XDA

Here is yet another reiteration of the Democrat's story that the Democrats and Republicans switched racial animi in the 60s. The first troubling mistake of the article is to show, as its only historical photo, Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of a building at the University of Alabama blocking the entry of the first black students to attend there. I was in military school in Alabama at the time and watched it live on local TV (and I was struck how quickly the Governor backed down after the federal marshals explained things to him). So what's wrong with using that particular photograph? Clearly, Wallace (Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.) was a racist. But he was a Democrat and died a Democrat (as all the southern segregationists, save one, did). If you're writing about mythical Republican institutional racism, showing a famous Democrat being a racist while Governor is probably not the best way to start. Notice that the holsters of the Alabama State Troopers flanking Wallace are empty. As was the gesture. As was the man.


Here is another problem. The false historians write:

The civil rights movement, while a victory on many levels, was also the origin of our present morass. It spawned a powerful national “white resistance” countermovement that decisively altered the racial geography of American politics... The seeds of America’s dysfunction were planted 50 years ago. And the ugly politics of race had everything to do with it. 

Powerful national "white resistance" countermovement? Among the Republicans? Utter BS.

What's the proof? Well, it comes down to two sets of two charts. The first is the number of Republican and Democrat votes for and against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. (All but 18 Republicans in the House vote for it, while nearly half of the House Democrats, 107 of them, vote against it. In the Senate 18 Democrats vote against it; none of the 43 Republican Senators voted against it). But rather than compare apples to apples, by showing the vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, (where the Republicans support it better than the Democrats did, per representation) the next chart is the supposed decline of "liberal" Republicans and the rise of "liberal" Democrats between the 85th and the 89th Congress. Who's picking the liberal versus conservative labels? What are the criteria? Is there a racial animus component in these labels? Who knows? Pretty bad BS.

The next comparison is the map of the states won by Eisenhower in '56 in his landslide over liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson compared to the states won by Johnson over Goldwater in Johnson's '64 landslide.

Four states who voted for Stevenson in '56 voted for Goldwater in '64 (all in the South). But there are 13 states that were in the Confederacy; so nine states showed no useful correlation at all, certainly none which supports the "switch" lie. I was young in '64, but I think the reason the four states went for Goldwater had next to nothing to do with race. There was nothing in the nomination speeches about race, nothing in the long laughably unsophisticated (to our modern jaded eyes) television commercials about race. Less than 1/3 of the former Confederacy went for Goldwater when 8 years earlier they went for Stevenson. Only five former Confederate states went for Goldwater at all, that's well less than half. How is that a meaningful statistic? Contemptible BS.

What did the deep South do in the '68 election Nixon v. Humphrey? The four states that had voted for Goldwater voted for Democrat Wallace, running on a campaign almost wholly about racism--Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever. So at least by '68, the Democrats were still racists as they had always been and supporting institutional racism. What about in '76; how did Carter do against Ford? The entire former Confederacy, except Virginia, went for Carter. So 8 years after the deep South went for a racist Democrat, the deep South went for an ostensibly non-racist Democrat. So the South was not quite yet completely Republican in 1976. Furthermore, presidential politics by then had very little to do with the racism of the Democrats. Nobody within sight of the mainstream was running on a segregation platform. How about the '92 election between Bush (father) and Clinton? Six states of the former Confederacy went for Clinton and seven for Bush. Kind of hard to see any pattern there. However, all these elections go unmentioned in the politico article because they show how fruitless it is to try to see any change in racial animus in the parties merely by noting who the states voted for in presidential elections. Stupid BS.

Then the Big Finish:

In 1956 the “solid South” holds true to its historic allegiance to the Democratic Party, even in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of the rest of the country. Eight years later, the South is out of step with the nation once again, this time in a way that no one could have imagined in 1956. The votes of the Deep South now belonged to the Republican Party and, more tellingly, to its conservative, anti-civil rights candidate, Goldwater.

This last is an evil maligning of Goldwater. He voted against the '64 Civil Rights Act; but he clearly did so for constitutional reasons (not racial hatred). He felt the right to free association in the First Amendment meant that we could associate or disassociate equally and the federal government could not force us to associate. That desire for association with others unlike us was for persuasion, not force of law. I kinda agree, but I would not repeal the '64 Civil Rights Act because it protects minorities from the institutional racism created and enforced for generations exclusively by Democrats. It's a monument on the grave of Jim Crow. That's why uneducated writers for politico and people willing to lie about history for political gain (but I repeat myself) make me angry with this drivel.

Race relations in the United States and Global Warming rate often as the two issues least worrying Americans. See, we're not as stupid as the Eastern elites think.

Labels: Barry Goldwater; '64 Civil Rights Act; Lie that Republicans and Democrats Switched on Hating Blacks in late '60s