Why did the two political parties trade sides after the Civil Rights era?

Prior to the civil rights era, Republicans were liberals, who believed in racial equality, and Democrats were conservatives, who didnt. Why did they end up trading positions?


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Republicans never believed in “radical equality.” But beyond that they gave up on the idea of racial justice after the 1876 election.

After that there was a large number of political and social changes that affected the stances if the parties.

In.the late 19th century, the Democrats absorbed populist movements, while the Republicans supported big business.

During the Great Depression, the plan if the Republicans was to do nothing. That started the big movement of social justice supporters towards the Democrats. In 1948 and I’m.the early "60s the Democrats officially became the party of civil rights.

Nixon countered this by making the Republicans attractive to those continuing to harbor racist views.

So.a lot if things have happened over time to bring us to where we are.

You mean to where one of the Britain’s greatest athletes gets insulted in Atlanta?

Basically, it would take a book-length dissertation to explain everything that happened between the Civil War and today. The two political parties were both constantly undergoing slight changes in their political philosophies. Eventually these added up to large changes.

Ahistoric nonsense.

The modern part system developed after the Civil War. The Democrats, who supported two candidates in 1860, merged back into one nominal party with two widely diverse wings: a conservative southern wing and a liberal urban wing, mostly tied to big city bosses who touted the needs of lower-class immigrants. The Republicans absorbed the business and professional classes but also a more conservative group of midwestern farmers. Both sides paid next-to-no attention to racial equality.

At the turn of the century, a Populist Party and a Progressive Party movement formed to battle the entrenched interests from two sides. Populists were generally rural, Progressives were generally urban. In historic irony, many of the Populist programs were absorbed by the Democrats - Bryan in 1896 - and many of the Progressive programs by the Republicans - Roosevelt in 1904. By 1912, both parties had supporters across the spectrum: liberal, moderate, and conservative. Wilson won in 1912 by being a southern conservative socially who advocated progressive labor policies.

Reaction to WWI brought the business wing of the Republicans to the fore in 1920, which happened to coincide with the conservative-supported Prohibition. When both failed at the end of the decade, Roosevelt took a progressive coalition into office. He had several Republicans in his cabinet, all of whom were far more liberal than the southern Democrats who dominated the Senate. Even so, the Democrats as a party were far more attuned to the needs of blacks than the Republicans had ever been, so they left the Republican Party en masse, especially as they moved from the South to northern cities and became Democratic political forces in the 1950s.

The Civil Rights movement really began during WWII when blacks demanded equally in the armed forces. Northern white Democrats became strongly civil rights - Humphrey rose to prominence in 1948 - but southern Democrats refused to budge - leading to Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat party in 1948. Even so, both parties retained their three wings through 1965 and the Civil Rights Act, which was passed by bipartisan support narrowly overtaking the solid democratic south. Again, the Democrats split, with George Wallace leading the American Independent Party. That helped Nixon become president.

Nixon started the Southern Strategy. Republicans deliberately played upon the prejudices of the south and welcomed them wholeheartedly while the northern Democrats were horrified and tried to distance themselves as much as possible. The liberal wing - Rockefeller Republicans - virtually disappeared after 1968 as the Republicans absorbed a huge number of conservatives, many of them evangelical. Without that huge southern bloc to cater to, the remaining moderate Democrats took power in their party.

That led to today’s split. The Republicans have rightists, far rightists, and ultra far-rightists with a smattering of business moderates and no liberals. The Democrats have centrists and liberals, with a growing faction of angry progressives who feel they are ignored and a remnant of conservatives who generally fall to Republican conservatives.

They at no time traded positions. They merely shed large portions of their constituencies allowing the rest to be stronger at the ends.

Long, tl;dr, but less than book length.

They teach you in school that the Civil War was all about slavery. It’s actually a lot more complex than that, and the Republican Party was not a party of liberals who all believed in racial equality.

The Republican Party was formed out of two main groups that had little to do with each other, except that they were both against the South. You had the northern industrialists, who opposed the southern agricultural way of life as it was holding back progress and was stifling the country (or at least the northeast) economically. And you had the abolitionists, who wanted to get rid of slavery. The industrialists, for the most part, didn’t give two hoots about slavery. They only joined forces with the abolitionists so that they could have enough power in congress to push the South around. And the abolitionists, for the most part, didn’t give two hoots about the economics of the northeastern factories. Those factories didn’t have slaves.

If you go back and look at Lincoln’s speeches from that era, you can tell which group he was speaking to. When he spoke to industrialists, he downplayed the slavery angle and he spoke about things like protective tariffs. When he spoke to abolitionists, the speech instead focused on slavery and preventing its expansion into the western territories.

You can also see this split in the Republican Party’s platform for the 1860 election. It had 4 main points:

  1. Tariffs protecting industry
  2. No slavery in western territories, but southern states could keep their slaves
  3. A homestead act to settle the western territories
  4. A trans-continental railroad

The South saw the protective tariffs as helping industry but hurting agriculture, and were therefore against southern slave plantations. While the Republicans promised that the South could keep their slaves, making the western territories into free states meant that free states would have a majority in congress and with that majority, they would be able to completely control the South (and get rid of slavery eventually). So for the South, the writing was on the wall, and the Civil War was on.

There also weren’t a whole lot of people back then who truly believed in racial equality. A much more common belief among abolitionists were that blacks were inferior to whites, but that it was still cruel to keep them as slaves and to treat them poorly. There were some abolitionists who believed that blacks and whites were truly equals, but they were a minority. Lincoln himself believed that blacks were less intelligent than whites, though his views on that did change somewhat as the years progressed.

Even though that wasn’t a belief of true equality, it was a lot better than the common belief in the South. Many southerners believed that blacks were little more than animals, and had to be kept as slaves because they weren’t capable of behaving like civilized men if they were free.

They were late for boarding, tried to jump in line while economy class was boarding, and when not allowed to do what everyone knows you’re not supposed to do, * his wife* appears to be the one throwing the nasty insults.

Sorry, not sorry.

As others have noted, boffking, your thread begins with a fundamentally flawed premise. Exapno Mapcase has done a nice job of explaining a lot of big historical changes in a relatively short post.

I would add a couple of things to his explanation. First, i would emphasize a little more the importance of Roosevelt’s New Deal in the process. Wherever African Americans were able to vote in the 1930s (and that meant mainly regions outside the South) they increasingly voted Democratic, leaving behind the party of Lincoln that most had stuck with since the Civil War.

They were under no illusions that FDR was perfect, and some blacks criticized him for caving to Southern Democrats on a variety of issues, but he (and especially his wife) made the White House a place that took more notice of African Americans and their needs.

And, equally important, they demanded equality outside the armed forces. A Philip Randolph’s proposed March on Washington in 1941 was about equal treatment in a whole variety of areas, especially government employment outside of the military itself. Randolph’s “Why We Should March” flyer called on FDR to:

It was Randolph’s movement that helped spur Roosevelt’s creation of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and throughout the war the goal for many blacks remained the “Double V”: victory against fascism abroad, and against discrimination at home.

So you can kind of (vastly over-) simplify all this turmoil (post 1870-ish) into the story of two interest groups, blacks and racists, each jockeying to find a home in a party that will support their agenda.

It’s pretty clear they can’t both occupy the same party at the same time. So as each finds less than full support in its current party of choice, it creates a splinter group (e.g. dixiecrats) which eventually snaps off and joins the other side.

The current Tea Party is in some ways similar except their issue isn’t skin color but tax / transfer economics. Going forward, if the Rs become evermore the party of the uber wealthy the TP could find itself as a rump populist splinter that suddenly finds it fits better with the Ds. Certainly Trumpism is a huge distraction from the Rs becoming a more purely plutocrat party, so we won’t see this play out in the next 10-15 years. But who knows after that?

Except that the Republican position on tariffs was indistinguishable from the Democratic platform (and the Southern Democrats, too). It also was vague as possible, on the level of “we’ll use the best policy possible.”

The final showdown was when the Dixiecrats, led by Strom Thurmond, were rebuffed by the Democrats and left the party. And then Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy cemented it.

Which goes to the point that sometimes the splinter group jumps out in a huff and sometimes they get pushed out by the rest of the party. Usually both factors are present, but one or the other is the final big push that cements the divorce.

It’s worth mentioning that LBJ’s Civil Rights legislation was a significant nail in the coffin for southern Democrats. Johnson himself knew this and said, “We’ve lost the south for a generation”. Actually, they lost the south permanently. So far anyway. Even though Obama won in 2008 if you lookat the electoral map he still ‘only’ won Virginia and North Carolina in the south (Florida is not the ‘south’ politically).

Which is far more true than false.

Every issue trotted out to make the causes of the Civil War seem more complex can all be traced back to slavery, the preservation of which was the all-consuming obsession of the Southern political class in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

The Civil War was started because the South attempted to secede in order to preserve slavery in the face of a North which could comprehensively out-vote it. That became politically incorrect to talk about after the war, so Southern historians created something called the Lost Cause narrative, which portrayed the South as a noble but doomed society of chivalrous planters clinging to an outmoded, romantic way of life based on states’ rights, and conveniently forgetting that the South was quashing the rights of Northern states left and right the moment those rights interfered with the South’s ability to demand the return of runaway slaves.

If you want to see how Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy impacted the Republicans, compare this section from the 1968 Republican platform

and this section of the 1972 Republican platform

In other words, the Republicans went from officially acknowledging the impact of discrimination in 1968, to taking about four times the space to decry busing in 1972.

In 1856, the Republicans were founded as an antislavery party, but there never was anywhere near a majority of Republicans who were for racial equality.

If you just dismiss it as being all about slavery though, you won’t have a very good understanding of why the Civil War occurred in 1860 and not earlier (or later), or why it even occurred at all.

What’s true is that the Secession was all about slavery. There were a complex set of reasons for the ongoing conflict between north and south and and many people had multiple reasons for fighting in the war. But the South seceded in order to preserve slavery.

I give up. What were the other causes beyond slavery and the systemic economic differences that resulted from it? Air conditioning?

Ascenray has it correct. The debates over secession and the declarations after the vote were about slavery even if couched in terms of other issues like state’s rights, which meant the rights of states to continue slavery.

Everything the South said and did eventually comes back to slavery and that was true every minute from 1789 onward. It is impossible to believe in a Civil War in an America that didn’t have slavery.