Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
A big part of the South's rejection of the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party is ran by guys in the North who actually say and think shit like this. It is insulting.
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Hank: you're not making any sense.
First of all, I was using the past tense. We're talking about the 60s here, Hank, stretching into the 80s. I grew up in the South. I live in the South. I have taken classes on the South. I have researched and written multiple papers on voting patterns in the South.
When I say the problem was that the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, I do not mean to imply (although I suppose one could infer) that now the Republican party is full of racists. I mean that people were Democrats because of tradition and inertia.
Up until the late sixties, and really until the early 80s, people in the South were Democrats because if you wanted to win an election, you were a Democrat.
This lead to an odd discomfort within the Democratic party: an increasingly large portion of the Democratic party was seriously out of step with the national Democratic platform, and was feeling increasingly alienated from the national party. Finally, something snapped, and people decided to switch to the party that best represented their political beliefs (if not there best interests), no matter whether granddad was spinning in his grave or not.
When Phil Gramm became a Republican, it wasn't because he suddenly found God. Or supply side economics. It was Reagan's magnetism, and his electoral success in Southern states, that finally allowed Southern conservatives to align with the party that was the best fit.
And of course, it was not universal that Democrats from the South were conservative. LBJ created the War on Poverty and pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So it wasn't the Yankee liberals the Southerners were rebelling against; it was one of their own.
