Did you just contradict yourself in a single sentence?
Hahahaha no.
Black people seem to have decided pretty decisively which party they think better supports their rights. I suppose Kevin Williamson thinks he’s a better judge of that, though.
I agree–I remember those days, too.
But Goldwater & Wm F Buckley, for all their faults, make the current crop of Republican hopefuls look like demented dwarves. Remember primary season, with each one trying to out-Teabag the other? And my own governor earning howls of disbelieving derision; he started out as a Democrat…
That elicits some rather disturbing visual images.
The proud stalwarts of the Tea Party
Have lusts that are hearty but naughty
Such as offering their sacks
As mid-morning snacks
To all and to sundry! How haughty!
Not coincidentally, white Southerners were pretty decisive about which party was better supporting black peoples’ rights too.
You have messed up the quote to make it seem worse, what he said was they do not have a civil right. Goldwater was a principled person caught in a dilemna. One the one hand he felt passionately about civil rights, which is why he backed all of the Civil Rights bills of the 1950s, the anti-lynching bills, the voting rights bills and why he desegregated the Arizona national guard. One the other hand his reading of the constitution and the enumerated powers it gave the federal government did not allow him to impose his own beliefs. Because he knew that his oath was to uphold the constitution and not to impose his own beliefs. I understand why liberals have trouble understanding this because they do not believe government should have limits.
Black people are not single issue voters and even if they were it would be nuts to vote on what a party stood for 60 years ago.
If you look at voting trends over time, the Democrat party started winning a majority of the black vote in the early 1940’s. This was after their interests were sold out by FDR in the creation of Social Security and Medicare. This was during the time where no only were democrats blocking civil rights laws they were blocking anti-lynching laws. Just a few scant decade after the infamous Klan bake democratic convention. In fact there has been more time passed between the 1964 civil rights act and now then between the passage of the act and the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, the democrat who segregated the federal government. So the fact that black people now vote overwhelmingly for Democrats tells us nothing about which party stood for civil rights when it was controversial.
If you look at the history of voting in America most ethnic groups in the past 100 years or so go through an evolution in voting preferences. They arrive poor from their home countries and move into crowded cities. The local democrat machines enlists them as voters and they support whoever the machine tells them to so they can receive government services. As they grow more prosperous they move out of the crowded cities and into less homogenous suburbs. At this point they stop voting democrat and start voting Republican. At one point the Italians, and Irish vote was as Democrat as the black vote is.
The history of black voting in the US is similar. Following the great migration from the rural south to the urban north blacks voted for the candidates of the Democrat machine. Which is why the majority of the black vote started going from the Democrat party to the Republican party during the 1940s. Despite the horrific legacy of how Democrats historically treated black people. One of the consequences of the great migration was that black people now lived in large numbers in places that did not have laws in place that kept them from voting. This newfound political clout was what LBJ was referring to when he said that he needed to pass a bill with civil rights in the title to placate the black vote.
Speaking of mischaracterizing the other side…sheesh.
Uh, whut?
Ok, serious question.
Do you agree with Barry Goldwater that the Brown decision was wrong and that if states wish to run racially segregated school systems that is their right?
Keep in mind that this statement is coming from someone who thinks the guy who opposed the Martin Luther King holiday and who argued that states had the right to maintain racially segregated school systems was a “passionate supporter of Civil Rights”.
That not exactly what I’d call reality-based thinking.
Tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestic servants were all explicitly denied benefits under the Social Security Act because those occupations were traditionally filled by black people and the democrats in charge of the government did not what black people to receive benefits. Because of this hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in America were locked out of old age relief. There are many other examples of how the New Deal was bad for black americans but this was probably the most egregious.
So the party that ended Reconstruction, founded the first and second Klan, instituted Jim Crow laws, segregated the federal government, fought anti-lynching laws, locked many black people out of social security, stood in the school house door to block integration, watered down the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, had more of its members vote against the 1964 civil rights bill and the voting rights bills, and elected George Wallace governor was the party of civil rights? That is neither reality based nor thinking.
Goldwater was not perfect on Civil Rights but he was much better than the Democrat party of the time.
No, racially segregated school systems are unconstitutional and Goldwater was wrong to imply otherwise. Goldwater changed his mind about that much quicker than the Democrat party did and when he did so he joined the Republican consensus.
Cite? Without evidence to the contrary I would assume that tenant farmers and sharecroppers were exempt because they were self-employed.
Incidentally, there is no such thing as “the Democrat party”, at least not in American politics.
I don’t think anyone’s claiming that. Outside the South, both parties seem to have been similarly in favor of civil rights, at least by 1964. Among non-Southern Democrats, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed 145–9 in the House and 45–1 in the Senate. The Republican figures were 138–24 and 27–5. For Southerners, all Republicans in both houses, and a tiny handful of the Democrats voted against the act. So support for the act was actually slightly higher among non-Southern Democrats than among non-Southern Republicans, as well as higher among southern Democrats than among southern Republicans. And in 1964 the Democrats ran a Southerner who signed that act, while the Republicans ran a non-Southerner who filibustered it.
Since then, of course, the white Southern vote has trended steadily towards the Republicans and the black vote has been strongly Democratic. The story of the parties “switching places,” which Williamson sets out to rebut, seems oversimplified, but basically correct. If the Republicans want to be proud of their party’s history, they need to do something about the post-1964 part of history.
While Nathan Bedford Forrest was a a registered Democrat, William Joseph Simmons was not. It’s true that the second-era Klan was mostly allied with the Democratic Party in the South, but its highest “achievement” was electing *Republican *governor Ed Jackson in Indiana.