CPAC forum on race devolves into hot mess after someone defends slavery

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Someone certainly needed to correct the idiot. Perhaps it would have been more fitting if it was not only a woman, but a black woman that called him out.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

2. Frederick Douglass was a Republican liberal, and it was Republicans liberals who fought to end slavery and segregation.  If Terry knew the history, he would be a Democrat conservative, especially since he had a George Wallace button.

2. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, and it was Republicans who fought to end slavery and segregation.  If Terry knew the history, he would be a Democrat, especially since he had a George Wallace button.

Ever wondered why scumbag racists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms switched parties? Liberals ended slavery, and southern conservatives happily fought against that... just like they opposed the Reconstruction amendments, women suffrage, segregation, and several more dubious social crusades that establishment Republicans pretend to have never happened.

We took the Deweys and Rockefellers of the world, you took the Thurmonds and the Wallaces and the Byrds.

That is one hell of an oversimplification justified on political grounds.

There is such a thing as a Pro-Civil Rights Conservative, arguably both Bob Taft and Everett Dirksen could be counted as such. The reason such unsavory people (like those you mentioned, not implying Taft or Dirksen were unsavory by the location of this sentence) joined the GOP wasn't because it full throated embraced dixie, but instead because it was the "lesser of two evils", as the party more inclined to advance a conservative ideal set, as opposed to the Democratic party, which was being pulled more and more to the left. A process that the GOP leadership encouraged through the use of specific and select issues that could just as easily by motivated by legitimate ideological views as they could by being a racist hater (the so-called "Southern Strategy"), which was adopted as a means to break out from its two region imprisonment and gain access into the SE and SW, both of which were more fertile ground for a conservative poltical party, then a party isolated in two regions dominated by unions, liberal ethnics and so forth.

The reason the GOP was more inclined to a conservative mindset in the 1960's, wasn't because of a hijacking but instead because of conservative influences in the Northeast (shocking as it may seem now, there were such bastions at the time. For many, Abolition and Prohibition were espoused by fervent Protestants wanting to export their beliefs to other people as means to "civilize them". Sound familiar?) and Midwest. Exemplified by the fact that as far back as Alexander Hamilton's (who gets counted as a Conservative and legitimately so) and John Adam's (another obvious conservative) Federalist Party, the party opposed to the Democrats (or Jefferson's party before them) had a conservative element of some form. That would include Lincoln's opposition to Popular Sovereignty on the basis of the promised freedoms being universal and thus untouchable to a transient majority opinion in a particular locale, which sounds a lot like the conservative view that the popular majority isn't always acceptable and should be checked by institutions (like constitutionally guarranteed and promised freedoms for one, or even just institutionalized precedents regarding such and those did exist at the time. They were ignored by the Supreme Court at the time which violated the Constitution, prior precedent and the Seperation of Powers to hand down Dred Scott. Sounds like a conservative complaint to me. Thanks to Mecha for finding the full Curtis dissent, I would recommend it to a friend).

Oh, but conservatism in the GOP came about because a bunch of racist Southerners hijacked the party in the 1960's, like that Ohioan name William McKinely in 1896 or that Ohioan Warren Harding in 1920 or that Massachusetts man Calvin Coolidge, who won not a single Southern state amongst them (save for TN in 1920 of course). There is something wrong with this statement, which should be obvious to anyone with objectivity, and that is basically a symbolic represenation of what you are saying. The notion that the party's just switched is one of the most blatant and stupid misrepresentations of history and is about as unnacceptable as blaming the Democrats of today for what Jackson and the boys did in 1830. Though, if I had to find a way to connect such to those unfortunate events of the past to the Democratic party of today, it wouldn't be based on nominal affiliations of a rotting corpse wearing a gray uniform (the oldiesfreak approach), but instead based on the designs regarding the critical institutions of our system and the long term risks from removing them. It would be more accurate to say that two parties with ideological diversity, subsequently went through a period of ideological polarization and thus resulted in a political realignment based on "current regional demographics", which in many cases had changed considerably over the decades. I am shocked, SHOCKED to find Irish in Massachusetts.

Conservatism in the Republican party wasn't the result of a hijacking, stupidity, that is a different story.

In fairness, I have simplified here as well, but the reason wasn't to misrepresent. It was to avoid a tl;dr post and to save hours that I don't have today. If anyone disagrees with what I said, I will be happy to defend anything posted here.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Conservatism in the Republican party wasn't the result of a hijacking, stupidity, that is a different story.

This was a very good post, but in all honesty I didn't need a history lesson and I wasn't postulating anything close to the notion that conservatism in the GOP was birthed by the Thurmonds and the Wallaces and the Byrds. I'm well aware of the backgrounds of the two parties and their generational shifts. The KKK was trying to hijack the Democrats' conventions just 40 years before those men switched parties, after all.

My point was that Republicans were happy to accomodate these men by branding themselves as the party that was less friendly to the darkies, and that's all those scumbags like Jesse Helms cared about politically. The GOP did it to strengthen the geography of the party and was wildy successful in doing so, but the Southern Strategy is still an extremely dubious stain to wear in (somewhat) recent political times. This was more relavant to bring up in race relations than anything in Oldiesfreak's potshot about the Civil War. I think the young man in the video knows exactly where his interests lie.

You did however ground the pro versus anti on civil rights in terms of ideology with Liberals being for it and Conservatives being against it, which is historically innaccurate. Only in the most simplistic of understandings regarding terms as meaning "changing something" versus "keeping something the same", would such be considered accurate. In an era of "defined" ideologies based around sets of core principles, and in which consistency is paramount, you would be hard pressed to find any reasonable conservative (even a hardcore conservative one) who would find anything other then sheer disgust at say, the Dred Scott decision, or popular sovereignty as espoused by Cass and Stephen Douglas, or even segregation. Most examples of such racist policies were the results at one point or another, of abandoning or ignoring something or even some things that Conservatives tend to uphold, in the process of making them. Many of these politicians who did this were ideological opportunists of the highest order. People who would bitch about states rights, only to create a military dictatorship and prior to that were willing to deny northerners their own state's rights with regards to being free states (When Lincoln said the House divided against itself cannot stand, they were one step away from side imposing its will on the other and it wasn't the north demanding such their way be imposed on the South, is in fact the other way around as being the only means to preserve the institution).

Oldiesfreak lacks tact and could certainly use some more depth, lest he become a caricature and thus not be taken seriously. He probably has already crossed that rubicon and thus its too late. It is such a shame to see such potential wasted. Aside from the poor recommendation of a party for Terry, most of it was just quotes of obvious facts that I would hope everyone knows and yes probably irrevelant. But it is easy to ignore historically correct but off topic stuff, as opposed to on topic but historically incorrect feedback, such as described in the first paragraph.

This man may know where his interests lie to be sure and they certainly are not in what is best for the movement, that is for sure. They seem to be about getting attention for himself and his group of kook friends in the instant news era, in a way not to disimilar to the way in which a garden variety terrorist or serial killer would gain attention for their cause by killing people. Hardly a legitimate "movement activist", and more like a self-centered act of attention whoring at the expense of the efforts of the larger movement.

The Southern Strategy is largely overrated in terms of its effect in destroying GOP vote performance amongs the African American community. Another, more accurate, analysis would be the impacts of the history (or perhaps the historical interpretations) of it on preventing a recovery. This is in my view more the result of a combination of lack of effort, combined with some really effective misinformation as well as some really intense scare tactics by the other side to preserve the current margins. It would take a multi-cycle effort to bust through and politics is done election by election tactical desicion making, as opposed to long term strategic decision making in most cases. The Southern Strategy wasn't created in 1968, in fact it goes back at least seven decades prior to that. Busing was one of the key issues used as a tacticial move to gain support from the Helms of the world, and yes it most certainly worked and for sure hurt amongst the Black community. However, it wasn't an embrace of slavery or segregation. Did Nixon even oppose the VRA or CRA? I don't beleive so. It was about being the lesser of two evils for sure, but it wasn't really that big a change for the GOP to take such a position. If anything the party of Lincoln became the party of the South by staying where it was for the most part. Success moved the issue of civil rights to left and ironically that is why the successes stopped in the late 1960's for the civil rights movement and the excesses like busing became a target, because it had moved beyond where the middle of America was willing to go at the time. A "liberal" on civil rights in the 1940's could easily find himself a "conservative" by 1970. In spite of that, Nixon still did work in other areas to push through the more traditional arenas, those which he would have been the considered a civil rights advocate for back in the 1950's, such as pushing the south to continue to desegregate. This is what Wallace meant when he claimed there wasn't a dimes worth a difference betweent the two parties, referring that both the Humphrey Democratic party and Richard Nixon's GOP were both against Segregation, and thus what he stood for. For him the lesser of two evils, was still a largely pro-civil rights party and thus he wasn't interested.

Anyway, the GOP as the more Conservative party would have been hard pressed to compete for a largely impoverished community seeing as it would tend to oppose the very programs that were topping the priority list, against a Democratic party determined to advance government as a cure for the country's social ills like it was doing in the 1960's. African Americans had already been largely economic focused since the 1934 elections when they began to switch over to the Democrats (I recommend reading about Oscar De Priest's defeat in the South Side of Chicago) and hence why the GOP would max out at onl 39% of the black of the vote and generally ranged between 25% and 39% in the 1950's. Ironically though the Southern Strategy was old by this point. In VA and some states, there had been a general surrender once the second generation kooks had taken over (The Bilbos and such who were sons of Civil War Generation) and removed what little black voting still happened, the GOP essentially surrendered and sought to be a white party. This got elevated up to the national level in 1928 as part of Hoover's campaign, however; the black vote remained loyal until the New Deal era. What destroyed the GOP amongst the black vote wasn't adherence to the southern strategy, which was primarily aimed at the southern suburbs and the outer South (The idea was to emphasize a set of issues that brought a large piece of the South into a coalition with northern white ethnics, suburbs and the Western states and thus anything that was aimed at the South, couldn't alienate the rest), as opposed to the Goldwater campaign, which was a disaster on many levels. It was certainly not an adherence to some grand plan to acheive a long term electoral majority. The two points which were decisive in destroying GOP support amongst African Americans, were points at which the plan either was irrelevant (1934 and 1936) or had been deviated from (1964). I read an article about two years ago detailing how some operatives in the Democratic party are beginning to re-examin the standard assumptions regarding the Southern Strategy (along the lines which I have described) to see if it is possible to regain some of those poor white voters. It is probably still on this site somewhere. What the strategy in 1968 did do at worst was send a single of more of the same, and it certainly didn't make up for Goldwater's sin of opposing the CRA, a law which every nominee since has supported to little effect with regards to getting back that 20%-39%.

Any effort to gain that back at the very least, will be difficult with a media that is both baised and conflict oriented and thus as Mecha pointed out, they misrepresented the reaction of the crowd. That combined with an opposition party that will do anything to maintain its base, will make any GOP efforts even more challenging in this regard and I don't know if the GOP has realized that it has to try every cycle, regardless.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

If anything, the more rural, poorer, and older Dixiecrats were the last group of Southern whites to switch to the GOP-not just at the Presidential level, but the state and local levels too.

To this day there are Democrats running unopposed in rural Texas.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://www.texastribune.org/2010/10/08/rural-white-democrats-in-republican-sights/

After the Civil War and Reconstruction Republicans were HATED in the South.  Being a Democrat is just a strong tradition down there.  But anyone that denies what happened after the signing of the Civil Rights act is deluding themselves.  That put a lot of southern Democrats in a tough position.  Some stayed Democrats and changed their views and a bunch of others slowly but surely threw in the towel and headed over to the Republicans so they could enjoy the dog whistle politics.

I think a lot of simplistic statements are made and accepted by people who have not spent much time in the South.  Anyone who is honest and spent some time down there knows the deal.

Oh I agree that the Civil Rights Act drove out a lot of racists and bigots in the South (and elsewhere...) from the Democratic Party, into the arms of the Republican Party (who, of course, did what any opportunistic party would do...). I just think that it's been way over simplified into  "the Southern Democrats bolted the party overnight, and today form the core of the GOP." That has some degree of truth, but really obscures the historical record and the nuances of what happened.

It also fails to take into account what was happening in the South prior to the CRA, the demographic changes, the existance of a GOP effort to make inroads at the Federal level as far back as 1928 on the national level and 1900 on the state level in these Southern states.

No doubt the CRA played a role in the in making a lot of people willing to vote for a "OMG The PARTY OF LINCOLN, THE DEVIL", for the first time. However, the transition of the south was certainly not overnight. Some of the very same people who voted for Goldwater, didn't vote Republican again until 1972 and even some not again until 1984. Some didn't become Republican voters regularly until 1990's and 2000's, when other social issues were more dominant. On the flip side, there were southerners voting Republican prior to 1964. FL voted for Ike, LA voted for Ike, and TX even voted for Ike. Nixon didn't win TX in 1968. And in 1956, had not Ike just used the national guard in Little Rock and signed the 1956 Civil Rights Act, not to mention being an evil "Republican" before the CRA dislodged many of those "unreconstructed Democrats"? He was helped by his War record to be sure, but the GOP was already moving into the South, and taking advantage of demographic shifts of mostly Republican northern transplants to aid the process.

As I said in a prior post, the Southern Strategy predated the 1960's and was centered building a coalition that could win a majority nationwide, not embracing something that was a loser outisde of just a few states like opposition to the CRA. In my opinion that was more of a deviation from the strategy, as opposed to an embrace of it.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

We sure got a lot of mileage out of something a dopey college kid said, huh?

It often requires someone make a fool of themselves to provide teachable moments.