Today, who brand themselves “Conservative” have retconned Barry Goldwater into someone who was personally above racial politics, if perhaps too idealistic to realize what his people were doing. There’s a good article over at fivethirtyeight.com that goes through the entire fraught history of the Republican Party’s descent into outright racism, and while the 1964 section doesn’t address Goldwater’s inner beliefs, it makes it clear he could not have been unaware of what his followers were doing. There was a huge public battle between Civil Rights Republicans like George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and, most notably, Edward Brookes, who would be elected as the first black Senator since Reconstruction in 1966. It is ridiculous to believe Goldwater was unaware of it.
In her book, “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” Harvard professor Leah Wright Rigueur describes the treatment of the few Black delegates at the 1964 convention, several of whom were detained by security for talking to the press about their anti-Goldwater sentiments. One man’s suit was set on fire, and another “ran sobbing from the convention floor, crying that he was sick of being abused by Goldwater supporters. ‘They call you “nigger,” push you and step on your feet,’ he muttered to reporters, wiping tears from his eyes. ‘I had to leave to keep my self-respect.’”
few months before Jackson’s speech in Washington, President Carter had introduced electoral reforms — an end to the Electoral College and same-day universal voter registration — that were met with praise from Brock, the RNC chair. But an essay that soon appeared in the conservative publication Human Events expressed an opposing view in the party. Writer Kevin Phillips said that Carter’s proposal “could blow the Republican Party sky-high” given that most of the new voters in a higher-turnout election would be Democratic.
Phillips, who worked for Nixon’s 1968 campaign, was the author of the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” which articulated a road map for the GOP to sweep up white voters. Or as a 1970 New York Times profile of the Bronx native with “a visage that looked half scholar and half black-Irishman” put it: “Political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices, a circumstance which at last favors the Republicans.”
The fateful decision in 1964 to embrace Southern racists meant that by 1970 at the latest, no new Civil Rights Republicans would be able to hold any sway in the party. It took a generation before the old guard was completely gone, but that 1964 decision irretrievably decided the GOP’s course.
The article above makes the case that the last hurrah of the moderate wing came with George W Bush. I’m skeptical but he makes an interesting case. Stuart Stevens, an adviser to Bush, now says that any outreach efforts such as those put forward by Bush would now be Republican career suicide.
Bush signed the program into law with the support of liberal icon Ted Kennedy — there’s a picture of Kennedy standing behind Bush as he puts pen to paper. Two Black children stand directly behind the president. “This is the kind of thing that the current Republican Party would present at a war crimes trial,” Stevens said of the show of bipartisanship.
MADRID (Reuters) – Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday.
Russia Offered Afghans Bounty to Kill U.S. Troops, Officials say. And the president of the United States has known about this intelligence for several months and DID NOTHING ABOUT IT!
How could any active US military support Donald Trump?
How could any retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone with an active US military in their family support Donald Trump?
How could anyone with a retired US military in their family support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who is active US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who is retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who has family that is active US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who has family that is retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could any American support Donald Trump?
@MarkedMan: On the LGM blog this morning (but posted on the 27th) is a picture of dynamic, smiling young George Wallace with podium and mic in front and Rebel battle flag behind. Caption: Alabama governor George C Wallace is shown in this Oct 19th 1964 photo speaking in Glen Burnie, Md. at a rally supporting Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater. (AP Photo).
@Sleeping Dog: Presence in Spain, many months earlier, would change things dramatically if it is confirmed, mostly in the hunt for the intermediary species. Right now, we’re operating under the presumption that the disease moved from bats to an intermediary animal in China, then made the leap to humans (I’ve noted previously that covid-19 only shares about 94% of the DNA that is in the horseshoe bat population, which means it likely jumped to animals a while ago). About a week ago, I read that mink farmers in the Netherlands had caught covid from the minks they were handling. This was confirmed through testing, and they’re trying to determine how the minks got sick first.
@Teve: I would hope researchers wouldn’t be that sloppy, but I’m interested in the peer review of this study.
One study isn’t going to be conclusive, but it just goes to show that there’s a lot we still don’t know.
An hour ago, Trump Tweeted that no one told him or Pence that Russian paid bounties to Afghans for killing U.S. soldiers. “So-called attacks on our troops,” he calls them, reported “by the FakeNews@nytimes.”
“What does the dog do when it catches the car?” asks Levin. “Turns out the dog just keeps running and barking. I had this thought in the Lafayette Square madness. Trump puts on this show. And then he gets there and has nothing to do. He’s just standing there. His whole presidency is like that.”
—————————————–
“The Republican Party is not a serious governing organization on the national level,” says Stevens, who in addition to working on Romney’s presidential campaign has worked for more than a dozen GOP gubernatorial and senatorial campaigns. “Look who they’re bringing in to testify as experts: Diamond and Silk. To me, the only thing remotely like it is the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, because the dissonance between what the party was and what it said it was was just so great.”
A couple of weeks ago we discussed Tiny’s collapsing poll numbers and whether he could recover. It is comforting knowing that Tiny is too ill disciplined to follow a course of action and that providence would provide another crisis for him to mishandle. That crisis is upon us in the form ot the Russian bounty scandal. A scandal that promises to have a long life and that hits hard at his base.
Politico had a piece this AM on Tiny’s follies, that contained this nugget that we should hope does not come true.
If Trump’s numbers against erode to 35 percentage points over the next two weeks, Nunberg added, “He’s going to be facing realistically a 400-plus electoral vote loss and the president would need to strongly reconsider whether he wants to continue to run as the Republican presidential nominee.”
@Jen: having done science many years ago and seen how the sausage is made, i never trust One single new paper about anything. Three studies, now it’s starting to look likely. Ten, and I’m getting confident. But sometimes even then it’s wrong.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m wondering why it took Trump an entire day to react. Usually when someone points out something heinous he’s done or hasn’t done, he’s all over Twitter denying it.
Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an “anonymous source” by the Fake News @nytimes. Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us…..
It’s completely fair to point out acts of racism from 1964 that relate to Barry Goldwater. Completely fair. And it should be noted that in 1964, one could find similar acts, or worse, from among the ranks of Democrats.
I feel we white people have little business throwing stones at “those other guys” when it comes to race. I think it is impossible to grow up in America and not be a little stained by the racism and hatred created by 200 years of slavery. We can do better than we are doing, and we should work on that, for sure. But we have met the enemy, and he is us.
Several Republicans on social media initially went with the whole Fake News New York Times thing, but then Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and British intelligence confirmed it.
Trump tweeted a video of his supporters at The Villages shouting white power at people. Then it was deleted. But I watched it. They’re shouting white power. And not, like, at the end of a 12 minute video that nobody watched to the end, it’s near the start of a two minute video.
@sam: I think it was Umberto Eco who wrote a brilliant dissection of all the tropes in Casablanca and why it has ended up being such a beloved film. (Either Umberto Eco or John Fowles) It’s a mythological story using present-day imagery, but in its own way it has ended up becoming universal.
It’s completely fair to point out acts of racism from 1964 that relate to Barry Goldwater. Completely fair. And it should be noted that in 1964, one could find similar acts, or worse, from among the ranks of Democrats.
In 1964? I’m sure you will find Democrats being racist as fork. We still have the Dixiecrats, for instance, and there were still pockets of racists in the Democratic Party in 2008 — look at the Pumas.
But, if you look at the direction the parties were heading, and are heading, the difference is stark.
As our Republican friends never tire of telling us, the “Democrat Party” is the party of Robert Byrd, who organized a new chapter of the Klan (and got the honestly quite awesome title of Exalted Cyclops*). But, even though they are right about that, our Republican friends miss the point — Robert Byrd rejected the Klan, likely for political reasons at first, but eventually honestly after a lifetime of struggle and growth.
——
*: Is there an overlap between the D&D community and the KKK?
Probably hadn’t heard about the Times article. There was a report yesterday that Fox was ignoring the Times piece. Probably just heard about as someone gave him a heads up. Plus every newspaper and news program in the world was buzzing about by last evening.
I feel we white people have little business throwing stones at “those other guys” when it comes to race. I think it is impossible to grow up in America and not be a little stained by the racism and hatred created by 200 years of slavery. We can do better than we are doing, and we should work on that, for sure. But we have met the enemy, and he is us.
I completely agree with that and when you add it to the perfectly normal human tendency to embrace tribalism (after all, a primary reason homosapians survived was their ability to organize in groups for protection and foraging) and you have an explanation for a lot of casual racist attitudes.
@Sleeping Dog:
Earlier today Fox had a prominently displayed piece about Bolton “blasting” Trump for denying that he was briefed. It’s still on the home page, but no longer prominently displayed.
There’s a slight possibility, I suppose, that Trump wasn’t briefed. As gVOR08 pointed out, the first thing he’d do would be to squeal to Putin.
@Jay L Gischer: The GOP was once the party of Lincoln and Grant but now it is the party of trump and King. The Democratic Party was once the party of Wilson and Byrd but now it is the party of Obama and Pelosi. It’s the different trajectories of the 2 parties and 1964 was the turning point, encapsulated by the party switch of Strom “States’ Rights” Thurmond.
Nobody is without sin, but one party is trying to do better (and is) while the other wants to do worse.
@Sleeping Dog: Even so, environmental presence several thousand miles away from and chronologically before what is supposed to be “ground zero” seems unusual to me. Then again, I never paid that much attention in biology–never held my interest.
Wuhan is where the jump from animals to humans occurred, it doesn’t mean that the same or a similar animal virus couldn’t exist in Spain or elsewhere for an indeterminate period in the past.
NYT intelligence on the Russian bounty scheme came months ago via Spec Ops and Intelligence agents in Afghanistan.
The crucial information that led the spies and commandos to focus on the bounties included the recovery of a large amount of American cash from a raid on a Taliban outpost that prompted suspicions. Interrogations of captured militants and criminals played a central role in making the intelligence community confident in its assessment that the Russians had offered and paid bounties in 2019, another official has said.
In 1964? I’m sure you will find Democrats being racist as fork. We still have the Dixiecrats, for instance, and there were still pockets of racists in the Democratic Party in 2008 — look at the Pumas.
The process was extremely gradual. Though a lot of people cite 1964 as the turning point, what first got the ball rolling was the party’s adoption of a civil-rights plank in 1948. Even after 1964 most of those Southern states continued to be strongly Democratic at the state level for decades, and candidates like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were able to draw in some of those old-fashioned racist voters. It wasn’t really until the millennium rolled around that that began to change (and yes, I think the rise of Obama was a final nail in the coffin for many of those voters).
In 2003 Howard Dean said he wanted to be the candidate of men with a Confederate flag in the back of their pickup. After his comment provoked a fair amount of outrage from other Dems, he clarified that he meant he wanted to get them to take the Confederate flag out of their pickup. It was a gaffe, but a revealing one, because at the time it was only two cycles since the Dems had managed to win several former Confederate states (albeit not by making openly pro-Confederate remarks, a point that was lost on Dean), and while support for Dems in the South really seemed to collapse in 2000, those states still seemed relatively competitive–Gore had only lost them by single digits. What happened in the coming years was that the states became super-Republican, and the need to pander to those voters withered away.
It’s interesting to me that Dems have been showing promise in some of those former Confederate bastions, but through a totally different path than the traditional one. Due to immigration from the North, Florida and Virginia have gotten a lot less culturally Southern (in the traditional sense). When Obama won NC, it was done by concentrating on the big cities and shoring up the African American vote. If you look at the 2018 near-misses by Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia (which was probably stolen), you see a similar pattern–a concentration on the metro areas, good turnout from minorities, and increasing support for Dems in the traditionally Republican suburbs. The people waving Confederate flags just aren’t as relevant as they once were. And it’s ironic that Trump, after all his pro-Confederate apologia, stands a chance of becoming the first Republican in decades to lose more than three former Confederate states.
@Jay L Gischer: Actually, looking at both major political parties in 1964 and now is a wonderful way to see how a political party can evolve from its racist roots and become the party of inclusion and diversity…sadly, it is also a wonderful way to see how another party threw away its powerful founding principles simply to scrounge up more votes and gain and hold onto political power…
In 2003 Howard Dean said he wanted to be the candidate of men with a Confederate flag in the back of their pickup. After his comment provoked a fair amount of outrage from other Dems, he clarified that he meant he wanted to get them to take the Confederate flag out of their pickup. It was a gaffe, but a revealing one, because at the time it was only two cycles since the Dems had managed to win several former Confederate states (albeit not by making openly pro-Confederate remarks, a point that was lost on Dean)
Dean started with a much better argument, and kept dropping little bits of nuance every time he told it.
It started as “even the guy with the confederate flag on the back of his pickup needs health care,” as an example of how Democrats can be competitive in the South, and that what unites us is more important than what dives us.
And then there was this, from very early in the campaign:
I want my country back! We want our country back! I am tired of being divided! I don’t want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore! I want America to look like America, where we are all included, hand in hand. We have dream. We can only reach the dream if we are all together – black and white, gay and straight, man and woman. America! The Democratic Party! We are going to win in 2004!
I loved me some Howard Dean back in the day. He turned out to be wrong about America, and whether what unites us is stronger than what divides us.
That unhinged rant was not repeated 800 times on Fox. They waited for something people wouldn’t listen to the words of, and then they played it so often they manufactured a narrative in the rest of the media.
Today, who brand themselves “Conservative” have retconned Barry Goldwater into someone who was personally above racial politics, if perhaps too idealistic to realize what his people were doing. There’s a good article over at fivethirtyeight.com that goes through the entire fraught history of the Republican Party’s descent into outright racism, and while the 1964 section doesn’t address Goldwater’s inner beliefs, it makes it clear he could not have been unaware of what his followers were doing. There was a huge public battle between Civil Rights Republicans like George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and, most notably, Edward Brookes, who would be elected as the first black Senator since Reconstruction in 1966. It is ridiculous to believe Goldwater was unaware of it.
From the article mentioned above:
The fateful decision in 1964 to embrace Southern racists meant that by 1970 at the latest, no new Civil Rights Republicans would be able to hold any sway in the party. It took a generation before the old guard was completely gone, but that 1964 decision irretrievably decided the GOP’s course.
The article above makes the case that the last hurrah of the moderate wing came with George W Bush. I’m skeptical but he makes an interesting case. Stuart Stevens, an adviser to Bush, now says that any outreach efforts such as those put forward by Bush would now be Republican career suicide.
@MarkedMan: Interesting.
Well, this is curious.
Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows
@Jen:
Since Covid-19 emanated from animals, environmental presence shouldn’t be too surprising.
Everyone has their favorite quote from Casablanca –
Nice twitter thread on the greatest piece of improv in movie history.
@Jen: likely contaminated samples or something. I don’t trust it without further evidence.
Russia Offered Afghans Bounty to Kill U.S. Troops, Officials say. And the president of the United States has known about this intelligence for several months and DID NOTHING ABOUT IT!
How could any active US military support Donald Trump?
How could any retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone with an active US military in their family support Donald Trump?
How could anyone with a retired US military in their family support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who is active US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who is retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who has family that is active US military support Donald Trump?
How could anyone who knows someone who has family that is retired US military support Donald Trump?
How could any American support Donald Trump?
@MarkedMan: On the LGM blog this morning (but posted on the 27th) is a picture of dynamic, smiling young George Wallace with podium and mic in front and Rebel battle flag behind. Caption: Alabama governor George C Wallace is shown in this Oct 19th 1964 photo speaking in Glen Burnie, Md. at a rally supporting Republican presidential candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater. (AP Photo).
Because states’ rights.
@senyordave: Otherwise the NOT-ME’s win!
@Sleeping Dog: Presence in Spain, many months earlier, would change things dramatically if it is confirmed, mostly in the hunt for the intermediary species. Right now, we’re operating under the presumption that the disease moved from bats to an intermediary animal in China, then made the leap to humans (I’ve noted previously that covid-19 only shares about 94% of the DNA that is in the horseshoe bat population, which means it likely jumped to animals a while ago). About a week ago, I read that mink farmers in the Netherlands had caught covid from the minks they were handling. This was confirmed through testing, and they’re trying to determine how the minks got sick first.
@Teve: I would hope researchers wouldn’t be that sloppy, but I’m interested in the peer review of this study.
One study isn’t going to be conclusive, but it just goes to show that there’s a lot we still don’t know.
An hour ago, Trump Tweeted that no one told him or Pence that Russian paid bounties to Afghans for killing U.S. soldiers. “So-called attacks on our troops,” he calls them, reported “by the FakeNews@nytimes.”
@CSK: If they didn’t tell Trump it would be for reasons hardly flattering to Trump. Like fear he’d tell Putin the source.
Trump’s reality TV presidency is being crushed by reality
A couple of weeks ago we discussed Tiny’s collapsing poll numbers and whether he could recover. It is comforting knowing that Tiny is too ill disciplined to follow a course of action and that providence would provide another crisis for him to mishandle. That crisis is upon us in the form ot the Russian bounty scandal. A scandal that promises to have a long life and that hits hard at his base.
Politico had a piece this AM on Tiny’s follies, that contained this nugget that we should hope does not come true.
Run Donald run, we need you to be the nominee.
@gVOR08:
I know. There is no favorable spin Trump can put on this.
@CSK:
You heard it hear first.
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/trump-ignores-russian-bounties-on-american-troops/#comment-2523849
Another day ending in Y and another accusation of fake news.
@Jen: having done science many years ago and seen how the sausage is made, i never trust One single new paper about anything. Three studies, now it’s starting to look likely. Ten, and I’m getting confident. But sometimes even then it’s wrong.
@CSK: called it! Well, I said he was going to call it fake news from the deep state.
@Sleeping Dog:
I’m wondering why it took Trump an entire day to react. Usually when someone points out something heinous he’s done or hasn’t done, he’s all over Twitter denying it.
You know, they might’ve told Trump, but he was zoned out thinking about Ivanka’s jugs.
(His word, not mine)
@CSK: They had to assemble the team to figure out the least damaging lie.
@CSK: holy cow.
@CSK: He was busy golfing.
It’s completely fair to point out acts of racism from 1964 that relate to Barry Goldwater. Completely fair. And it should be noted that in 1964, one could find similar acts, or worse, from among the ranks of Democrats.
I feel we white people have little business throwing stones at “those other guys” when it comes to race. I think it is impossible to grow up in America and not be a little stained by the racism and hatred created by 200 years of slavery. We can do better than we are doing, and we should work on that, for sure. But we have met the enemy, and he is us.
Several Republicans on social media initially went with the whole Fake News New York Times thing, but then Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and British intelligence confirmed it.
project lincoln new ad
Trump tweeted a video of his supporters at The Villages shouting white power at people. Then it was deleted. But I watched it. They’re shouting white power. And not, like, at the end of a 12 minute video that nobody watched to the end, it’s near the start of a two minute video.
@OzarkHillbilly:
In fact he was, wasn’t he?
@Teve:
As far as Cult45 over at Lucianne.com is concerned, this episode never happened. They can’t even bring themselves to deny it.
@Teve:
Sounds like Charlottesville, doesn’t it?
@CSK: it’s almost like trump’s a racist or something. Weird. Never suspected that before.
@sam: I think it was Umberto Eco who wrote a brilliant dissection of all the tropes in Casablanca and why it has ended up being such a beloved film. (Either Umberto Eco or John Fowles) It’s a mythological story using present-day imagery, but in its own way it has ended up becoming universal.
@Jay L Gischer:
In 1964? I’m sure you will find Democrats being racist as fork. We still have the Dixiecrats, for instance, and there were still pockets of racists in the Democratic Party in 2008 — look at the Pumas.
But, if you look at the direction the parties were heading, and are heading, the difference is stark.
As our Republican friends never tire of telling us, the “Democrat Party” is the party of Robert Byrd, who organized a new chapter of the Klan (and got the honestly quite awesome title of Exalted Cyclops*). But, even though they are right about that, our Republican friends miss the point — Robert Byrd rejected the Klan, likely for political reasons at first, but eventually honestly after a lifetime of struggle and growth.
——
*: Is there an overlap between the D&D community and the KKK?
@CSK:
Probably hadn’t heard about the Times article. There was a report yesterday that Fox was ignoring the Times piece. Probably just heard about as someone gave him a heads up. Plus every newspaper and news program in the world was buzzing about by last evening.
Come to think of it he probably saw this Lincoln Project video https://youtu.be/kiDkTOKI7Ro
@Jay L Gischer:
I completely agree with that and when you add it to the perfectly normal human tendency to embrace tribalism (after all, a primary reason homosapians survived was their ability to organize in groups for protection and foraging) and you have an explanation for a lot of casual racist attitudes.
@Jay L Gischer: I think the goal was to explore the trajectory, i.e., how did the Republican party go from the party of civil rights to the opposite?
@Sleeping Dog:
Earlier today Fox had a prominently displayed piece about Bolton “blasting” Trump for denying that he was briefed. It’s still on the home page, but no longer prominently displayed.
There’s a slight possibility, I suppose, that Trump wasn’t briefed. As gVOR08 pointed out, the first thing he’d do would be to squeal to Putin.
@Jay L Gischer: The GOP was once the party of Lincoln and Grant but now it is the party of trump and King. The Democratic Party was once the party of Wilson and Byrd but now it is the party of Obama and Pelosi. It’s the different trajectories of the 2 parties and 1964 was the turning point, encapsulated by the party switch of Strom “States’ Rights” Thurmond.
Nobody is without sin, but one party is trying to do better (and is) while the other wants to do worse.
@sam: I can’t believe nobody brought up, “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”
followed immediately by the even better,
“Your winnings, Sir.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
@Sleeping Dog: Even so, environmental presence several thousand miles away from and chronologically before what is supposed to be “ground zero” seems unusual to me. Then again, I never paid that much attention in biology–never held my interest.
ETA: @Teve: Okay, that makes some sense.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Wuhan is where the jump from animals to humans occurred, it doesn’t mean that the same or a similar animal virus couldn’t exist in Spain or elsewhere for an indeterminate period in the past.
But I’m not a virologist either.
NYT intelligence on the Russian bounty scheme came months ago via Spec Ops and Intelligence agents in Afghanistan.
@Gustopher:
The process was extremely gradual. Though a lot of people cite 1964 as the turning point, what first got the ball rolling was the party’s adoption of a civil-rights plank in 1948. Even after 1964 most of those Southern states continued to be strongly Democratic at the state level for decades, and candidates like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were able to draw in some of those old-fashioned racist voters. It wasn’t really until the millennium rolled around that that began to change (and yes, I think the rise of Obama was a final nail in the coffin for many of those voters).
In 2003 Howard Dean said he wanted to be the candidate of men with a Confederate flag in the back of their pickup. After his comment provoked a fair amount of outrage from other Dems, he clarified that he meant he wanted to get them to take the Confederate flag out of their pickup. It was a gaffe, but a revealing one, because at the time it was only two cycles since the Dems had managed to win several former Confederate states (albeit not by making openly pro-Confederate remarks, a point that was lost on Dean), and while support for Dems in the South really seemed to collapse in 2000, those states still seemed relatively competitive–Gore had only lost them by single digits. What happened in the coming years was that the states became super-Republican, and the need to pander to those voters withered away.
It’s interesting to me that Dems have been showing promise in some of those former Confederate bastions, but through a totally different path than the traditional one. Due to immigration from the North, Florida and Virginia have gotten a lot less culturally Southern (in the traditional sense). When Obama won NC, it was done by concentrating on the big cities and shoring up the African American vote. If you look at the 2018 near-misses by Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia (which was probably stolen), you see a similar pattern–a concentration on the metro areas, good turnout from minorities, and increasing support for Dems in the traditionally Republican suburbs. The people waving Confederate flags just aren’t as relevant as they once were. And it’s ironic that Trump, after all his pro-Confederate apologia, stands a chance of becoming the first Republican in decades to lose more than three former Confederate states.
@Kylopod: Really interesting. I knew that by 1964 Republican strategists saw an opening but I never really thought about why that opening was there.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Reinhold Niebuhr
@OzarkHillbilly: Did you notice the ad in that thread? Wow!
If you’re going to act like a traitor you don’t get to thank us for our service.
@Jay L Gischer: Actually, looking at both major political parties in 1964 and now is a wonderful way to see how a political party can evolve from its racist roots and become the party of inclusion and diversity…sadly, it is also a wonderful way to see how another party threw away its powerful founding principles simply to scrounge up more votes and gain and hold onto political power…
@An Interested Party: Good ad.
@Kylopod:
Dean started with a much better argument, and kept dropping little bits of nuance every time he told it.
It started as “even the guy with the confederate flag on the back of his pickup needs health care,” as an example of how Democrats can be competitive in the South, and that what unites us is more important than what dives us.
And then there was this, from very early in the campaign:
I loved me some Howard Dean back in the day. He turned out to be wrong about America, and whether what unites us is stronger than what divides us.
That unhinged rant was not repeated 800 times on Fox. They waited for something people wouldn’t listen to the words of, and then they played it so often they manufactured a narrative in the rest of the media.