> However, the Civil Rights movement along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964
> changed the social equation.
This makes it sound like the Democratic party suddenly became concerned with civil rights in 1964 in complete opposition to its previous positions. In fact, the Democratic party had been drifting towards a pro-civil-rights position since at least the 1930’s. Franklin Roosevelt did what he could to oppose racial discrimination without overly annoying white southern Democrats. He won his elections by a sufficient margin that he didn’t feel as beholden to them as his Democratic predecessors had. Much of what he did wasn’t in legislation he proposed as much as in his general social attitude, and he in some sense used his wife Eleanor to make more explicit statements about such issues when he didn’t want to go on the record about them himself. There was a saying that went something like “FDR is 90% Eleanor and 10% fudge.”
By 1948, enough Democrats had decided to quit placating the racist southern Democrats that they passed a civil rights plank at the 1948 convention which caused a lot of southern Democrats to walk out of the convention. Druing the 1950’s, the southern Democrats mostly stayed in the party, but they knew perfectly well that they were in opposition to the national party about a lot of issues. Adlai Stevenson was pretty clearly the candidate of anyone who called themself a liberal in 1952 and 1956. Although the South continued to be solidly Democratic, it had less and less influence on the national party. The Democrats’ championing of the civil rights bill in 1964 was merely the last stage of a drift that had been going on for at least thirty years.
The effect of Governor Warner on the Commonwealth of Virginia, I believe, was to moderate the right-wing extremism of some of the ultra Republicans we got here. I weep for my beautiful adopted state. The Virginia House of Delegates is the oldest legislative body in America, the cradle of our democracy, and now look what’s happened to it. Warner is moderate overall. I don’t look to him for liberalism. Most Democrats suck on liberalism these days, especially since Wellstone died. I don’t know why I keep voting for them, but I do.
Warner seems to me as middle of the road as any politician in the USA today. His protégé, our new Democratic governor, comes across as even more conservative than Warner. He’s already sided with the anti-gay campaign, making me sorry I voted for him. Too bad Virginia governors are single term limited; I would like one more chance to vote against his sorry ass. Call it the Kaine Mutiny.
Wendell Wagner, so the Dems had been moving toward doing something about race for 30 years. That made them feel great about themselves and did nothing for the blacks in the south. Nothing really changed until a President was willing to stand up and lead and take the heat and he could do so only because the attitudes in the rest of the nation had changed just enough to allow him to take actions they would back up. All shifts in culture are the results of decades of slow accumulations. Politically, however, changes tend to occur relatively rapidly.
You’re making somewhat the same mistake as CC did in the earlier post, confusing socio-cultural changes with political changes. Political changes always follow, never lead. Sixties’ individualism was never a political issue in the 60s, although it mutated into the Me Decade of the 70s and the self-rewarding monetary politics of the 80s.
CC, conservatives have been Republicans for long enough that people take the association for granted. It hasn’t always been true, as I stated earlier, and it may not be true in the future, or least as true. Just as an example: If Libertarians ever gain enough mass to take over the Republican Party in lieu of the continual failures of starting their own party, they could give it a platform for some seemingly liberal social policies. I have no idea if this particular change could ever really happen, but shifts like this are inevitable in politics. Things will change, and in unexpected ways.
Saying that the walkout of many southern Democrats from the 1948 convention because of the civil rights plank in the party platform is not political is just confusing things. Yes, in some sense saying that the cultural changes were gradual and the political ones were discrete is true, but there was more than a single political shift toward civil rights among Democrats. There were several distinct political changes among Democrats in this process, most prominently the 1948 plank in the platform and the 1964 law. Long before 1964, it was clear that most of the Democratic party was pro-civil-rights and the Republicans were a little slower in pushing civil rights. And besides, I don’t recall anyone ever saying that we couldn’t discuss cultural changes and how they affected political changes.
All the things we’re saying are, I suppose, just nitpicks in your post, but another example of how you simplified things is to say that the 1964 election was the last to reference the Cold War. Reagan’s campaigns in 1980 and 1984 also had strong elements of anti-Communist rhetoric. In general, things changed more gradually than you indicate in the post, even if you restrict yourself to political events. 1964 was not the watershed year that you make it out to be.
Coming from a not-quite republican here: No, not really. There are things we don’t wish to change or want to move back to an older standard, but for the most part we’re forward looking.
I think this is getting into GD territory, or at least into a separate thread. But I’d be interested in knowing what positions or beliefs you or these other quasi-Republicans hold that are not allied with what we normally associate with conservative views, either socially, politically, economically or other. I guess I understand that you might argue for replacing or changing some policy - which in the strictest sence is not conserving - but you may be moving to something that is more in line with conservative values. For example, you might replace Illinois’ current moratorium on the death penalty with a much harsher and all-encompassing death penalty. I’d like to be edified here. thanks. xo, C.
I’d like to register, however, that my original intent, and my continued hope, has been for something like a list of quotations making it clear what “conservative” and “liberal” meant to people in the sixties. It looks right now that they meant “Concerned with the threat of Communism, and with the preservation of States’ Rights” and “Concerned with the preservation of civil liberties, and with establishing the legitimacy of federal-level solutions to social problems,” respectively.
That’s pure GQ material right there. To make it even more GQ, references, quotes, and lists of books would be a good thing to have in the thread.