Just watched the film Lincoln.
Given that the Democrats really, really wanted to keep slavery, what happened since that African Americans now vote for them in such large numbers?
The first big movement came from the New Deal. The second big movement came from the Civil Rights Act.
My own theory for why Democrats get African-American support unconditionally is a combination of brand loyalty(people generally don’t switch unless they get a good reason to switch), and the Democrats’ support for a strong federal government. African-Americans mainly get screwed by state and local governments and the feds have always been the ones to enforce their civil rights.
The political parties in the U.S. changed significantly over the years. For African American voters, the first major switch came around the time of Roosevelt (a democrat), who won 71% of the black vote in 1936 due mostly to the New Deal.
Ironically, Republicans led the fight for civil rights from Lincoln all the way up to the 1960s, but in the 1960s the Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Democrats picked up the Civil Rights battle when it counted most, and African Americans have been mostly Democrat since then.
Republicans actually supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act in larger numbers than Democrats.
It just shows how amazingly well Democrats have managed to revise history.
Because the political descendents (what used to be called Dixiecrats) of the people who wanted slavery and then Jim Crow are now Republicans. The Republicans spent decades pandering to and recruiting racists, and have earned the reputation as the party of white racism. It doesn’t really matter what they were like a century-and-a-half-or-so ago.
I’m not going to contest the Southern Strategy thing at this point because we’ve been over it before, but claiming that the GOP are the descendants of the people who favored slavery and Jim Crow are Republicans is just nonsense. All of those Dixiecrats save Strom Thurmond died as Democrats. A particularly noxious case is JW Fulbright, an ardent segregationist who Democrats still regard as a progressive hero, meaning that the segregationist line still descends to the Democrats. Fulbright even got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from a Democratic President, Bill Clinton.
Because, right now, the Democrats generally support and vote for policies that are preferable to a greater number of African Americans.
It makes much more sense to choose a party based on what their policies are now, or at least their contemporary voting history, than what they were about 50 or 100 years ago.
The Democrats aren’t the party of slavery. There hasn’t been a pro-slavery party in over a hundred and fifty years.
The Democrats are now the party which is more in tune with things black voters see as important. So the majority of black voters support the Democratic party.
Seriously? The party of slavery? Where do people get this nonsense? And do they really think black people are stupid enough to fall for this?
I think that’s right. THe Democratic Party is preferable to African-Americans now due to their policies. But also due to attitude. The Democrats act like they care, the Republicans act like they don’t.
138 is not a larger number then 153. They supported the Act by a larger margin, not in larger numbers.
But it wasn’t really Dem revision of history that has left people with the opposite impression. Almost immediately after the act passed, the GOP nominated an anti-Civil Rights Act candidate for Prez, several prominent Southern Dems who had opposed the Act jumped to the GOP and Republican’s, smelling blood in the water, increasingly tried to appeal to pro-segregationist Southerners.
It was this move against the Act and similar legislation in the late 60’s that left people with the impression the GOP had opposed the original legislation, not “Dem revisionism”.
Ah, okay, margin is right.
I can see how that was used against him, but his opposition was not based on racism, but on federalism objections. Goldwater had supported previous civil rights acts.
The first part is false, only Thurmond jumped among those who were high profile. Maybe there are others I haven’t thought of, but the vast majority stayed Democrats. Fulbright, Wallace, Stennis, Russell, Byrd, Gore, pretty much all of the Southern Dems who voted no.
I won’t say the Republicans didn’t contribute to the misconception, but the primary driver as far as I can see is Democrats and their enablers in the media actively trying to change the historical record. Just recently MSNBC had a picture of George Wallace captioned “George Wallace(R)”.
The belief that Dixiecrats became Republicans is so commonly held I have to assume otherwise very smart people actually believe it. But it’s one of those myths of history that Democrats have worked hard to sell.
The political philosophies of parties are not constant over long periods. Their political philosophies are slowly but constantly changing. It’s not remotely surprising that party A and party B, after a century and a half of slow change in their philosophies, could reach a point on a given issue where, although A was stronger on issue X back then, now B is stronger on that issue.
This may be clearer in the U.S. than in some other countries. The U.S. does not have lots of smaller parties which are appearing and disappearing, as some countries do. The U.S. does not have parties whose names indicate that they are tied to a particular ethnic, religious, or socio-economic group, as some countries do. The names “Democratic” and “Republican” are vague enough that they aren’t permanently tied to a single philosophy.
To explain the changes in the two parties over the past 150 years would really take a book, not just a single thread.
OP ignorantly conflates today’s Democrats with those 150 years ago. But adaher now appears to be just as ignorant and surprisingly so: he often writes like he thinks he’s a political expert but now seems be unaware of the “Dixiecrats” and their kin. 
Not really.
If one looks at the Democratic/Republican split based on geography, we find
The original House version:
Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)
Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)
The Senate version:
Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5–95%) (only Ralph Yarborough of Texas voted in favor)
Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0–100%) (John Tower of Texas)
Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98–2%) (only Robert Byrd of West Virginia voted against)
Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84–16%)
Even without arguments about the Southern Strategy or Dixiecrat defections, the Democratic party experienced a major shift following that vote, with control moving from entrenched, seniority-based power among Southern Democrats to Democrats in the North. By 1968, there was no question regarding which party was providing more appealing candidates to black voters. (Given that it took nearly a decade to actually implement the Voting Rights law, black voters tended to be from the Northern states where the Democrats had provided overwhelming support for the Civil Rights Act.)
You just contradicted yourself, then. Is a swipe at democrats necessary in GQ? (Although this is GD territory in reality).
I didn’t contradict myself. The movement of African-Americans to the Democratic Party was given further impetus by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in large part because a Democratic President was at the head of the effort and the Democrats sold the whole endeavour better than Republicans did when they passed Civil Rights Acts of their own earlier.
I didn’t take a swipe either, I just didn’t want to blame the poster for his fact being wrong, because it’s such a widely held belief. Along with the idea that the Dixiecrats switched to the GOP. It’s two claims that are so widely accepted even in intelligent circles, that there’s no reason to cite it. Which is why I had to cite the opposite, while blaming the Democratic revisionists, not the posters.
I’m not really sure that’s true. Southern Democrats continued to exercise great power after the passage of the 1964 law and proceeded to elect two Presidents, something the northern Democrats never even came close to doing during the same period. Further, the “Boll Weevils” as they came to be called, ended up being the swing bloc that controlled Congress during Reagan’s first term.
I’d say that it wasn’t until 2010 that the Southern Dems got a stake driven through their hearts, but that was a recent wave election and they could very well make a comeback. When in decent numbers, they do tend to be able to set the agenda.
This. While slavery itself has long been irrelevant as a political issue, Democrats tend to believe that social problems such as race relations are best addressed by the federal government through programs like Affirmative Action, etc., while Republicans are more inclined to favor a hands-off approach, believing that society can best solve social problems such as racial inequality on its own. Both parties intentions are probably equally good however, as with most social issues, the Democrats are able to present themselves as taking a more proactive stance on civil rights than their Republican counterparts and this makes them much more popular among African American voters.
I agree, but I was actually referring more to situations like the beating of Rodney King. EVen in states without a particularly noxious history of discrimination, sometimes the feds are seen as coming to the rescue when injustice occurs.