice Hugo Black held prominent positions in the Democratic party — and President Wilson chose the Klan epic Birth of a Nation to be the first film ever shown at the White House.
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The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.
Read. Learn. The Dem party has always been the party of slavery and racism.
Read. Learn. The Dem party has always been the party of slavery and racism.
Your ability to copy and paste has certainly changed my mind.
Seriously, there were racists in both parties. They still are racists in both parties. Neither party has racism as part of their platform. I vote for person over party though most of those I vote for are not Republicans. Anytime someone makes a sweeping statement that "the INSERT YOUR POLITICAL PARTY YO DESPISE HERE is the party of all that is evil in the world looks pretty silly. Neither party is perfect.
They really need to start teaching history in school again.
It hasn't been debunked at all. It was initiated by Lee Atwater (the Karl Rove of his day), who later very much regretted it--a day late and a dollar short.
Read. Learn. The Dem party has always been the party of slavery and racism.
The Democratic Party in the 19th century was the conservative, right-wing party; the Republican Party was the progressive, liberal party. That began to change at the beginning of the 20th century.
Lincoln was a huge racist and actual white supremacist. But he was a Republican - funny how the Democrats worship him.
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