I’ve been doing some reading about the Ku Klux Klan and the Civil Rights movement. It’s my understanding that the KKK was originally formed by returning Confederate soldiers, serving the interests of the Democratic Party through violence in opposition to the Republican Party (which seems to have been formed around a core of anti-slavery Democrats who left that party) and Reconstruction, resisting social change, and to foment the return of white supremacy. They conducted an active program of violence and assassinations against Republican leaders, both black and white. This led Republican leaders to introduce and pass legislation to attempt to suppress the KKK, in the form of the Civil Rights Act. But, it seemed to be too little, too late, as much of the south seemed to become a Democratic Party stronghold, while the Republicans were strong in the north and mid-west. Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, many southern Democratic governors worked hard to prevent segregation, and used the full power of their administration and government to that end. Both Bull Connor and George Wallace were (at least, local) leaders in the Democratic Party.
So, my question is, what happened? How did each party’s geographic center of power seem to switch? How did the Republicans become the party associated with resisting social change?
It’s all about the Southern strategy, the infamous attempt by Republicans to gain strength in the South by appealing to white racism. This quote from Nixon’s political strategist sums it up
The D’s seem more resistant to social change to me.
They use this thing called “the race card” meaning its ok to use slurs against Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas but if you question Susan Rice or Obama it means you’re racist.
Currently the D’s are championing racist gun laws which are incarcerating tons of African Americans, drug laws are also mostly racist and both parties are guilty.
The power of the Democratic Party in the antebellum South was not just a matter of anti-abolitionism; the Democrats had a long history of supporting agrarian interests against mercantile interests in the North. The Republicans, then as now, supported big business, hard money, high tariffs, and economic growth centered on cities. When slavery lost its power as a political issue (i.e., 13th Amendment), the GOP continued to focus on its other issues, leading the Democrats to re-brand themselves as the party of the “little guy”: the farmer against the railroads, the poor man against the banks, the worker against the corporations, etc. So it came to pass that labor interests, immigrant rights activists and other champions of the urban have-nots in the increasingly populous North challenged the agrarian focus of the party.
In the 1950s and '60s, the Republicans, already the party of Corporate America, drew increasing strength from the middle class, who were fearful of Communism (and its association with labor unions and immigrants), disgusted by the behavior of young people, and nervous about Blacks. At least in the North, these groups turned to the Democrats. When the call came for civil rights reform, Southern Democrats discovered that their party had left them behind.
This is about 90% of it, as close as you can get in GQ. People don’t remember this, but there were two almost completely distinct Democratic parties under Roosevelt. One was northern urban ethnics; the other was Southern and rural and more conservative in many ways than many Republicans, who still retained some of their liberal Progressive era policies. They barely got along. The 1948 election saw Strom Thurmond run for president on the Dixiecrat ticket. Civil Rights was obviously going to split the Democrats. The 1950s doomed the party - more recognizable in hindsight than at the time - and Johnson only won because of Kennedy’s assassination. After that, only the freak of Watergate allowed them to win an election.
Several other demographic trends comprise the additional 10%. After the stagnation in home building caused by the Depression and WWII, prosperity allowed the middle-class to move out of crowded cities and use their now-available automobiles to commute from the suburbs. Cities, especially in the Northeast, came to be seen as crime-ridden and dominated by minorities. Those who moved out were almost exclusively white, because blacks were prohibited from moving into many major suburban communities. This phenomenon is termed white flight. As the 60s progressed, the anti-war and hippie movements created an aura of disruption that was heavily opposed by the growing suburban majorities. Nixon won as a law and order candidate. The Democrats were seen as associated with “peaceniks” and many in the former majority Rooseveltian Democratic coalition broke away fro the party over this. In addition, there was a huge population shift from the Northeast to the Sunbelt, an area with historically extremely conservative attitudes.
When Reagan came into office, his administration pursued a policy of moving funds away from urban areas - by then heavily Democratic - and toward the emerging Republican Sunbelt states. This helped to solidify the South for the Republicans but also solidified central cities as Democratic bastions within Republican metro areas.
It’s only because of the huge demographic shift that has increased the percentage of minorities - a group against whom the Republicans have been successfully branding themselves for 40 years - that Democrats now dominate national elections. But it wasn’t so much that the parties have switched. It’s more that the conservative wing of the Democratic Party swung over to self-identify as Republicans because of racial issues.
The “Southern Strategy” never worked, though–Nixon lost the South to Wallace in 1968, and Democrats have always been able to win various Southern states when they win Presidential elections.
The answer a few posts back gets it a little more correct–the reason that the civil rights battle was basically Democrats on one side v Democrats on the other was that other issues drove the party, namely a more populist approach to tax/welfare concerns. Republicans generally sat it out entirely since they didn’t exist in the South. A segment of white Southern Democrats saw an opportunity in defecting from the party during the 1960s and bringing the racist banner to the GOP side; at the same time, and not really for the same reasons, the Yankee industriousness that previously drove economic conservatism was eroding in the North and leading Republicans to abandon their concern about federal spending and only focus on taxes as an electoral strategy.
Depends on your definition of worked. I recently read that every house of every state legislature in the old South is now Republican. All but two have Republican governors. Every Southern State has at least one Republican Senator. Republicans are an overwhelming majority in the House seats from those states. They won every single state in the South except Florida in the presidential election.
And since the Southern Strategy wasn’t formulated until around 1970, nothing that happened in the 1968 election could refute it. Just the opposite. It was the obvious break that Southerners made for Wallace that instigated it.
His whole post was nonsense, but in the context of history gun control was steeped in racism, an attempt to keep forearms out of the hands of black people and immigrants.
As long as we’re now out of GQ, Condescending Robot, there was never a “more populist approach to tax/welfare concerns.” There was a more racist approach. The Democrats had been the overtly racist party. The Southern strategy was to brand the Republicans as the new covertly racist party. That worked exceptionally well, and the voting patterns by demographics prove it conclusively.
Join Nametag’s and Exapno’s posts, and after the first paragraph of Nametag’s insert how during the long Roosevelt period the not only did the trade-union/ethnic urban wing become dominant and powerful in the rank-and-file but also the “liberal/intellectual” group became dominant over the central party hierarchy – as Condescending Robot indicated, in the South there was then no Republican party to speak of, so the civil rights issue had to be fought out between two Democrat factions
While this was happenning, the base of what had been Progressive Republicans was itself affected by the population moves from farm to city to suburb and by the upheaval of the Depression and many of them had joined in the Roosevelt coalition. So IMO by the end of the Roosevelt period the parties had begun to line up more solidly as Dems=liberal/GOP=conservative on major socioeconomic policies, but with populism/segregation (depending on your location) still being key elements at the ground level of the state/local Democratic parties.
It then took the sociocultural upheavals of the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam (specially with the 1968-72 meltdown of the Democratic Party) for the “bases” to realign, ending with Reagan gathering back the non-Southern rurals and bringing the South and the blue collar vote to the GOP side(*). As was said, the GOP sat back at the start of the process and let the Dems tear apart at the sociocultural line; then the Wallace run showed how the segregationist faction were not rolling over for the liberals, but on their own right could only be spoilers, so they now were ripe for courting by a new-generation GOP that welcomed sociocultural reactionaries of all stripes under the banner of “Values”.
(*Which is the thing - it was not just a “covert racist” Southern Strategy. It was also being able to convince an electorate in places outside the South that had been Progressive Republican or Populist Democrat, that the goals of those causes had already been achieved or had turned out badly, and the trend was now going too far beyond.)
One humorous story about this involved guns and Katrina in Louisiana. After Katrina, police started confiscating guns worn publicly in the hard hit areas-which included a lot of white suburbs. Turns out that back in the 60s the state legislature had passed a law allowing police to do this during a state of emergency. It was passed due to the inner city riots of the time and clearly aimed at minorities. When the 2005 police forces enforced this rule relatively fairly-boy did you see some backtracking! The NRA noticed and the state legislature moved very quickly to apologize and repeal the law.
BTW, most people that wanted to did carry publicly in the weeks after the storm. The local police didn’t enforce the law very hard, but some stories came out and that was more than enough…
Well, Nixon won every state except Massachusetts in 1972; unless there was also a Midwest Strategy and a Northern Strategy and a Rockies Strategy, I’m not sure what this proves…
The question is why the battle for civil rights was fought within and for the Democratic Party, though–why weren’t Asa Randolph and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Republicans? The answer is that the Democratic Party was, from the time that the Grover Cleveland coalition/Bourbon Democrats collapsed and the party became dominated by William Jennings Bryan from 1896 on, the party of higher taxes on the rich and more spending on public works and direct subsidies to the poor and to farmers. That’s why the most virulent racists in politics and the black leaders of the civil rights movement existed within the same party–because they *agreed *on economic issues.
The realignment that took place in the late 1960s among Southern Republicans was to pair coded racial animus with economic conservatism—previously, the racist politicians were economic populists, aka today’s Democrats. Note that Nixon, who was not a Southerner, didn’t participate in this–he was a fairly economically left-wing President for a Republican and his appeal to racism, so much as it was, came in the form of invoking “law and order” not “welfare queens.”
In 1960, the northern Ds were already the party of the urban blacks (and cities in general). They were the main civil rights party. Lyndon Johnson was not personally a racist (he couldn’t have been), but as a southern D, he routinely opposed civil rights legislation. Until the late 50s when a weak civil rights bill was passed, godfathered by Hubert Humphrey. Then after Johnson became president, a much stronger civil rights bill (which finally allowed blacks in the south to vote) and Johnson was said to have remarked, “This will cost us the south for a generation”. Well, two generations have passed and the south (except for VA whose voting is now largely driven by suburban DC) is still solidly R. And likely to remain so for the forseeable future. But this is not necessarily driven by racism. Now it is ingrained conservatism, religiosity, opposition to change in general.
What I cannot understand is that the party of poor whites is so focused on keeping down the taxes for the very rich. And it is not just money; it seems to be a defining principle of the tea party.
Incidentally, although technically southern blacks did have the right to vote, there were 101 ways of preventing them from exercising those rights. To begin with, literacy tests that the most ignorant whites routinely passed and black college professors failed. Then threats of losing your job if you voted. And simple physical intimidation (if you vote we will murder you). Now they have devised a more subtle strategy that the current supreme court thinks is just fine. These voter ID laws that are not confined just to the south unfortunately.
In Canada voter ID is generally required, but it is the government that makes sure very citizen has some. Here in Quebec, it is the universal medicare card.
