Time for a history lesson on the 2 parties

Eureka CA

Description

The op’s statement about the KKK being a Democratic organization is just flat out false. The Ku klux klan was founded in 1866 by ex-Confederate Soldiers in Tennessee, and their first leader was an ex-Confederate general. The number of Democratic and Republican politicians who have been members of the kkk throughout history is split right down the middle. Before civil rights the south was, by enlarge, Democratic. But the Southern Republicans of today would have been the Dixie Democrats pre-Civil Rights. They merely changed their party affiliation when Nixon was elected. THAT IS THE ONLY THING THAT HAS CHANGED. Those state’s core racist ideological beliefs HAVEN’T changed one iota. It was Nixon’s “southern strategy” to appeal to racist Democrats who resented the party’s liberal northern and western wings and to use racism to convert them into southern Republicans and thereby win a majority of electoral votes in the south. Democrats in the north and the west never wanted to own slaves or disenfranchise blacks. They were drawn to the party because of its strong support of labor and the working class. The Republican Party, in the wake of civil rights, decided to court Southern white voters by capitalizing on their racial fears. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater first wielded this strategy in 1964 and Richard Nixon perfected it in 1968 and 1972, turning the solidly Democratic South into a bastion of Republicanism. Furthermore, the kkk was complicit in helping Nixon do this. Just google, how the kkk helped Nixon win with his “southern strategy.” You’ll get plenty of articles on the topic. Moreover, sociological studies have found that between 1960 and 2000, counties in the south with a historically strong Klan presence, show a 3.4 percent increase in Republican voting compared to non-klan counties. Democrats depended for a century on the Southern Jim Crow states, which is why Republicans were dominant in presidential elections in the late 19th and early 20th century. That all changed with the Great Depression when Democrats aligned with poor farmers and workers to create a formidable labor-based majority under FDR (He was elected to four terms! before a 50s constitutional amendment initiated by Republicans limited presidential terms to two).  Since racism in America was pretty widespread, the Dems stayed in power through the 30s and 40s by appealing to the union working men (and they were all men) in the north while holding on to its Jim Crow white cracker vote in the south (which wasn’t hard because blacks were not allowed to vote in most southern states). By the late 50s this was getting to be a problem: trying to support progressive Demos in the north while depending on southern anti-Republican (i.e. anti-emancipation) Democrats in the south.  The 1960 ticket of John Kennedy (northern liberal) and LBJ (Texas senator) underscored this tension. (To show the difference between then and now, Kennedy won the 1960 election by 100,000 votes and paper-thin electoral state margins, but Nixon conceded the next day). After Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ, while he waged war in Vietnam, became a flaming domestic liberal: passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and creating Medicare…By 1968 Nixon was running again for President and trying out the “new” Republican “southern strategy” by which he campaigned through the south as a (wink, wink) “conservative” candidate (i.e. racist).  Despite the fact that Alabama Governor George Wallace was also running for President (and took five southern states’ electoral votes) Nixon’s point was made and by 1972 the South went almost completely Republican in Nixon's landslide whipping of liberal Demo George McGovern (who barely won two northern states!). Strom Thurmond changed his party registration from Democrat to Republican. It was a big deal. If Jimmy Carter hadn’t been governor of Georgia (and therefore took several Southern states in the 1976 election following Nixon’s impeachment), a Democrat would not have won. Sure enough, Reagan picked up Nixon’s southern strategy in 1980 by opening his presidential campaign in Jefferson, Mississippi (where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1965). He complained about “welfare queens” and “shiftless unemployed” (which everyone understood to mean black mothers and black men) and swept Carter out of office in another GOP landslide. Republicans dominated presidential elections until 1992 when Bill Clinton (another southern governor—Arkansas) broke the solid south open again. And if Ross Perot hadn’t run in that election and pulled votes from George H.W. Bush, Clinton would not have won. Really, it wasn’t until Barak Obama that the Demos successfully reassembled a coalition that could appeal to both urban voters and rural farmers impacted by the Great Recession. And if the Demos had stayed home (as they did with Hillary), the Republicans would have been guaranteed a win. However, social media has changed everything now. Rump, with his dominance of the GOP, has demonstrated what a soulless carnival barker can do if he can tweet to an audience of 66 million Americans his most foolish and stupid thoughts. They believe him because they all think they are having personal contact with a celebrity!  When Rump left the White House, I had no doubt that he would put together an entertainment and “news” operation in an attempt to sustain a high celebrity visibility via social media. If Q-Anon can succeed in this environment then anything’s possible. Were it up to me Mark Zuckerberg would be tried and shot for treason.