What the hell happened? I even asked my grandpa and he confirmed it. In fact he said he always voted for the Republican party until the mid 70s when he began to notice changes in their ideologies in relation black folks.
The biggest change in perception happened in the sixties. The Republicans saw the Great Society programs as essentially a great bribery plan to ensure Black dependence on big government. As LBJ is claimed to have said, his policy would have Black people voting Democrat for the next 200 years. They saw the programs as being expensive, gicing too much power to the Federal government, corrosive of individual liberty and initiaive. They've noted that African Americans are more affected by poverty and family breakdown today than they were in the mid-Sixties.
Democrats, on the other hand, tend to claim that any criticism of those policies is racist, this being easier than examining the fundamental theories and practices that have made those policies ineffective, at best, and counter-productive, at worst.
Edited to allow for the possibility the LBJ quote was inaccurate.
Don't perpetuate invented quotes. LBJ never said that. From Snopes.com:
LBJ's comment about black people voting Democrat was supposedly uttered to two unnamed governors traveling with the president on Air Force One, but we only have one source — MacMillan, who claimed he overheard the exchange — and no corroboration from anyone else. And then there's MacMillan's editorializing: "It was strictly a political ploy for the Democratic party. He was phony from the word go." And: "This was the attitude of these people who were championing civil rights."
It's not just that MacMillan gives the appearance of being a biased witness, but also that his cynical portrait is at odds with historical evidence showing that by the time Johnson took office after JFK's assassination, he was fully committed to Kennedy's civil rights legislation. Some of this evidence can be found in LBJ's oval office recordings, in which he can be heard fighting for its passage. Eric Foner writes in the New York Times Book Review:
One example of genuine idealism that does come through in these volumes is Johnson's commitment to civil rights. When he took office, nobody expected that he would identify himself with the black movement more passionately than any previous president. But from his first days in office he urged black leaders, labor officials and businessmen to lobby Congress for passage of the stalled civil rights bill. He asked Robert Anderson, a member of Eisenhower's cabinet, to work on Republicans: "You're either the party of Lincoln or you ain't.... By God, put up or shut up!"
Lastly, the historical evidence suggests that far from being concerned about securing future generations of black votes, one of Johnson's main worries -- which, to his credit, didn't prevent him from pushing for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — was losing the votes of white Southerners. His former press secretary, Bill Moyers, recounted this scene in his 2004 book Moyers on America:
When he signed the act he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the bulldog edition of the Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come," he said.
Whether Johnson actually said this or not is not especially relevant to my argument, so I have edited it accordingly. The effect has been to make the Democrats the party of choice among African Americans. As I've noted, it doesn't seem to have made things better for African American communities.
shareHere's the entire article. They don't say never..
http://www.snopes.com/lbj-voting-democratic/
The biggest change in perception happened in the sixties. The Republicans saw the Great Society programs as essentially a great bribery plan to ensure Black dependence on big government. As LBJ is claimed to have said, his policy would have Black people voting Democrat for the next 200 years. They saw the programs as being expensive, gicing too much power to the Federal government, corrosive of individual liberty and initiaive. They've noted that African Americans are more affected by poverty and family breakdown today than they were in the mid-Sixties.
My post wasn't addressing why formerly Democratic Whites became Republicans, but why formerly Republican Blacks became Democrats. What you wrote tends to support the bribery theory.
Civil Rights legislation was overwhelmingly supported by Republicans at the time. Republican president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce Brown vs Board of Education.
Nor did White voters abandon the Democrats until the Democrats moved shrply leftwards through the eighties and nineties. The rise of the religious right has more to do with Republican strength among those voters than voting rights for Blacks.
That is so far from the truth it couldn't see it with the Hubble.
In fact (and i was there for most of this) what happened is that Nixon and his crew's "Southern Strategy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy), in which the Republicans invited the "Democrats" of the South - really properly "Dixiecrats", the political descendants of the party that, essentially, started the KKK - to switch to the GOP.
Up till the late 50s/early 60s (somehow, by a strange coincidence, the era of the Civil Rights movement) Dixiecrats had opposed Republicans because, indeed, it was the part of Lincoln, the party of freedom and rights for blacks. (In fact, Strom Thurmond ran for President on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, the year i was born.)
So, basically, over the 60s, the GOP became the party or repression.
What the hell happened?
Great explanation except Trump doesn't even bother with dog whistles anymore.
shareHe says he doesn't like illegal immigrants and is suspicious of Muslims. Unless one assumes that all Hispanics are illegal immigrants and that all Middle Eastern and South Asian people are Islamists or even Muslim, that isn't racist. One can, of course, dispute the wisdom or emphasis on those issues.
In particular I'm not aware of any actual animosity or real prejudiced he's expressed toward African-Americans, so perhaps you can tell us.
Unless one assumes that all Hispanics are illegal immigrants and that all Middle Eastern and South Asian people are Islamists or even MuslimThat does indeed apply to a large part of Trump's base of support. Multiple polling research organizations and political scientists have surveyed Americans about their views on race and who they support for president. I'm sure you can find them with a google search.
That does indeed apply to a large part of Trump's base of support.
As for Trump's personal prejudices, don't forget that he suggested an American-born federal judge might be biased against him because the judge's parents happen to be from Mexico,
He has a history of saying stereotypical racist things like "I think the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that
Trump offered what to the electorate? What policy positions? Who knows. He was capable of changing a policy position from the beginning to the end of a sentence (when he was actually capable of formulating a policy position). His ignorance of any important issue was appalling.
He's going to bring back factory jobs from the 3rd world? He and his daughter Ivanka manufacture everything in the 3rd world. They're not bringing their jobs back. Americans love buying cheap merchandise at Walmart, Best Buy, etc. How are they going to afford those same items IF they were manufactured in the US (which they won't be)?
He's going to further inflate the military.. he claims he's going to invest in infrastructure (which the GOP has always refused to do). How's he going to do that by reducing the taxes on the 1% and corporations? Where's the money coming from? Illegal immigrants paid $12B in income taxes in 2015. Trump paid Zero. Who's going to make up the shortfall?
All his speeches involved insulting people (POWs, the disabled, women, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, a Gold Star mother). He was going to get rid of Obamacare (by the way, what's going to happen to the 20million people now covered?). If he gets rid of Obamacare, he will also get rid the stipulation Obamacare forced on health insurance companies of covering people with preexisting conditions. Paul Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, Social Security.
All Trump offered was overt racism to bigotted whites who blame their miserable lives on people of other races and other religion: just get rid of those other people and your lives will improve. Hitler did the same thing.
The only reason to vote for Trump was because you hate the people he hates. You bought it. You own it.
The only reassuring thing about this election is that Hillary beat Trump by more than 500K votes. Now the Electoral College, which was designed not only to protect the interests of landowners and slaveholders but to prevent poor, ignorant white men from voting, will elect the candidate of ignorant white men.
All Trump offered was overt racism
The only reason to vote for Trump was because you hate the people he hates.I disagree. There are more reasons for voting for Trump, but by doing so, they're implying that the hate either doesn't really matter or is acceptable at the least. share
Well, installing Bannon within the White House inner circle certainly did nothing to dissociate Trump from racists, anti-Semites and misogynists. Bannon's the king of all that.
shareOf course, when we dumb down definitions of racism and misogyny to include anyone who objects to left-wing extremism including claims of microaggession and triggering, then we will find quite a few Trump supporters who are tried of Social Justice warrior bullying.Who said anything about SJWs? You obviously didn't bother to look for the polls I was referring to which ask specific questions. If you need help on where to start looking, try searching "trump supporters views on race."
It's interesting, by the way, that Trump improved Republican's standing among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.I agree, it is interesting, psychologically and politically. Trump also increased turnout for Republicans among white voters too.
The difference is that the Republicans try to shun racial bigots who clim to support themAh, yes, the greatest shun of all: being appointed chief strategist and Senior Counselor to the President.
he's leery about the impartiality of a Hispanic judge.Thinking someone can't do their job solely because of their ethnic heritage is the definition of racism. What other evidence suggests Judge Curiel can't remain impartial?
And how does wanting to more narrowly target specific problem countries instead of Muslims in general prove racism?It's not narrowing the target, it's broadening it from what's supposed to be an individual case by case basis to generalizations covering entire countries. It expands on the Muslim ban by including people of other faiths just because they're from the same place (ethnically similar).
Except it seems he never said it.So take your pick from the many other examples. share
http://www.snopes.com/trump-laziness-is-a-trait-in-blacks/
@Dave
Come on,now. trumpf is racist as hell and always has been----both him and his father were sued for discriminating against black tenants in the housing projects they both owned in the early '70s, and ordered by the feds to cut it out. And he only said that stupid s*** about the judge (who is Mexican-American, and was born and raised in the Midwest) because that judge was the one overseeing his trumpf university fraud trial.
Apparently, family, country, faith, and law are not Black values - at least according to the dog whistle theory. Do note that the Democratic Party usually owned most of the South well into the nineties.
The characterization of Senator Goldwater as a disguised racist is particularly unfounded given his support for civil rights legislation in areas clearly under federal jurisdiction and for individual rights for all people.
Barry Goldwater might better have shown his support for civil rights by actually voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was one of 6 Republican Senators who voted against it.
shareOr he could have stood by his long-standing principals regarding the separation of powers You will note that most of the Democrats who voted against the Federal Civil Rights Acts of the mid sixties had opposed earlier legislation well within Federal purview that Goldwater actively supported.
shareThe thing about dog whistle politics is that you don't need to be a dog to blow the whistle. Goldwater wasn't racist, but he proposed a "philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists" as Martin Luther King Jr. had put it, and purposely kept his local support for civil rights on the down low in order to appeal to Southern whites.
The switch from the Democratic Solid South to the current Republican-dominated one didn't happen overnight. It took much longer than the presidential vote indicated because of how entrenched political parties are on the local level due to gerrymandering and the fact that local politicians don't have to always agree with their party on the national level.
How did you come to the conclusion that family, country, faith, and law are not black values?
The even cooler thing about dog whistle politics is that there doesn't need to be a whistle at all to accuse someone of employing it.
shareTrump dispensed with the dog whistle. He used a megaphone.
shareAs Flannery O'Connor said, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." Your objection to the concept doesn't mean it's not real. Also, you didn't answer my question about black values.
shareSouthern whites and blacks do not get along. Never have, and their politics tend to be on opposite sides of the spectrum.
In the civil war, the republicans were the party that supported civil rights, they also supported reconstruction after the war. The south was extremely democrat to oppose this.
So for a long time, southern whites were democrat, blacks tended to be republican.
But when FDR came along, he passed a lot of reforms that got approval from blacks. This started moving blacks into the democratic party. Also the democratic party had liberals in it who tend to be socially liberal.
Having a party of both southern whites but also blacks and liberals created a lot of stress in the democratic party.
This came to a head in the 1960s when LBJ passed various civil rights acts. The civil rights act of 1964, the civil rights act of 1968, the voting rights act of 1965.
This really pissed off southern whites. In fact, while politicians in the rest of the nation supported the law by wide margins, southern politicians were almost uniformly against it.
So one of Nixon's strategists came up with the southern strategy. The south had been solidly democratic for 100 years at this point. His goal was to encourage the democrats to register black people and encourage them to vote, to build a schizm between southern whites and the democratic party.
That has now been accomplished. Whites in the south now prefer the GOP by 2-1 margins. In the deep south like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, etc whites prefer the GOP by 9-1 margins.
Blacks nationwide prefer the democratic party by 9-1 margins.
So that is basically what it is. Southern whites don't like it when blacks are treated with dignity, and they support whatever political party lets them oppress and mistreat them. When the democrats did so, they were democrats. When the republicans did so, they were republicans.
Very thorough explanation. You might want to check out "13th" a documentary on Netflix. Not the masterpiece some critics are claiming, but full of important information about the civil rights struggle and how black men have been "funnelled" into the prison system, creating a second form of slavery, deprived of their rights and used as (very) cheap labor in for-profit prisons.
shareRepublican Party for the most part of its history has been the party of fiscal conservatism. The liberal economic policies of Democrats such as FDR attracted the southern blacks initially to vote for Democrats, even if the racist element was predominant among that party. Following the civil rights movement, the south still voted mostly Democrat all the way up to 90s. There was one politician named Storm Thurmond who switched sides, but the racists remained Democrat until their death. But as the south got less racist, the more they started prioritizing fiscal conservatism and small government and thus started voting Republican.
The narrative is that the racists simply started voting Republican because many racist Democrats became part of Republican party. But aside from Thurmond, the switch never happened. There are plenty of KKK affiliated Democrats who are lionized by the party even today. It is no coincidence that the Democrat controlled cities for decades such as Detroit and Chicago have such horrible conditions for blacks. Their racist policies are the reason why.
Oh,come on----I'm tired of this BS line that the Rpublican party cared so much about black people, and hat every problem black people have had is the Democratic Party's fault (which is some complete bull****, and a myth right-wingers love to promote.) Being a Detroiter, I know the problem is way more complex than that (the loss of tax bases from the city, corporations sending jobs overseas so they won't have to deal with unions and use cheap, low-paid labor, the reducing of manufacturing plants, the long history of racist redlining both here and in Chicago (aka housing discrimination toward black people) all of those played a factor in the city's decline. Currently Detroit is making a comeback, after having survived the bankrupcty, and having a brand rail system built (Detroit is the last major city in the U.S. without a comprehensive transportation system, so we definitely need it) there are still some major problems, but no, all problems with any city are not the entire fault of Democrats only, and its a lie to say so. Read THE ORGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS,,by Thomas Sugrue (an ex-Detroiter, I think) which is all about why Detroit went downhill for years, and is finally getting back on its feet somewhat.
shareSimple answer is that the things that political parties care about drastically change over time. The political parties back then had to deal with rebuilding the country after a bloody civil war, KKK, rights of previous slaves, relations with 1800's foreign countries, and many more issues that are nonexistant or much different today.
shareRichard Nixon's Southern Strategy happened.
shareYou and your grandpa are both idiots
share