Our history is ugly, but that particular detail needs to address the southern realignment where the Jim Crow-era Democrats moved to the Republican Party. I think it’s less about bipartisanship and more that there’s a group of people who both switch parties and influence within parties trying to accomplish their goal of maintaining their superiority over other groups. Their loyalty is to their group, not the party.
This isn't an accurate picture either. A good example would be Justice Hugo Black, Roosevelt's first appointee to the Supreme Court. Black remains one of the most noteworthy big-time liberals in the history of the court (with a few exceptions like Korematsu.) He was a southern democrat and a klansman; not a member of some shadowy cabal that exploited the democrats for political expediency but a true believer in progressivism.
Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure, and only through it can one be purified. None of us is free from history, none of our forefathers was clean, but neither are we responsible for their failings.
> Perhaps one of the funniest elements of the American left's propensity to preach slavery and racism as a form of original sin is its insistence that it, unlike others, is pure
Opposition to slavery isn’t exclusive to the left, but also if that isn’t hyperbole you really need a wider sample. By far the most common perspective I’ve heard from anyone in the anti-racist camp is that nobody is perfect because we are all shaped by our environment. The whole point of entire campaigns is to avoid reinforcing those biases because they’re so widespread.
This also touches on the perceived inaccuracy you mentioned: my argument is that the key part for Black isn’t the Democratic affiliation but the southern white identity. People are motivated by issues but some people prioritize that one above everything else, and that’s what happened with the southern realignment: some people valued white supremacy most and changed what were in many cases generational party affiliations, while others decided that things like labor rights or social programs mattered more and shifted correspondingly. It was largely the same people but they sorted themselves into different parties and that shaped the policies of those parties.
Get a list of all democrats in office then highlight the ones who changed party. The number that switched were a small minority. Wikipedia lists less than 70 and most of those were state rather than federal.
Compared to the thousands of state and federal seats, it’s minimal.
So-called civil rights pioneers like Lyndon Johnson were raging racist who saw the civil rights act as cheap lip service to get black votes for decades to come.
You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.
As someone who has lived in the south (my family is not from the south), I’ll tell you that the Republicans were correct. The clan controlled the local counties (most important offices) and nobody would stop them from disappearing people or burning them out of their homes regardless of that the federal government said.
What changed was the people. Each generation has grown more tolerant. That finally broke the clan control and the millennial generation in the South is overwhelmingly not racist.
Unfortunately, the recent moves away from MLK-style equality to the radical Marxist-style equity (equity except for people who happen to be born white as they see it — very similar to Russian discrimination against children of formerly Middle/upper class people like engineers) seem to be pushing gen Z back toward racial supremacy (this seems true across the whole country).
The most interesting question is why republicans and democrats supposedly swapped parties in the 1960s, but the black vote shifted in the 1930s. The answer seems pretty clear. Black unemployment was through the roof and the New Deal promised jobs, so they broke with the part of Lincoln because they were forced to. As things stabilized, there was a risk of them switching back and once again creating a Republican supermajority which is what spawned support for a federal civil rights act by the racist democrats.
> You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.
No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.
LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.
A larger proportion of both House and Senate republicans voted for the '64 Civil Rights Act, true, but that doesn't change the fact that many preferred the state model. Goldwater, the party's nominee for president in '64, had been an outspoken civil rights supporter since before it was cool. He opposed specific titles on specific grounds because he, like many others, believed in upholding constitutional limitations on federal power, rather than just writing a bill and calling it solved. This was not as a proxy for racism, and Goldwater had been a major proponent of the prior two major civil rights bills in '57 and '60. He even spent many of his later years advocating for gay rights.
I am personally opposed to maintaining what I see as an overreach of the federal government. This goes back to the start of the new deal and stretches through much of what primarily the Warren Court found constitutional. Plenty of us "states rights" types are in favor of it on a whole host of other issues, e.g. many of the policies Trump promulgates. Please stop trying to erase the concept of local governance with hostile and incomplete interpretations of the past.
