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

[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."

[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.

[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.

[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.

[RINO Tom]

The point is not really whether or not "support for 'civil rights'" is inherently liberal, though; it's about what the people in those times SAW it as, and if they didn't see it the same way we do ... then we can't accurately judge their ideologies based on the issue alone or even call them "liberal" or "conservative" on the issue even by itself.  How is that so controversial?  

Just as modern liberals do not consider the rights of the unborn/fetuses to fall under the umbrella of "civil rights," and conservatives who are pro-life are likely not taking that position from a "liberal" point of view, simply trying to extend universal rights to as many as possible ... 19th Century Democrats did not consider Black Americans to be part of the conversation on "equality," and they (correctly IMO) viewed the Republicans that supported including them in said conversation as doing so with ulterior motives, none of which carried the inherently liberal spirit of extending rights to those who deserve them but cannot attain them (e.g., Northern business interests or trying to rid society of sin).  Democrats of the era very clearly DID see themselves as more "liberal" on "civil rights issues" ... they just considered those issues to only encompass White immigrants of a different ethnic background or religion.  While I will not be able to produce the exact quote until I visit my parents' house again in a few weeks (from the book Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine), Stephen Douglas declared before the 1860 election that a winning strategy for the Democrats was to make the election one about TOLERANCE, emphasizing that only the Democratic Party would stand by ALL White Americans, regardless of their ancestral origin, household structure or religious beliefs - phrasing the GOP as an intolerant bunch of religious fanatics, xenophobes and shills for Wall Street.  In a society where so few saw Black Americans as anything approaching equals, I would argue it's quite intellectually dishonest (if the ultimate objective is to try to objectively identify the contemporary "left" and "right" of the day) to look at the struggle for Black rights through the same framework that it was pitched in the mid-20th Century or today.  Again, if we are actively trying to discern THEIR ideologies, OUR contemporary ideologies can't get too far in the way.  We HAVE to look at why they supported what they did, not just what they supported.  Opposing slavery for "liberal" or "progressive" reasons (as many Republicans did) is indeed "liberal" ... doing so for non-liberal reasons is NOT, and ignoring slavery the same way you ignore your liberal calling to support the fetuses who are aborted (i.e., you think it's a ridiculous comparison ... I'm pro-choice, but I'm making a point here; you won't be "not a liberal" in 200 years if society views legal abortion as a backward black mark on our political history) does not make one a "conservative" on that issue.

In fact, I would largely argue that we only really began to associate supporting civil rights with being a "liberal" view after the Democratic Party itself (the clearly more liberal party by ANY stretch of the imagination by the 1930s and 1940s...) picked up the issue.  It's anachronistic to apply that framework to people decades and decades earlier, making a statement like "the GOP was more 'liberal' on civil rights before 1964" ridiculous in my mind (for the reasons I just stated, but also because the GOP position on civil rights was no different in 1964 than in 1960 or 1954).  A hypothetical Puritan-minded Republican who supported gay marriage being legalized in the 1920s as a ploy to get the government entirely out of marriage is neither "liberal" on that issue nor supporting what we now consider a "liberal" stance for anything approaching a "liberal" reason; frankly, the fact that we see it as "liberal" now (and it undeniably is) is irrelevant.

RE: Rockefeller ... come on, dude.  Is George W. Bush not an economic conservative because he ran up the debt?  Is Charlie Baker's ideology explained overly well by seeing what he thinks he can get away with in Massachusetts?

[RINO Tom]

^ I don't think the assertion that the slave power in the South was fundamentally right wing in any way necessitates that the Republicans opposing them in the North, and therefore looking to curb slavery's expansion and existence, were therefore in any way left wing (or that the Democrats in the North that apologized for said Southerners weren't left-of-center, themselves).  Which is kind of the broader point.  I think there is plenty of historical evidence from primary sources that suggest the basic dynamic of the Nineteenth Century North was a pro-immigration, more-pro-separation-of-church-and-state and economically left-leaning Democratic Party and a rather xenophobic, moralist and pro-business Republican Party ... then you had the Southern planters, who happened to be in the same party as the Northern Democrats, effectively making division over slavery a "Democrats problem."

And I do appreciate that being "Puritanical" has a more complicated history than a direct line back from modern day Evangelicals screaming about the culture wars, but I think that from what I have read about this period, the Democrats did in fact see these moralist Republicans as fundamentally "right wing" in this sense (which I again maintain is more important than our analysis with modern lens).