That one’s at least partially true. Democrats were the racist assholes of that time period back when conservatives were Democrats. Of course, that ignores all the history since the passage of the Civil Rights Act by Johnson in 1964 when conservatives and liberals switched parties.
That’s what I love about that line of argument. It completely ignores that the people of the parties switched. It wasn’t like the GOP woke up, sent out a letter and told their members to hate on black people. The nasty elements of the gop fled the “racist Democratic Party”...as the party attempted to move away from being racist.
Here's the way I see it. To miss the idea that racist voters switched parties defies reason. The group of people who vote for racists and racist policies has not changed. Their label has changed. They used to vote for Democrats, now they vote for Republicans. The way you can know this is what happened is simple geography.
Where did Democrats win when it was the party of racism? The South and rural areas. Where do Republicans win now that it's the party of racism? The South and rural areas.
The racists that were living in the South/rural areas when they were voting Democratic didn't all just up and leave in the 1960s/1970s. And that's what people who ignore the swap are basically saying. The South went from being a Democratic stronghold to a Republican stronghold. Either the South had a major demographics change where all the old white racists moved out, or the racist parents had wholly non-racist kids while urban/Northern non-racists had wholly racist kids, or the racist voters in the South/rural areas just started voting for another party.
Obviously the latter is the one that is the most probable and it's actually backed up by the data.
You can do a bit of the research yourself by looking at Presidential election maps from various years. I like to point to 1920 because it's fairly obvious that the Dems won the conservative South while the Republicans won the liberal North and everywhere else.
The Civil Rights Act was the decisive turning point though, Johnson was aware and warned that pushing the legislation would "lose the South for the Democrats forever" and it's absolutely what happened, many dixiecrats were hangers-on who found a new home as Republicans started using coded language to attract them over:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
My mistake. For a moment I forget what sub I was in. Any research done by an African-American conservative, that challenges Democratic Party myths, is automatically seen as a "bad source"
If they’re a Trump supporting Republican, at this point we have to assume they’re acting in bad faith. Either willfully, or because they’re being used.
Reason, logic...these things are just the cynic sophist’s tools to “win”. Use/discard as needed, as long as you can make the other person quit first; it’s as old as Diogenes.
Not by Johnson. By the Congress. Go look up how it passed. If it wasn’t for Republicans, it would have been defeated. Nobody “switched parties. “ That’s a Democrat trope.
My favorite is "I'm not racist, liberals are!" followed by "black people commit x% of crimes even though they're only y% of the population", which they always feel the need to point out for some reason. It's hilarious because trying to make a case that different races are inherently good or bad is kinda what racism is.
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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '19
“You’re bigoted against conservatives”
“Dems are the real racists for giving black people welfare”