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Conservative support of "states' rights" has always been a dog whistle for restricting civil liberties. Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marria

Conservative support of "states' rights" has always been a dog whistle for restricting civil liberties. Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban. Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.

rayiner 6y ago
> Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
- wool_gather 6y ago
  Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    This is the real answer, due to the civil rights movement the DNC lost the south due to the less civil minded parts of the party switched to the republicans.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      That makes literally no sense. Republicans supported the civil rights acts of 1957 through 1968 with supermajorities, by far larger margins than democrats did. How can it be that "due to the civil rights movement," "less civil minded" people switched from a party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts, to the party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts by even larger margins? The realignment of southern democrats is due more to the fact that, once segregation--which democrats tolerated and republicans didn't--was off the table, they were more aligned with republicans on other issues, such as religion, gun control, abortion, business regulation, taxes, etc.
      - kmonsen 6y ago
        You are either willfully cherry-picking facts here or being ignorant. This info is widely available and it was the racists south that was against the civil rights movement and the union states pushed it through. When the 64 law passed the DNC had 21 out of 22 confederate senators, 1 of whom voted for the act. GOP had 1 southern senator, who voted against it. Looking at the union numbers, DNC had 46 senators of whom 45 voted for the act while the GOP had 32 of which 27 voted for it. So in union numbers the DNC senators voted 98% for it, while GOP did so with 84%. Here is a longer article with this information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republ... As a result of this both parties changed. The DNC took a stand for civil rights and the southern democrats left. At the same time the GOP got a lot new members that influenced the party and created the new power base for it. Later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats. Bigger picture, it is clear that the party depending on the south needs to cater to a voting base that is not very positive to civil rights movement, and the opposite for a party that wants to hold the north. It is important to understand that the DNC took a stand here that lost them the south long term because it was the right thing to do (in their minds).
        rayiner 6y ago
        So your theory is that "racists" left the DNC because it "took a stand for civil rights" and decamped to the party that had taken a stronger stand for civil rights for the 100 years preceding that? How does that make sense? You are also not really correct in claiming that "later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats." The 1976 Carter-Ford election was pretty close, with Carter winning by 2% overall. In North Carolina, Carter won by 10 points, while he won New York by less than 5 points. Regan won North Carolina by 2 points and New York by 3 points 1980. It's no doubt that Republicans gained a decisive advantage in the south eventually, but that happened decades later.
        kmonsen 6y ago
        Again you are cherry-picking data and ignoring the bigger picture. The fact that you are able to do so means that you are just a troll and I will not comment further after this post. Yes Carter had a larger margin in some souther states, he was also a souther politician. But this is not what I said. Close GOP victories relied on the south. These are the close elections after this period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia... Also if you look at the election during this time Johnson won every state except from the south: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidentia... Also, please no "racist" when it comes to Dixiecrats. Read up on for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond The might not agree with the racist label but openly believe the white race is superior and would clearly today be called a racist.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    That's an overstatement, which has been popularized by Democrats to distance themselves from their longstanding coalition with southern segregationists. The key Civil Rights Acts were passed from 1957 to 1968. The political alignments on various issues haven't changed much since FDR. Democrats were on the liberal alignment with respect to government regulation, business freedom, taxes, education, immigration, social welfare, religion, gun control, etc. Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968? The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas. I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions. (I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)
    - wool_gather 6y ago
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  > Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. The PATRIOT Act is hardly a champion of many patriotic things. Names mean... very little, so I'm not sure your point. "Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters."
  - harryh 6y ago
    The Civil Rights Acts were not bills with misleading names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968
    - kasey_junk 6y ago
      The Voter Rights Act was a landmark civil rights act that isn’t obviously civil rights.
- afuchs 6y ago
  The GP's focus on the republican party over the individual voters is misplaced in a historical context [1], but holds for the alignment of modern day voting blocs [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System
- Larrikin 6y ago
  You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue. Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights. The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
    - jakelazaroff 6y ago
      > First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue. I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.
      - rayiner 6y ago
        That's still inaccurate. Republicans in the 1930s-1960s were ideologically conservative. Southern democrats, meanwhile, were in many respects ideologically liberal, for example supporting the New Deal: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-republican-party https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-rep.... > There were conservative tendencies in American politics before the 1930s, but the modern conservative movement was founded on opposition to the New Deal. The segregationist Democrats, on the other hand, were for the most part eager supporters of the New Deal—provided it was administered in a way that would exclude African Americans from most of its benefits. You do not have to take my word for it—consider the votes: on labor reform, on entitlements, on financial regulation, etc. If the southern Democrats were “conservatives,” then the New Deal was passed on conservative support, which is a very odd claim to make.

rayiner 6y ago

> Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.

wool_gather 6y ago
Current party lines blur to to the point of falling apart in the context of the 1964 Act, because it was a huge precipitating event for politicians switching parties (particularly Southern Democrats becoming Republicans). You can't directly map "Rs voted for the Act" onto party membership today: there was a very different mix of platforms at that time, only loosely comparable to what we have now.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  This is the real answer, due to the civil rights movement the DNC lost the south due to the less civil minded parts of the party switched to the republicans.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    That makes literally no sense. Republicans supported the civil rights acts of 1957 through 1968 with supermajorities, by far larger margins than democrats did. How can it be that "due to the civil rights movement," "less civil minded" people switched from a party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts, to the party that voted for the Civil Rights Acts by even larger margins? The realignment of southern democrats is due more to the fact that, once segregation--which democrats tolerated and republicans didn't--was off the table, they were more aligned with republicans on other issues, such as religion, gun control, abortion, business regulation, taxes, etc.
    - kmonsen 6y ago
      You are either willfully cherry-picking facts here or being ignorant. This info is widely available and it was the racists south that was against the civil rights movement and the union states pushed it through. When the 64 law passed the DNC had 21 out of 22 confederate senators, 1 of whom voted for the act. GOP had 1 southern senator, who voted against it. Looking at the union numbers, DNC had 46 senators of whom 45 voted for the act while the GOP had 32 of which 27 voted for it. So in union numbers the DNC senators voted 98% for it, while GOP did so with 84%. Here is a longer article with this information: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republ... As a result of this both parties changed. The DNC took a stand for civil rights and the southern democrats left. At the same time the GOP got a lot new members that influenced the party and created the new power base for it. Later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats. Bigger picture, it is clear that the party depending on the south needs to cater to a voting base that is not very positive to civil rights movement, and the opposite for a party that wants to hold the north. It is important to understand that the DNC took a stand here that lost them the south long term because it was the right thing to do (in their minds).
      - rayiner 6y ago
        So your theory is that "racists" left the DNC because it "took a stand for civil rights" and decamped to the party that had taken a stronger stand for civil rights for the 100 years preceding that? How does that make sense? You are also not really correct in claiming that "later GOP close victories all relied on the previous southern democrats." The 1976 Carter-Ford election was pretty close, with Carter winning by 2% overall. In North Carolina, Carter won by 10 points, while he won New York by less than 5 points. Regan won North Carolina by 2 points and New York by 3 points 1980. It's no doubt that Republicans gained a decisive advantage in the south eventually, but that happened decades later.
        kmonsen 6y ago
        Again you are cherry-picking data and ignoring the bigger picture. The fact that you are able to do so means that you are just a troll and I will not comment further after this post. Yes Carter had a larger margin in some souther states, he was also a souther politician. But this is not what I said. Close GOP victories relied on the south. These are the close elections after this period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidentia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia... Also if you look at the election during this time Johnson won every state except from the south: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_United_States_presidentia... Also, please no "racist" when it comes to Dixiecrats. Read up on for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Russell_Jr. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond The might not agree with the racist label but openly believe the white race is superior and would clearly today be called a racist.
- rayiner 6y ago
  That's an overstatement, which has been popularized by Democrats to distance themselves from their longstanding coalition with southern segregationists. The key Civil Rights Acts were passed from 1957 to 1968. The political alignments on various issues haven't changed much since FDR. Democrats were on the liberal alignment with respect to government regulation, business freedom, taxes, education, immigration, social welfare, religion, gun control, etc. Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968? The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas. I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions. (I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)
  - wool_gather 6y ago
FireBeyond 6y ago
> Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. The PATRIOT Act is hardly a champion of many patriotic things. Names mean... very little, so I'm not sure your point. "Every faction in Africa calls themselves by these noble names - Liberation this, Patriotic that, Democratic Republic of something-or-other... I guess they can't own up to what they usually are: the Federation of Worse Oppressors Than the Last Bunch of Oppressors. Often, the most barbaric atrocities occur when both combatants proclaim themselves Freedom Fighters."
- harryh 6y ago
  The Civil Rights Acts were not bills with misleading names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    The Voter Rights Act was a landmark civil rights act that isn’t obviously civil rights.
afuchs 6y ago
The GP's focus on the republican party over the individual voters is misplaced in a historical context [1], but holds for the alignment of modern day voting blocs [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Party_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Party_System
Larrikin 6y ago
You forgot to mention that Lincoln was also a Republican while pretending that the party names of decades ago have anything to do with the party names currently.
- rayiner 6y ago
  First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue. Second, we're talking about the 1960s, not the 1860s. By that time, the Democrats were already the party of FDR and JFK, and Republicans were already the party of Richard Nixon. JFK won the Carolinas, Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, and beat Nixon in Alabama and Mississippi, because it was perceived that he had a poor record on civil rights. The idea that the “party labels flipped” is just blatant historical revisionism. By the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats were the party both of African Americans (who switched from Republicans during the FDR era), the War in Poverty, and southern segregationists. What happened is that, at some point, support for outright discrimination became unviable, and the battle front moved to other issues, such as affirmative action. That naturally fit into Democrats’ willingness to use the power of government to address social inequities.
  - jakelazaroff 6y ago
    > First, the specific claim was that Republicans invoked "states rights" to oppose the Civil Rights Acts, which is just demonstrably untrue. I have since changed it to “conservatives”, which is the ideology that supported Jim Crow and opposed the Civil Rights Act regardless of what the party name happened to be.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      That's still inaccurate. Republicans in the 1930s-1960s were ideologically conservative. Southern democrats, meanwhile, were in many respects ideologically liberal, for example supporting the New Deal: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-republican-party https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-deal-democrats-rep.... > There were conservative tendencies in American politics before the 1930s, but the modern conservative movement was founded on opposition to the New Deal. The segregationist Democrats, on the other hand, were for the most part eager supporters of the New Deal—provided it was administered in a way that would exclude African Americans from most of its benefits. You do not have to take my word for it—consider the votes: on labor reform, on entitlements, on financial regulation, etc. If the southern Democrats were “conservatives,” then the New Deal was passed on conservative support, which is a very odd claim to make.