The Hofoid House of Absurd & Ignorant Posts VII

[All Along The Watchtower]

Wasn't George Wallace pretty much a segregationist (and socially conservative) Bernie Sanders?

This isn't as absurd as it seems on the surface. Wallace was fairly progressive on economic issues.

...He was conservative to the core.



Let's dispel the fiction that Dixiecrats were "economically progressive."  Even during the New Deal, Southern Democrats aided the GOP in opposing FDR's programs.  Most of the Democrat party bosses who controlled the region didn't like black or white poors.

Democrats controlled an entire region; to say that all of them were "economically progressive" OR economically conservative would be dumb.  There was obviously a spectrum.  However, Southern Democrats only began to oppose the New Deal once it was solidly in place and seen as helping Blacks a tad too much.  There weren't any Southern Democrats opposing the initiatives in the first few years.  It's disingenuous to insinuate they were pretty much just voting exactly like Republicans.

To be fair, the Republican Party at a national level wasn't necessarily monolithically "conservative" back then (certainly not in the post-WWII, "movement conservative" sense) as it is today. Then again, as you noted, the Democrats 100% controlled via Jim Crow practices and memories of Lincoln and Reconstruction an entire region - the very same region in which the Republicans are hegemonic today (and among the same demographic - said region's white voters are the largest, most consistent, and most monolithically "conservative" regional bloc of Republican voters in the way in which most people use the term post-WWII, post-Goldwater/Wallace/Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich and yes, in our current Age of Trump). 

Good luck finding any Rockefeller/Dewey/(George)Romney/Scranton-style Republicans in that region at any point in American history (unless you count the almost-forgotten first crop of Southern Republicans during Reconstruction, ironically enough! ).

Also, keep in mind the kinds of Southern Democrats who tended to chair and control Congressional Committees, which were of course much more powerful fiefdoms back then. Those Dixiecrats certainly weren't what you'd call bleeding hearts, needless to say...