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Both political parties are two sides of the same coin. None can be trusted. PoLIEtics is pure bull****. It's bs. Political parties should be eliminated.
Both political parties are two sides of the same coin. None can be trusted. PoLIEtics is pure bull****. It's bs. Political parties should be eliminated.
Dude, what's with bumping ancient threads to add these ridiculous comments?
The only people I have really heard deny the political realignment of the 1960-1980s are Republican propaganda makers who want to promote the idea that the modern Democratic party is racist, by conflating it with the historical Southern Democratic parties in the deep south. The only way this works is to deny the existence of the southern strategy and the over all political realignment of the Southeast and Northeast, especially New England.
The history of party evolution is very convoluted and full of twists. I think the biggest problem is that present-day partisans with an axe to grind find it all too tempting to oversimplify. For example while I would agree that there was realignment after Reagan, Goldwater was not very far ideologically from Reagan, so the limited gov't conservatism of Reagan was present long before Reagan became president.
One thing I hear all the time now is that Reagan would be thrown out of today's GOP for being too far left. I find that meme to be absurd.
The very term traces back to just two GOP consultants, Kevin Phillips and Lee Atwater. Phillips worked for Nixon and later became somewhat of a lefty pundit. Lee Atwater was a bare-knuckles politico, but no racist. He was also a professional musician who recorded mostly with black musicians like Percy Sledge. But anyway the entire evidence for the existence of the Southern Strategy comes from interviews of Atwater and Phillips, as far as I know.
A Nixon speechwriter denied that Nixon ever had a Southern Strategy:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Writer Jeffrey Hart who worked on the Nixon campaign as a speechwriter says that Nixon did not have a "Southern Strategy" but "Border State Strategy" as the campaign ceded the Deep South to George Wallace and that the press merely call it a "Southern Strategy" as they are "very lazy
Ann Coulter identified 13 segregationist Senators from the 50s-60s era. Exactly one of them (Strom Thurmond) switched from the Democratic to the Republican parties. The remaining 12 all stayed lifelong Democrats. //www.city-data.com/forum/polit...ationists.html
Also they were mostly not 'conservative Democrats.' People like Sam Ervin and J William Fulbright were to the left of center. Fulbright was mentor to none other than Bill Clinton.
Did it really? Many of the early Republicans such as Seward were pretty progressive in pushing for government involvement in building the nations's infrastructure and in public education. Teddy Roosevelt was much the same in that regard as opposed to the Taft wing of the party which was much more conservative than Seward, Lincoln and the other ex-whig early Republicans had been.
You have to keep in mind that what was considered "progressive" or "conservative" in 1880s is not necessarily considered the same way today, if for no other reason than the issues are so different today. Whigs tended to be more progressive than Democrats in the antebellum period, but "progressive" in the 1840s-1850s usually meant favoring government assistance to building infrastructure, public education, etc because pre-Civil War America didn't have those things and needed them to prosper.
By 1900, you've got an entirely different situation. You have large and ever growing cities. You have masses of foreigners flooding the US. You have people working in factories that employ hundreds of people instead of working in small shops. There's a much greater disparity in wealth in than in 1860. There's more concern with things like protecting places like Yellowstone and Yosemite and Niagara Falls. You have "modern" technology like the telephone, electricity, and the first automobiles.
Furthermore, contrary to modern belief, political parties in the US have always appealed to a variety of constituencies, and their issues (platforms) have reflected that. For example, in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a major populist movement in the US. They even formed the Populist Party. It had an awful lot in common with today's Tea Party. However, the Populists were noted for wanting an expanded money supply (ie, using silver as well as gold to back currency) as well as policies that would benefit poorer people while today's Tea Partyers are more likely to back scaling back the money supply and limiting benefits for poorer people.
Political parties aren't static entities because society isn't static. As people's concerns change, political parties have to change, too, adapting to the new political reality. If a political party can't do that, it will simply cease to exist, and its former members will find other political parties to suit them. That's pretty much what happened to the Whigs in the 1850s with most northern Whigs ending up Republicans.
In todays's political alignment, there is no such thing as a "Conservative Democrat" it is an oxymoron. The Wiki article got it partly right in that conservative Democrats went extinct with the passing of the southern Boll Weevils in the 80's. Today's so called Blue Dog Democrats are far to the left of the most liberal Republicans, none are remotely conservative, very few are moderate, most are still center left in spite of their label.
Ann Coulter identified 13 segregationist Senators from the 50s-60s era. Exactly one of them (Strom Thurmond) switched from the Democratic to the Republican parties. The remaining 12 all stayed lifelong Democrats. //www.city-data.com/forum/polit...ationists.html
Also they were mostly not 'conservative Democrats.' People like Sam Ervin and J William Fulbright were to the left of center. Fulbright was mentor to none other than Bill Clinton.
Most of those 13 were not in very long after the 1960 if that and as such were not around through the Nixon-Reagan realignment. Only Strom power Byrd and Hollings had staying power and they switched parties or recanted.
Fulbright lost to Bumpers in '74
Harry Byrd Sr. resigned in '65
Allen Ellender died in '72
Sam Irving retired in '74
Albert Gore Sr. was defeated in '70
James Eastland retired in '78
Walter George died in '57
Richard Russell retire in '86
Russell Long died in '71
John Stennis retired in '88
Other then Hollings and Byrd who subsequently recanted their opposition to civil rights almost all of the Democrats were out before Reagan finally turned the south red pretty permanently during the 1980s.
On the other hand a lot of the newer Republicans like Jesse Helms had been segregationist Democrats prior to running for office and switched when they ran. This is particularly true of Helms who was notorious for race batting in his broadcasting career and during his time in the senate.
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