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Well, there is the view that the “left” in America has always been the party of racism - in the mid 19th century the democrats were pro slavery, in the early 20

• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Well, there is the view that the “left” in America has always been the party of racism - in the mid 19th century the democrats were pro slavery, in the early 20th century they were promoting eugenics[1], in the mid 20th century it was the democrats that had to be cajoled/bribed/whipped to get the civil rights act passed, not the republicans the Democrats weren’t, even relatively between the two major parties, on the left, until the partisan realignment that started with the New Deal coalition (usually characterized as the US’s Fifth Party System) and hadn’t really completed before being overlayed with another realignment triggered by Johnson’s 1968 move on civil rights and completed around the mid-1990s (the US’s Sixth, and current, Party System). > People like to promote the idea that the parties “switched” at some point in time, but looking at the history of the US since the civil war, it’s hard to see where that would have happened in any meaningful way. On economic issues, its pretty easy to pin the starting point of the major shift to 1932, though obviously there had to be some lower-level shifts to enable that from-the-top shift. Before that, the Democrats and Republicans were both on average more to the right than the post-1932 Democrats, and neither was clearly right-or-left of each other (they both had fairly broad left-right spans, which remained true for some time after the realignment started; they were more regional and less left-right ideological splits.) On race, in the same way, its very easy to clearly pinpoint 1968 as the pivotal moment. (And just look over history at which major parties rallies are most likely to see people proudly waving symbols of the confederacy, or which party has intellectuals arguing that American slavery was good for Blacks, or which party is actively imposing voting restrictions with the overt intention of reducing Black turnout, and which parties presidential candidates have been actually endorsed by the KKK, and the idea that the parties have not switched on this is revealed as ludicrous.) Also important is that (unloke the temporary split of the Dixiecrats previously), the Republicans actively exploited disaffection among White racists from the Democrats after 1968, appealing to them and flipping them over time to supporting Republicans. This was an actual reversal, not the adoption of a new axis of differentiation, and is directly thr cause of why the South flipped from solidly Democratic to become solidly Republican, except where inroads in black voting later weakened that. For both, the final major wave of shifts of members-in-government-office that can be viewed as essentially completing the realignment occurred just after the 1994 midterm elections.
  • aksss 6y ago
    1968 is one of a few time periods when people like to say the parties switched (others put it decades earlier). And I understand the ‘65-‘68 theory, probably the most compelling of the theories; but I just don’t think it holds much water beyond the hopeful ambition of the time, diluted as it is by the countervailing evidence in the years since. I don’t think a Democrat of, say, 1871, would find the practical outcomes of the 2021 party’s racial politics all that alien.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > And I understand the ‘65-‘68 theory, probably the most compelling of the theories; but I just don’t think it holds much water beyond the hopeful ambition of the time, The description of a post-1968 political realignment has nothing to do with “hopeful ambition”; that racists were disillusioned by Johnson’s action is well-established fact (as it is they had been by Truman’s 20 years before), that the Republicans exploited this disillusionment, preventing it from resolving as the Dixiecrat split did is well-established fact. That the same institutions (and, until they died) that had supported, or been Democrats, advocating against racial equality, racial integration, or against federal action on those fronts under thr banner of “states rights”, largely switched to the Republican Party if they didn’t recant is also well-established fact. > the countervailing evidence in the years since. What countervailing evidence? The Democratic support by and for overt white supremacist rallies? The crowds backing a Democratic Partt waving confederate battle flags that stormed the Capitol?
      • aksss 6y ago
        I think we've now come full circle to the first comment I made, which had examples to get you started.