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Did you miss the part where the party of Lincoln managed to rebuild the Southern economy and society from the ground up? Of course, it wasn't the first "Reconst

Did you miss the part where the party of Lincoln managed to rebuild the Southern economy and society from the ground up? Of course, it wasn't the first "Reconstruction" that they attempted in the South, either - but hey, second time's the charm! And no, even waving the Confederate flag isn't exactly a contradiction with celebrating that either, or at least it wouldn't be until quite recently indeed (yes, it's a fact that race relations are going sour once again, unfortunately). But explaining why that was the case would be taking us quite far from the original topic, so I'm not sure that it's worth even trying to address this point.

inflatableDodo 7y ago
>But explaining why that's the case would be taking us quite far from the original topic, so I'm not sure that it's worth even trying to address this point. Well, in for a penny and all that. From the outside it looks pretty simple. A sizable cross section of the USA completely and utterly lost their minds after a dark skinned guy became president, so they got behind the candidate who was most openly and consistently bigoted. It probably helped that he also had a TV show with a simple catchphrase and hats emblazoned with a jingoistic but ultimately meaningless campaign slogan. However without the relentless bigotry to push his campaign forward, he would have been just a tacky loudmouth grifter from New York with a gold toilet and stupid hair. Given that these last qualities would, on their own, be far more likely to lose him votes than gain him any with the majority of people who ultimately ended up supporting him, it seems a fairly safe assumption that most of his supporters just really liked the hatefulness he directed towards an amorphous enemy that had been conjured seemingly out of whole cloth, with the aid of a heady mix of fear, gullibility and delusional levels of paranoia. Of course it didn't really help the other party very much, when they chose to parachute in a Washington insider as their candidate, who possessed almost no charisma, an obviously corrupt ex-president as a husband and a roughly equal level of hubris to Trump. edit - To be fair, this is not the whole picture. There is also what might be the largest unacknowledged contemporary political group, those voters who are best described by the song 'Asshole', by Denis Leary. For them, Trump was never someone they ever remotely respected or agreed with. They know he is a fool who will wreck the place. And they voted for him for exactly that reason, as they find fucking up shit for the hell of it to be highly amusing.
- 0815test 7y ago
  > A sizable cross section of the USA completely and utterly lost their minds after a dark skinned guy became president Except for the part where, you know, that didn't really happen. Obama was a great president for many, many reasons, but one of those was precisely how he managed to turn race relations into as near to a non-issue as could practically happen, given that he could and did appeal to an exceptionally broad and diverse cross-section of American voters. Even by the time Hillary became the Democrat candidate, the attitude had become quite different on all sides, in a way that's hard to underestimate. Trump wasn't always seen as bigoted or even foolish, either. I do agree that political campaigns have become a lot worse in many ways, with jingoism and even some outright bigotry being a big part of that, but I'd blame that on a broader loss of social cohesion or respect for our most prized political values (including moderation, deliberation, inclusiveness, focus on the complexity of core issues and not on pointless distractions etc. etc.) due to things like the bad economy and perhaps even our attitude to Internet-powered social media.
youdontknowtho 7y ago
I'm sorry to cut into your ongoing conversation here. There is no way around it. The Republicans were not a force in southern politics until they embraced racist tactics that gave old Dixie-crats a reason to move. The Democratic party actually had the South locked as Southerners joined in protest to Republicans trying to push Reconstruction through. Your argument sounds a bit like Dinesh Disuza when you say... The Democrats created the KKK... Not really. Ex-confederates created the KKK. As the larger Democratic party embraced civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights the Republicans gave the remnants of the old southern Democrats a place to go in protest...again...against modernization. I'm sorry about the Disuza reference. I don't mean to be offensive, but he had used that line of argument in the past. EDIT: Also, just because the Republicans were the party of Lincoln doesn't mean that Reconstruction era Democrats were left on the political spectrum. That's also a tactic that today's right uses. The Republicans of Lincolns day were to the left.
- masonic 7y ago
  As the larger Democratic party embraced civil rights Actually, Republican Congressmembers voted for the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Acts in higher propensity than did Democrats, and all filibuster activity against these Acts was led by Democrats.
  - youdontknowtho 7y ago
    Again, those were the Dixie-crats. They were segregationists. After that, the racists moved to the Republican party. Over time the Democratic party became the side that embraced multiculturalism. It's been a fight, no doubt about that, but it did happen. Saying that today's (after about 1975 or so) Republican party didn't explicitly make a play for the votes of racist Southerners that had been Democrats historically just fly's in the face of the words of the people who actually carried it out. The people involved have explicitly said that it was their strategy.
- 0815test 7y ago
  The "Republicans were not a force in southern politics" until the South actually became contestable, yes. But they did not "embrace racist tactics" other than perhaps momentarily in the 1970s, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Era. In actual fact, Republicans were always trying all sorts of angles to appeal to southern voters: Barry Goldwater's campaigning was quite different from Nixon's, for example. The suggestion that Republicans were uniformly "against modernization", and even more so, that this was also true in the 1980s, is simply laughable when one looks at the actual history of that time. Edit: And the Republicans of Lincoln's day were defining their stances in opposition to the Democrats, who were largely agrarian and in favor of local control by the purportedly-virtuous "little guy", against broad economic modernization that would deprive the little guy of his livelihood and make him a sort of 'wage slave' of corrupt industry. You can phrase it as "the Republicans were on the left" if you like, but that's really pushing it.

inflatableDodo 7y ago

>But explaining why that's the case would be taking us quite far from the original topic, so I'm not sure that it's worth even trying to address this point. Well, in for a penny and all that. From the outside it looks pretty simple. A sizable cross section of the USA completely and utterly lost their minds after a dark skinned guy became president, so they got behind the candidate who was most openly and consistently bigoted. It probably helped that he also had a TV show with a simple catchphrase and hats emblazoned with a jingoistic but ultimately meaningless campaign slogan. However without the relentless bigotry to push his campaign forward, he would have been just a tacky loudmouth grifter from New York with a gold toilet and stupid hair. Given that these last qualities would, on their own, be far more likely to lose him votes than gain him any with the majority of people who ultimately ended up supporting him, it seems a fairly safe assumption that most of his supporters just really liked the hatefulness he directed towards an amorphous enemy that had been conjured seemingly out of whole cloth, with the aid of a heady mix of fear, gullibility and delusional levels of paranoia. Of course it didn't really help the other party very much, when they chose to parachute in a Washington insider as their candidate, who possessed almost no charisma, an obviously corrupt ex-president as a husband and a roughly equal level of hubris to Trump. edit - To be fair, this is not the whole picture. There is also what might be the largest unacknowledged contemporary political group, those voters who are best described by the song 'Asshole', by Denis Leary. For them, Trump was never someone they ever remotely respected or agreed with. They know he is a fool who will wreck the place. And they voted for him for exactly that reason, as they find fucking up shit for the hell of it to be highly amusing.

0815test 7y ago
> A sizable cross section of the USA completely and utterly lost their minds after a dark skinned guy became president Except for the part where, you know, that didn't really happen. Obama was a great president for many, many reasons, but one of those was precisely how he managed to turn race relations into as near to a non-issue as could practically happen, given that he could and did appeal to an exceptionally broad and diverse cross-section of American voters. Even by the time Hillary became the Democrat candidate, the attitude had become quite different on all sides, in a way that's hard to underestimate. Trump wasn't always seen as bigoted or even foolish, either. I do agree that political campaigns have become a lot worse in many ways, with jingoism and even some outright bigotry being a big part of that, but I'd blame that on a broader loss of social cohesion or respect for our most prized political values (including moderation, deliberation, inclusiveness, focus on the complexity of core issues and not on pointless distractions etc. etc.) due to things like the bad economy and perhaps even our attitude to Internet-powered social media.

youdontknowtho 7y ago

I'm sorry to cut into your ongoing conversation here. There is no way around it. The Republicans were not a force in southern politics until they embraced racist tactics that gave old Dixie-crats a reason to move. The Democratic party actually had the South locked as Southerners joined in protest to Republicans trying to push Reconstruction through. Your argument sounds a bit like Dinesh Disuza when you say... The Democrats created the KKK... Not really. Ex-confederates created the KKK. As the larger Democratic party embraced civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights the Republicans gave the remnants of the old southern Democrats a place to go in protest...again...against modernization. I'm sorry about the Disuza reference. I don't mean to be offensive, but he had used that line of argument in the past. EDIT: Also, just because the Republicans were the party of Lincoln doesn't mean that Reconstruction era Democrats were left on the political spectrum. That's also a tactic that today's right uses. The Republicans of Lincolns day were to the left.

masonic 7y ago
As the larger Democratic party embraced civil rights Actually, Republican Congressmembers voted for the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Acts in higher propensity than did Democrats, and all filibuster activity against these Acts was led by Democrats.
- youdontknowtho 7y ago
  Again, those were the Dixie-crats. They were segregationists. After that, the racists moved to the Republican party. Over time the Democratic party became the side that embraced multiculturalism. It's been a fight, no doubt about that, but it did happen. Saying that today's (after about 1975 or so) Republican party didn't explicitly make a play for the votes of racist Southerners that had been Democrats historically just fly's in the face of the words of the people who actually carried it out. The people involved have explicitly said that it was their strategy.
0815test 7y ago
The "Republicans were not a force in southern politics" until the South actually became contestable, yes. But they did not "embrace racist tactics" other than perhaps momentarily in the 1970s, at the tail end of the Civil Rights Era. In actual fact, Republicans were always trying all sorts of angles to appeal to southern voters: Barry Goldwater's campaigning was quite different from Nixon's, for example. The suggestion that Republicans were uniformly "against modernization", and even more so, that this was also true in the 1980s, is simply laughable when one looks at the actual history of that time. Edit: And the Republicans of Lincoln's day were defining their stances in opposition to the Democrats, who were largely agrarian and in favor of local control by the purportedly-virtuous "little guy", against broad economic modernization that would deprive the little guy of his livelihood and make him a sort of 'wage slave' of corrupt industry. You can phrase it as "the Republicans were on the left" if you like, but that's really pushing it.