Southern Democrats ... I still don’t get it

[MillennialModerate]

I’ve asked this before but I didn’t get much of a clear answer. So I’ll see if a new set of responses change things. As you all know I’m a staunch Kennedyite.

One thing that has fascinated me in my constant study of the JFK era is the “Southern Democrats”.

I’ve read that often FDR efforts were stopped in congress the same way JFKs efforts sometimes were. And what made no sense to me is that in both cases there were MAMMOTH majorites for the Democrats in both the House & Senate. How do very popular Presidents with huge majorities in both houses not get absolutely everything they want?

It almost seems to me that there were 3 parties; Republicans, Dems and Southern Dems

The way things are now are simple.

Republican = Center Right, Right, Far Right, Bat sh**t Crazy (Trump)
Democrats: = Center Left, Left, Far Left, Bat sh**t Crazy (the red rose Twitter brigade)

WAY MORE SIMPLE.

But when I study the 50’s and early/mid 60’s it seems like some Republicans were way more in line with (for instance) JFK then some Southern Dems. You had some Republicans more LEFT than JFK and some Democrats more right than Eisenhower

Then there’s the confusion of Presidential elections: Stevenson wins almost all of the South’s EV against a very popular Eisenhower ....but then some states run independent slates in 60 against JF effing K. WTF is that all about. It’s just very confusing to me.

I mean I had always been under the impression that a Southern Democrat was someone who was Left of Center on every issue except RACE. Essentially a liberal who was racist. But clearly it goes beyond that

Someone explain to me the concept of “Southern Democrats”

[MABA 2020]

This thread could be very helpful cos it don't make no sense to me either

[darklordoftech]

The Southern states were one-party states, so people who should have been Republicans ran as Democrats in order to get elected in Southern states. Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Larry MacDonald come to mind as examples.

The independent slates were protests against bipartisan support for civil rights.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

American political parties were at one time far less about ideology and more about identity. There's still a remnant of identity politics but it is not nearly as powerful as it once was.

[Orser67]

This is a really good question, and I encourage you to keep thinking about this regardless of anything you read in this thread.

My personal mental model is that between ~1900 (when Southern Democrats stamped out the Populists) and the 1960s, there were essentially three parties (with the notable exceptions of the ephemeral third-party presidential candidacies of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 and Robert La Follette in 1924): Northern Republicans, Northern Democrats, and Southern Democrats. Because the South generally didn't have any partisan competition (though there were some early birds), any ambitious/smart/whatever Southern politician would join the Democrats. Pre-1932, Northern Republicans and Northern Democrats were often separated more by ethno-cultural differences than by ideology, but after 1932 Northern Democrats generally moved left of Northern Republicans (with some notable exceptions) and ideology became a more important (although not all-encompassing) factor. So in the North, your average Democrat was to the left of your average Republican, but in the South, pretty much anyone in office, regardless of ideology, was a Democrat.

So with that background paragraph out of the way, what was going on in the 1960s? Southern congressional Democrats tended to win re-election (de facto) uncontested, whereas their Northern compatriots faced actual competition. So Southern Democrats racked up seniority, gaining power within what was then a relatively decentralized Congress. Generally speaking, any major bill would have to go through at least one (if not more) committee in each house of Congress before receiving a vote in each house, and committee chairmen had a huge amount of discretion in bottling up any given bill before even allowing it a vote in their respective committee. One of LBJ's strengths was in courting committee chairmen; e.g. he was able to pass Kennedy's tax cut bill only after convincing Harry Byrd, the conservative Southern chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, that he would seek to balance the budget (it was a different time...).

[RINO Tom]

I encourage you to browse several pages of this very subforum; there is wonderful content on this to be found, and it will go well beyond simplifications.

One thing I will note is that I actually saw one time that Southern Democrats' voting record in the first two years of the New Deal was significantly more liberal (i.e., in favor of FDR's reforms) than Northern Democrats' voting record.  It was only after FDR's administration made significant inroads with Black voters and therefore felt a need to further cultivate this relationship that Southern Democrats started to push back against the administration's initiatives in larger numbers.  You can make up your own mind if that sudden pivot due to racial bias makes them instantly "conservative."

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

First, voting alignments depended upon the issue. The labor bill, by proposing to destroy southern competitive wage advantages, upset southerners of all persuasions. Walter Lippmann, in fact, called the bill "sectional legislation disguised as humanitarian reform. " On other crucial votes in the House, however, such as those which recommitted reorganization in 1938 and defeated the death sentence provision of the utility holding company bill in 1935, representatives from the South divided as did Democrats from other sections. Secondly, southerners were seldom united. As V. 0. Key put it, "while individual southern Senators may frequently vote with the Republicans, a majority rarely does; and when it does, the group as a whole is badly split more than half the time." The New Deal Congresses had their Glasses and Baileys*, but they also had their Blacks and Rayburns.**  Except on race legislation, southern congressmen were never "solid."

*reliably conservative Southern Dem Senators
**mostly progressive Southern Dem Senators
"A Conservative Coalition Forms in Congress, 1933-1939", James T. Patterson 1966 www.jstor.org/stable/1894345

Patterson goes on to say that the divide among Democrats on New Deal legislation was often more one of urban vs rural than between North and South, but that even among northern Democrats from more urban areas there were conservatives such as Sen Gerry of RI.

[RINO Tom]

^ I think this plays to a broader point that people really struggle with here.  Other than some mountainous Union strongholds (and a few exception suburban areas by the mid-Twentieth Century), the South was a one party state ... and a one party state, by definition, will include a wide spectrum of ideologies.  Most modern readers of this time period cannot get past the idea that any Southern Democrat who wanted to *conserve* the institution of segregation was therefore a "conservative."  Even if you want to say that being a segregationist could only be spun through a "conservative" argument (I disagree, but that's irrelevant), a segregationist could easily be a solid liberal who is just "conservative" (again, in this view) on solely the segregation issue.

I made a very long effort post arguing with Badger a year or so ago that demonstrated that the average Northern Republican who voted FOR the Civil Rights Act was more conservative than the average Southern Democrat who voted AGAINST the Civil Rights Act.  In other words, while the Northern Democrats were absolutely 110% more liberal than their Southern counterparts, Northern, pro-CRA Republicans were more conservative than segregationists in the South, on average.  This goes to show (in my view) that too much of the ideology argument here hangs on viewing support for segregation as indicative of an overall conservative politician.  Even though the fact that most Northern conservatives OPPOSED segregation should shed a lot of doubt on this assertion, there are several "Southern" (people have different definitions) Democrats that were clearly liberals who were just, ya know, racists.  I mean, I know liberal people today who are racists.  Willie Nelson has a Southern accent, and he is a liberal.  Why is it so hard for people to imagine a populist, left-of-center Southern Democrat who just so happens to support segregation?  Lol.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

To add to what Shua and RinoTom have said, Theodore Bilbo was a devout New Deal Democrat. He once even stressed his loyalty by calling out FDR's Republican appointees (Knox for instance) and his support for the New Deal agenda writ-large, when he came under criticism for his extreme racism, anti-semitism and anti-Italian views.

Poor people, poor farmers and such were a key component of the Democratic base and had been for some time. They were the people that made WJB's takeover possible and the whole rise of "New Liberal".  Economic progressivism depended on the poor farmers and laborers who were completely in agreement with the TVA, Social Security and so forth, even at the same time they were racist as all hell.

Yes FDR had opposition, from two places, Conservative Black belt/urban whites (Who as I have pointed out represented districts whose poor were more exclusively black thus creating a wealth skew alongside the racial vote suppression of Jim Crow, hence why they were so conservative. These were rotten boroughs for the rich whites of the black belt region and cities with no one else voting) and middle class Irish conservatives in places like New York. The Irish component of the opposition gets forgotten, as does the New Deal wing of the Southern Democratic Party, creating this false presumption that it was completely North versus South, when it was Conservative versus Progressive in both regions.

[vitoNova]

You never had Republicans more Left than Democrats in the early 1960s.  That is just revisionist propaganda.  They were all the same. 

You're then probably asking: why did (some) whyte Southerners vote for JFK in 1960 ?

Easy.

If you read ANY literature or media piece from the time, everyone spoke of the "declination" and degeneration of America under Eisenhower's leadership.   In hindsight, we view the 1950s as an era of peace and prosperity.

But that was not the consensus viewpoint in late 50s America. 

[Spark]

The issue of civil rights divided the Democratic Party.

[Fuzzy Says: "Abolish NPR!"]

One has to begin this story as to how the Solid Democratic South came to be.  The "Solid South" was formed in 1876, when National Republicans, who were about to lose the Presidency.  A deal was made; Florida would throw its electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, stealing the Presidency from Tilden.  In return, the Republicans promised to allow Reconstruction to end and granted the South "Home Rule".  What it boiled down to is that the National Republican Party agreed to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the Southern States from that point out.  The systematic disenfranchisement of the black voters in the South could not have been accomplished without this; by 1901, the last black Representative n the House (George P. White) was eliminated.

It was understood that the South, from that point onward, would deliver its electoral votes to Democrats.  It was the Democratic Party, after all, that forced the South to end Reconstruction, and the Solid South was leverage against the GOP reinstituting Reconstruction. 

This is how the Democratic South got started.  What kept the South in the Democratic Party over the years was the immense House majorities the Democratic Party gained in the House, beginning in 1930.  In those days, Committee Chairs were determined by the Seniority System.  Your voting record didn't matter; as long as you voted to organize the House with the Democrats, you stayed in the Caucus and stayed in office until you obtained a chair.  It's how a reactionary like Rep. Howard Smith (D-VA) could become chairman of the House Rules Committee, or how Sen. James Eastland  (D-MS) and Sen. John Stennis (D-MS) could chair the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively.  The goal for a Southern Democrat was to hold office for as long as possible, and that's what the voters wanted.

The Liberal Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest were never the force the Conservative Democrats of the South were, and they were less seniority-minded, as many despaired of every serving in a GOP Majority House.  Northeast Republicans were politically Protestant descendants of post-Civil War Radical Republicans, but there were some liberal Catholic Republicans (e. g. Rep. Silvio Conte, R-MA).  The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, was far, far less regimented in those days. 

The one-party Democratic South was about (A) excluding blacks from voting in the primary, and (B) ensuring finality of the primary.  V. O. Key discussed this extensively in his book, Southern Politics.  There were varying degrees of support for "liberal" positions by Southern Democrats over the years.  Many conservative Democrats supported New Deal measures because their constituents needed them, and because the pols themselves initially supported Roosevelt strongly.  What broke this down were the following events:

1944 - the SCOTUS striking down the White Primary.  This meant that the Democratic Party, itself, could not be used as a device to keep the electorate white.

1948 - Truman's advocacy of the FEPC and and anti-lynching law.  This started the Dixiecrat rebellion.

1952 -  Eisenhower became the first Republican to carry a number of Southern states since Hoover (against the Catholic Al Smith).  Eisenhower also carried on his coattails the election of Rep. William C. Wampler (R-VA), Charles Jonas (R-NC), and William Cramer (R-FL).  Prior to this, the only Southern Republicans were in Historically Republican East Tennessee.

1964 - LBJ opts to advance and sign Civil Rights Legislation.  This is what ended the idea that the Democratic Party would be the party of Home Rule for the South.  They undid all of that in 1964, and there was no walking that back.  This event brought in a number of elected downballot Republicans, and created a Solid Non-Democratic South that emerged in 1968.

But the BIGGEST event came in late 1974.  This was when Rep. Phil Burton (D-CA) led a coalition of Democrats that unseated three (3) Southern House Chairmen.  Rep. Wright Patman (D-TX) Banking Chair, Rep. F. Edward Hebert (D-LA), Armed Services Chair, and Rep. W. R. (Bob) Poage (D-TX), Banking Chair were bounced from their chairs of their committees by a vote of the Democratic Caucus.  This was the event that removed the incentive for conservatives in the South to cast their lot with the Democratic Party; they would have to forever moderate their votes in order to maintain favor with the Caucus, and if they went too far with that, they'd lose re-election.  The Caucus also clamped down on its members volubly opposing Democratic Presidential candidates.

It was the ending of the Seniority System in Congress (which came in stages) that brought an end to the variety of types of Democrats in the Congress (and Republicans as well).  That event, more than anything else, brought about greater conformity and uniformity.  It's why the factions of the two parties are more sensible now.  It's also why there's less "working across the aisle" than ever before; it's far less likely you'll find someone across the aisle who has much in common with what you think.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I am always very grateful to have Fuzzy Bear's first hand perspectives on matters, as it helps to provide viewpoints that for sake of brevity or lack of his direct first hand knowledge limits my abilities and others to touch on during the course of our postings on the matter. I certainly agree with his timeline, the events that kicked of the start of the solid south and also the importance of regional hegemony as a tool for political leverage and the timeline for how and while they broke down.

That being said, I would to provide my thoughts on this segment:

The Liberal Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest were never the force the Conservative Democrats of the South were, and they were less seniority-minded, as many despaired of every serving in a GOP Majority House.  Northeast Republicans were politically Protestant descendants of post-Civil War Radical Republicans, but there were some liberal Catholic Republicans (e. g. Rep. Silvio Conte, R-MA).  The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party, was far, far less regimented in those days.

The one-party Democratic South was about (A) excluding blacks from voting in the primary, and (B) ensuring finality of the primary.  V. O. Key discussed this extensively in his book, Southern Politics.  There were varying degrees of support for "liberal" positions by Southern Democrats over the years.  Many conservative Democrats supported New Deal measures because their constituents needed them, and because the pols themselves initially supported Roosevelt strongly.  What broke this down were the following events:

The referencing of "Liberal Republicans" here is problematic. For one thing for a large part of this period, "progressive" Republicans were centered mostly out west or in urban machines. For the most part though, in both the Northeast and Midwest, it would be hard to refer to the bulk of these "establishment" WASP Republicans as anything but Conservative, especially on economic matters. After the increased unionization rates and Democratic voting strength in the North, there certainly was a desire by establishment Republicans in the region to shift left to try and chase the regions voters. Kevin Phillips talks about this and the leftward shift of Republican Reps in Yankee districts during the mid 1960's, but as a general process this began as as shift left to accommodate the politics of the New Deal era while trying to hold on in an increasingly hostile region economically and demographically.

Meanwhile the sheer level of poverty held in the South dictated that large numbers of voters there would be natural supporters of the Populists like WJB or later political alliances like the New Deal. Many of these voters benefited directly from such programs. Certainly there were a number of "conservative" Democrats who embraced these programs, but it shouldn't be discounted that there were a number of economically progressive true believers in various parts of the South, again catering that large pool of economically depressed voters, who found things especially rough after the depression. If anything the level of Conservatism increased substantially towards the end as just like the Republicans up North, a few years earlier, there had been a massive shift towards competitiveness and with racial politics no longer holding things in place, this became more necessary.

Population shifts play a role as poorer farmers clear out and leave larger, richer surviving operations, a dynamic people often don't consider when discussing the shift of rural areas over the years and leading to the faulty presumption that rural always means conservative and urban always means liberal.

All of these factors create a pull effect, working on congress members to shift further to the right to keep up with the region's shift to the right.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Secular v Traditional.  The Dixiecrat party that supported slavery and Jim Crow laws were states rights Dems. The Lincoln Rs like Eisehower and Teddy Roosevelt that supported Civil Rights believed in Federal Rights is supreme.

When Nixon created the Southern stratedy after RFK assassination, states rights along with Reagan was the GOP party. Thus Red v Blue since 1992 at the end of the Cold War and instead of Dems v Rep, Blue v Traditional has been used

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Secular v Traditional.  The Dixiecrat party that supported slavery and Jim Crow laws were states rights Dems. The Lincoln Rs like Eisehower and Teddy Roosevelt that supported Civil Rights believed in Federal Rights is supreme.

When Nixon created the Southern stratedy after RFK assassination, states rights along with Reagan was the GOP party. Thus Red v Blue since 1992 at the end of the Cold War and instead of Dems v Rep, Blue v Traditional has been used

All you do is regurgitate standard, generic lines of party flip based on superficial and empty analysis.

I categorically reject this narrative in its entirety. From the 1870's onwards, the Republican Party was seen as the too for financial elites and big business interests, just as the Whigs were the party of banks and the Federalists the party of merchant interests. It is worth noting that Nathaniel Banks left the Republican Party over the catering to business in the 1870's.

Republicans gave up on civil rights in the 1870's as well, because it was harming the ability to win elections in the North and thus by extension harming the enactment of pro-business policies. The embrace of small government came not in 1968 or 1932. It was a long term process whereby business interests decided to favor small gov't once they obtained the things they wanted and meanwhile liberalism evolved from classical to New Liberalism, embracing the government as a tool to uplift as opposed to one that could only oppress. This was a change in the wants of core interests groups, which remained the same with the same general alignment of urban business versus poor rural farmers.

During the late 19th and early 20th century, the agricultural population declined leaving only large and wealthy farmers while most of the poor flocked to the cities. This is why rural areas became conservative and urban areas shifted more towards liberalism. We saw the same process play out in the South but it was delayed a few decades.

Furthermore, on the issue of immigration, Republicans inherited the Know-Nothing base in many Northern states including Massachusetts. They used tribalistic voting and nativism to boost up huge margins among Yankee protestants, which worked until the demographics shifted so much that this political base fell apart.When that happened, is when Republicans started looking to the South, but it was not a flip or a change in tactics or core priorities. They just reapplied it, using blacks as the wedge to unite the white population against them in favor of Republicans, just as they had used immigrants the same way in the NE. If anything, the Southern Strategy was just a slightly modified version of the "Northern Strategy" the GOP had been using for decades.

On the matter of secularism, are you seriously saying that politicians that the South attacked for "harboring the same spirit that hung the witches" as late as the 1880's, is going to pass the smell test as a secular coalition. The same coalition that also discriminated against Catholics because of religion on a frequent basis? Of course not. The NE was a very religious region and the process by which this secularized over time took decades and even centuries but certainly through the late 19th century at least it would be safe to say it was still very religious particularly in the rural areas of New England where liberal thought had less influence and furthermore the voters were likewise the most animated by the ethnic voting patterns. The Republicans have almost always been a protestant moralist party, with only a short interlude during the New Deal era until it found a new white protestant base for itself, to continue advancing largely the same pro-business agenda.

As for the Southern strategy, as long as the Republicans were around and serving as a primary vehicle politically speaking for business interests, it was only a matter of time before regional and historical animosities fell by the wayside to create a coalition with the Southern business class and this came about in the mid 20th century. I don't see the Southern Strategy as some massive transformation or worse a party flip, I see it as the reapplication of divide and conquer politics bought and paid for business interests seeking to reign in the New Deal by working with like minded people in the South, especially as the South grew and with it a professional middle class that would in most other regions have been strongly Republican and so to was it now the case in the South, increasingly.

The evolution of parties is a complex web involving core interest groups (business or the poor/debtors), there preferred policy set, the ideological covering to justify said policy set, and then of course the demographic shifts both economic and ethnic/racial and it is necessary that all factors be in considered while analyzingthe parties and how they changed over time.

When you start to pull all of the threads together, it makes a lot of sense actually

[darklordoftech]

middle class Irish conservatives in places like New York. The Irish component of the opposition gets forgotten

Would Al Smith be an example?

[The Mikado]

Rino Tom is on the right boat here: up until the 1950s at earliest, outside of Tennessee there essentially WASN'T a Republican Party in the South and that forced people from liberal to damn-near-socialist on one end to ultra-reactionary on the other end into the Democratic Party. One party states had to fold the entire political spectrum into that party, so you did have quite a bit of variance amongst Southern Dems. Many were deeply reactionary, but it wasn't a unanimous thing. They were almost all white supremacists, at least outwardly. Stats like 19 out of 22 ex-Confederate state Southern Senators signing Strom Thurmond's segregationist hardliner Southern Manifesto in 1956 speaks volumes.

By the 1950s, things were just barely beginning to change, starting in 1948 as the national Democratic Party started to be associated more with Civil Rights. Dwight Eisenhower got unheard of numbers for a Republican in the South in 1952 while at the same time doing quite well with the black vote in the North, and actually won some Southern states (VA, TN, FL, and TX) for the GOP for the first time since 1928. By 1960, it was actually socially acceptable for well-heeled white Southerners to (gasp) vote Republican, especially in the cities. My state of Texas elected the first Republican to the Senate from the South in 40 years in 1961, with John Tower taking over the Senate seat LBJ vacated.



Tower was one of the first Republicans to realize the path to running in the South was to run as a racial conservative and his breakthrough inspired Republicans throughout the rest of the South through the 1960s. I always have felt that the Tower 1961 race doesn't get the credit it deserves in this story: he pioneered the path to statewide success for a Southern Republican three years before the Civil Rights Act even passed.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

middle class Irish conservatives in places like New York. The Irish component of the opposition gets forgotten

Would Al Smith be an example?

There was also a Representative, I think O'Connor or something like that who opposed court packing.

[RINO Tom]

I had a few more thoughts on this today, and I think these points lead to a LOT of the misconceptions:

1) "Left" and "Right" HAVE to be relative to their times.

We can look back at someone like Jefferson and lazily think, "here is a guy who loved small government, was from the South, preached against 'big city elites' and didn't devote political energy to the well-being of minorities" and see an obvious contradiction with modern liberals.  However, that contradiction does NOT mean that Thomas Jefferson (or another "Southern 'Democrat'" from another era) was necessarily a conservative.  Thomas Jefferson loved small government because he perceived the government in his day as nothing more than a tool for corporations and, in a desire to promote pro-working class economic policies, saw his best option as keeping the federal government out of states' affairs.  Thomas Jefferson preached against "big city elites" like Alexander Hamilton, pro-business and HARDLY an analogous figure to "liberal elites" we associate with somewhere like New York City today.  He didn't devote his political energy to fighting slavery, but few did.  Additionally, those in the North who talked a big game were (sometimes correctly) called out for having ulterior motives (like promoting Northern economic interests or wanting a Black voting bloc in the South that would (hopefully) blindly aid them in their other policy priorities) or for being Puritanical, religious fanatics.

In a day and age when VERY few people considered Black Americans equal, I'm not sure it's intellectually fair to have a litmus test for being a "liberal" involve what your policy preference for Black Americans ... I mean, nobody will want to hear this (I'M PRO-CHOICE, SO CALM DOWN LOL), but that's frankly analogous to someone in 300 years when abortion is illegal calling the GOP of 2016 "the liberal party back then" because only they were fighting for those poor, downtrodden fetuses, even though accepted "science" of the day said we shouldn't extend that kind of caring toward them.

2. Just because modern liberals expand upon a policy from the past does NOT mean that the policy was inherently "liberal" when it was introduced.

Today, liberals rightfully see themselves in some ways as carrying the torch forward on "civil rights."  They look back at things like the Civil Rights Act and the Thirteenth Amendment and see obvious parallels with the policies they support today (that they allege) to help Black Americans achieve a better life.  So, it's quite natural for them to look back at both Southern Democrats who DIDN'T share this concern and Northern Republicans who DID and conclude that something must have happened to reshape the parties ideologically ... well, that's lazy.

First of all, every "cause" has a logical end, depending on your ideology.  So, while a conservative might support "infrastructure" to the extent that he agrees we need roads, trains and sidewalks, he might not support a Democrats' "infrastructure" plan in 2020.  Does he "support infrastructure?"  The same logic can be applied to civil rights, and that's actually exactly what happened - the GOP didn't so much change its positions on "civil rights" ... it let the times pass it by.  From 1960s and 1970s Republicans' perspectives, the CRA was "mission accomplished."  Southern Democrats had finally been defeated, and the ultimate mission of "the Party of Lincoln" had been achieved.  The problem was, Northern Democrats kept wanting to do more to help Black Americans (who were now a key constituency for them), and all of a sudden the GOP had to support things like housing discrimination laws and forced busing - things that flew in the face of their core ideology, YES since Lincoln - to remain "pro-civil rights."  Naturally, as Republicans began to see the world kind of "going off the deep end" with regard to civil rights and moving past a "color blind society" to one that looked to use government action to actually equalize, they started to look more antagonistic toward Black interests.  Well, guess who else was?  The realignment of Southern Whites into the GOP was honestly a bit less insidious than your average person insinuates.  Yes, the GOP courted "racist" Southern Whites, but more in the way the Democratic Party is now courting "Romney-Clinton voters" ... they found themselves as strange bedfellows more by circumstance than some intentional strategy.

Second, we have to look at WHY past politicians supported what they did, not just what they supported.  I was reading recently about the ideological diversity within the "Radical Republicans," and while there were surely some "left-wing" politicians in their ranks (any cause as broad as "opposing the expansion of slavery" is going to attract a wide range of ideologies), many were accused of being shills for Northern business interests, chauvinistically vicious "hawks" and religious fanatics who were tyrannically forcing the government to pass legislation that "God would want."  Lol.  Sorry, but that last part doesn't sound overly "liberal" to me.  Again, many were liberals, but it's just SO LAZY to look back on pro-civil rights Republicans as "liberal" simply because they supported a broad cause that modern liberals happened to have picked up and carried forward.

I honestly don't know why this is so hard for people to imagine (well, I mean, I do ... but those people are stupid, and there are at least SOME people here who are not):

The left-leaning party in the United States got early support from the South.  As time went on, the South coalesced into a one-party state, and that necessitates wide ideological diversity.  The right-leaning party was largely based in the North, and it was shut out from the South.  The South was nearly monolithically opposed to racial equality.  As time went on, Black voters in the North started to realize that the fundamentally conservative nature of the right-leaning party in the North was offering them nothing but nice words, and they began to put pressure on both parties for their votes.  Northern Democrats realized the EASY political advantage of trying to woo these voters, and they started to.  Republicans, again fundamentally right-leaning, used mostly rhetoric (rather than left-leaning economic proposals that would actually appeal to them) to fight back.  With time, Black voters in the North shifted to the Democratic Party, and the GOP (perhaps unjustly, perhaps understandably) felt quite betrayed and bitter.  In an effort to not be a minority party, it tried to woo the fundamentally conservative Southern Democratic voters (i.e., not all) into their camp.  Over time, the growing association of Black voters with the Democratic Party drove more and more Southerners into the GOP.  NONE OF THIS INVOLVES A SWITCH IN IDEOLOGIES, lol.

3. Republicans practically only supported civil rights legislation that dealt exclusively with the South's legally protected racism, NOT legislation that looked to make the North more "fair."

I actually think this is really important to understanding the Civil Rights Era.  Republicans hardly had ANY constituents in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.  So, they naturally threw their support hugely behind measures like allowing Blacks to legally vote in the South, removing the poll tax, passing an anti-lynching bill, etc ... but they wanted ALL of this to apply only to the South, obviously not their incredibly segregated suburban districts and states they represented.  What resulted was more or less a collective eye roll from Black leaders; they saw a party (the GOP) that supported them verbally and NOT functionally outside of Dixie, and they saw a party (the Democrats) that did NOT support them verbally (at least to the extent they empowered Southern Democrats in Congress) but DID support them functionally in Northern cities and actually improve their lot ... they made the obvious choice.  I'm a Republican, and I am proud of our party's history, but you cannot look at pro-civil rights Republicans as "liberals" in the sense of today's liberals; they largely weren't.  It cannot be understated how easy and not risky it was for them to support civil rights legislation that outlawed blatantly racist institutions in other states.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Dynamic evolution isn't always pretty in its results, it is just a reflection of the pressures working on it, causing it to develop that way. The same general concept would apply to an organization, just as it would to a plant species or some kind of bird.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Just think states rights when you think conservative, not Dem v R and you will get Dixiectats during Jim Crow era and Rs during Goldwater era.

3 Scotus CJ used this philosophy to promote or upend Jom Crow.

CJ Marshall in 1803 said that Congress can change Crts Appellate Jurisidication, we went from 3 to current 9 members and CRT can use Judicial Review to strike Slavery Laws

FM Vinson in 1953 said it's not in the Constitution to desegregate

1954 Warren reversed Vinson and said 14th Amendment does apply to Jim Crow ending laws

That's when they say Washington and Adam's and Hamilton were conservative due to Alien Sedation laws, they dont apply the fact Marshall was appointed by John Adam's to help end slavery .

Benjamin Franklin was from Boston, no slaves, he was a Quaker like Lincoln

[1978 New Wave skinny trousers]

3. Republicans practically only supported civil rights legislation that dealt exclusively with the South's legally protected racism, NOT legislation that looked to make the North more "fair."

I actually think this is really important to understanding the Civil Rights Era.  Republicans hardly had ANY constituents in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.  So, they naturally threw their support hugely behind measures like allowing Blacks to legally vote in the South, removing the poll tax, passing an anti-lynching bill, etc ... but they wanted ALL of this to apply only to the South, obviously not their incredibly segregated suburban districts and states they represented.  What resulted was more or less a collective eye roll from Black leaders; they saw a party (the GOP) that supported them verbally and NOT functionally outside of Dixie, and they saw a party (the Democrats) that did NOT support them verbally (at least to the extent they empowered Southern Democrats in Congress) but DID support them functionally in Northern cities and actually improve their lot ... they made the obvious choice.  I'm a Republican, and I am proud of our party's history, but you cannot look at pro-civil rights Republicans as "liberals" in the sense of today's liberals; they largely weren't.  It cannot be understated how easy and not risky it was for them to support civil rights legislation that outlawed blatantly racist institutions in other states.

Right, Black leaders made the obvious choice ... I guess that's why Adam Clayton Powell endorsed Eisenhower in 1956. And sure, only Democratic supporters of civil rights were liberals, not Republicans. It's not like Nelson Rockefeller was regarded as a liberal even at the time, and one who genuinely believed in civil rights and backed up his actions with deeds. Of course he did! As governor he actively pushed through a pro-civil rights agenda and was given a hero's welcome during a 1960 campaign stop at four Black churches in Brooklyn. By contrast, JFK and his ilk were utterly uninterested in the civil rights movement as such and only in how it could translate into Black votes. His subsequent "embrace" of civil rights was an entirely cynical political calculation, and his famous phone call to Coretta Scott King a complete accident of history that almost didn't happen. I'm a Democrat, and I am proud of our party's history, but you cannot look at JFK Democrats as "liberals" in the sense of today's liberals; they largely weren't.  It cannot be understated how opportunistic and craven it was for JFK to belatedly take a stance on civil rights nearly indistinguishable from that of Nixon's.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Just think states rights when you think conservative, not Dem v R and you will get Dixiectats during Jim Crow era and Rs during Goldwater era.

3 Scotus CJ used this philosophy to promote or upend Jom Crow.

CJ Marshall in 1803 said that Congress can change Crts Appellate Jurisidication, we went from 3 to current 9 members and CRT can use Judicial Review to strike Slavery Laws

FM Vinson in 1953 said it's not in the Constitution to desegregate

1954 Warren reversed Vinson and said 14th Amendment does apply to Jim Crow ending laws

That's when they say Washington and Adam's and Hamilton were conservative due to Alien Sedation laws, they dont apply the fact Marshall was appointed by John Adam's to help end slavery .

Benjamin Franklin was from Boston, no slaves, he was a Quaker like Lincoln

Benjamin Franklin owned two slaves and even advertised slave auctions in his newspaper. His conversion to abolition was late in life.

Adams and Hamilton were both conservatives though of different varieties. Both sought to preserve the interests of financial elites against the interest of the common man, which is the primary long term divide in American politics. Again you fail to grasp that Ideologies can evolve to.

Marshall was not appointed to abolish slavery, the guy was from VA. It is also worth pointing out that the second court ruling to overturn a federal law, was Dred Scott overturning the Missouri Compromise. This narrative you are peddling on the court is just full of holes.

Just think states rights when you think conservative, not Dem v R and you will get Dixiectats during Jim Crow era and Rs during Goldwater era.

Are you seriously going to claim that Calvin Coolidge was not a conservative? Harding? McKinley? Are you seriously going to claim that Theodore Bilbo and Huey Long were conservatives?

Again one dimensional analysis always falls flat.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Benjamin Franklin was from Boston, no slaves, he was a Quaker like Lincoln

Neither Franklin nor Lincoln was a Quaker. Because he ended up in Philadelphia, he did have to deal with Quakers, but religiously, he was a Deist with Unitarian leanings. While he never formally joined any church, Lincoln fairly regularly attended the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield until he left for Washington.

[RINO Tom]

3. Republicans practically only supported civil rights legislation that dealt exclusively with the South's legally protected racism, NOT legislation that looked to make the North more "fair."

I actually think this is really important to understanding the Civil Rights Era.  Republicans hardly had ANY constituents in the South in the 1950s and 1960s.  So, they naturally threw their support hugely behind measures like allowing Blacks to legally vote in the South, removing the poll tax, passing an anti-lynching bill, etc ... but they wanted ALL of this to apply only to the South, obviously not their incredibly segregated suburban districts and states they represented.  What resulted was more or less a collective eye roll from Black leaders; they saw a party (the GOP) that supported them verbally and NOT functionally outside of Dixie, and they saw a party (the Democrats) that did NOT support them verbally (at least to the extent they empowered Southern Democrats in Congress) but DID support them functionally in Northern cities and actually improve their lot ... they made the obvious choice.  I'm a Republican, and I am proud of our party's history, but you cannot look at pro-civil rights Republicans as "liberals" in the sense of today's liberals; they largely weren't.  It cannot be understated how easy and not risky it was for them to support civil rights legislation that outlawed blatantly racist institutions in other states.

Right, Black leaders made the obvious choice ... I guess that's why Adam Clayton Powell endorsed Eisenhower in 1956. And sure, only Democratic supporters of civil rights were liberals, not Republicans. It's not like Nelson Rockefeller was regarded as a liberal even at the time, and one who genuinely believed in civil rights and backed up his actions with deeds. Of course he did! As governor he actively pushed through a pro-civil rights agenda and was given a hero's welcome during a 1960 campaign stop at four Black churches in Brooklyn. By contrast, JFK and his ilk were utterly uninterested in the civil rights movement as such and only in how it could translate into Black votes. His subsequent "embrace" of civil rights was an entirely cynical political calculation, and his famous phone call to Coretta Scott King a complete accident of history that almost didn't happen. I'm a Democrat, and I am proud of our party's history, but you cannot look at JFK Democrats as "liberals" in the sense of today's liberals; they largely weren't.  It cannot be understated how opportunistic and craven it was for JFK to belatedly take a stance on civil rights nearly indistinguishable from that of Nixon's.

I guess I am genuinely not sure what your snark hoped to accomplish ... I will try, in good faith, to respond, but it's hard to do when you are not upfront with a point.

Cherry picking Black leaders' endorsements doesn't seem to prove much to me (but again, I don't know what you're trying to prove).  Eisenhower received significant Black support, and I never said otherwise ... however, after signing the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, enforcing Brown v. Board and running against a ticket with a literal segregationist on it, Ike lost the Black vote by over 20% both times.  According to Timothy Thurber, author of Republicans and Race: The GOP's Frayed Relationship With African Americans, 1945-1974, this infuriated many Republican leaders (including Eisenhower) and was effectively the final straw for them in regard to chasing Black voters.  They saw them as "bought and paid for" by the Democrats in a post-New Deal America.

Regarding Rockefeller, I will first say that obviously there have been bonafide liberals and progressives within the GOP ranks throughout his history; neither NC Yankee, I or anyone else who maintains that there was never this clean "party switch" has ever really disagreed with that ... our disagreement comes usually in the forms of 1) that not meaning that the GOP was necessarily ever, overall, to the "left" politically of the Democratic Party, 2) that these left-of-center Republicans ever outnumbered their centrist and right-of-center peers or 3) that this implied that a majority of left-leaning politicians weren't still Democrats in the contemporary time period of said liberal Republicans.  However, I do not believe this describes Rockefeller.  Even if I accept your assertion that Rockefeller's support for civil rights is inherently "liberal," that does not describe his entire ideology.  In the same way that many Democratic partisans today would not describe Charlie Baker or Larry Hogan as necessarily "liberals" but many partisan conservative Republicans might, Rockefeller was largely "liberal for a Republican."  While seeking the nomination, he said (perhaps agreeing with your assertion that support for civil rights had now become seen as "liberal") that he was an "economic conservative and a human-rights liberal."  I was simply maintaining that your average "liberal Republican" was not necessarily Hubert H. Humphrey with an R next to his name but rather a product of a left-leaning state, district or city in which he had to make concessions to simply be elected.  I really don't think it would have been much different from us calling Phil Scott a "liberal Republican," an assertion that Democrats scoff at today (instead insisting that he is simply a "moderate" and that "liberal Republicans don't exist"), and they scoffed at it back then.  Democrats have been more or less accusing the GOP of betraying its heritage as the "Party of Lincoln" since the second FDR won the Black vote, from what I have seen.

All "we" (the various people I recall you conversing with in that thread about party continuity) have ever alleged is that this is a lot more complicated than people make out, and relying on surface-level indicators (e.g., "supporting emancipation is inherently progressive," "supporting segregation is inherently conservative" or the worst, "the GOP used to support big government and the Democrats used to be a small government, states' rights party") will lead one down a path where they perform the wrong type of analysis for the period, giving politicians anachronistic labels that I humbly think they would disagree with.  For every dumbass Republican you see say, "The GOP freed the slaves!  The Democratic Party started the KKK!", you quite honestly see at least three or four nimrods on social media comment sections saying - as if they are bestowing long lost ancient knowledge on the rest of us and nobody has ever heard this hot take before - "ACTUALLY, the GOP used to be a progressive party, and the Democrats used to be the conservatives, and they switched in [insert arbitrary decade or year]."  Few credible historians place the Federalists to the left of the Democratic Republicans, and few place the Whigs to the left of their contemporary Democrats ... so the burden lies on those alleging that the Democratic Party of the mid- and late 1800s was clearly to the right of the GOP of that time period to articulate how exactly that came to be and how exactly it stopped being the case, and my humble opinion is that if that explanation relies too heavily on the rights of Black Americans, it will probably fall flat, especially if it fails to analyze the motives for which each party supports what it does.  Again, even if supporting an end to slavery or segregation IS, though I disagree, inherently progressive or liberal in all situations, that can still lead to a circumstance where there are conservatives supporting it and liberals opposing it.