@Suzianne said
This has been well-known in American History for decades now.
As well as discussed in this very forum every time you bring this up.
Where you been?
@Earl-of-Trumps said
only in your lying mind, suzianne. or show me:
Show me a group that the Repubs started that was as vicious and murderous as the Ku Klux Klan. SHOW ME
Show me a whole host of disgusting discrimination laws like Jim Crow Laws:
The Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation in the United States. These laws existed for about 100 years, from the post-Civil War era until 1968. Named after a Black minstrel show character, Jim Crow laws aimed to marginalize African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or access other opportunities. Violators faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and even death1. These laws enforced segregation in various aspects of life, including schools, public transportation, restaurants, and public facilities. For instance, in the Jim Crow South, it was illegal for Black Americans to ride in the front of public buses, eat at “whites only” restaurants, or attend “white” public schools2. The term “Jim Crow” itself became synonymous with racial discrimination and inequality. These laws remained in force until 1968.
Learn more
1
history.com
2
khanacademy.org
3
en.wikipedia.org
4
history.com
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And one of the biggest - Separate but Equal.
Now, can you show us where Republicans passed such harmful laws??
The dirt's all on you., Suzie
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I'm not going to sit here and defend the Southern Democrats. They were conservatives. This cannot be argued. By the time Reagan was elected (he won the South), the transition of the Republican Party to conservatism was complete. Oh, it was halfway there by 1928, when Hoover was elected and he immediately stripped banking restrictions and after 6 months of partying and spending money, the banks failed and thrust the World into the Great Depression.
You asked me for proof of something I am not going to defend. The botched Reconstruction after the Civil War (as well as the very reason for the Civil War, slavery) and the creation of the KKK and Jim Crow laws are all on the Southern Democrats. Conservative Southern Democrats.
Give this a read. I know it is long, but this will explain the actual transition better than I can. It reached its peak after 1933 with Southern Democrats leaving the Democratic Party in protest to FDR's New Deal, and by the time Reagan was elected in 1980, most of the Southern Democrats (White Democrats) had left that sinking ship for the Republican Party. Many left in 1948 after Truman started his policies of desegregation. Another major shift took place after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was anathema to most of the Southern Democrats who were left in the party. They couldn't take it anymore (more rights and voting power for Blacks), so they left, en masse, for the Republican Party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats
1933-1981
During the 1930s, as the New Deal began to move Democrats as a whole to the left in economic policy, Southern Democrats were mostly supportive, although by the late 1930s there was a growing conservative faction. Both factions supported Roosevelt's foreign policies. By 1948 the protection of segregation led Democrats in the Deep South to reject Truman and run a third party ticket of Dixiecrats in the 1948 election. After 1964, Southern Democrats lost major battles during the Civil Rights Movement. Federal laws ended segregation and restrictions on black voters.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats in the South initially still voted loyally with their party. After the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the old argument that all Whites had to stick together to prevent civil rights legislation lost its force because the legislation had now been passed. More and more Whites began to vote Republican, especially in the suburbs and growing cities. Newcomers from the North were mostly Republican; they were now joined by conservatives and wealthy Southern Whites, while liberal Whites and poor Whites, especially in rural areas, remained with the Democratic Party.
The New Deal program of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) generally united the party factions for over three decades, since Southerners, like Northern urban populations, were hit particularly hard and generally benefited from the massive governmental relief program. FDR was adept at holding White Southerners in the coalition while simultaneously beginning the erosion of Black voters away from their then-characteristic Republican preferences. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s catalyzed the end of this Democratic Party coalition of interests by magnetizing Black voters to the Democratic label and simultaneously ending White supremacist control of the Democratic Party apparatus. A series of court decisions, rendering primary elections as public instead of private events administered by the parties, essentially freed the Southern region to change more toward the two-party behavior of most of the rest of the nation.
In the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 Republican nominee Dwight D. Eisenhower, a popular World War II general, won several Southern states, thus breaking some White Southerners away from their Democratic Party pattern. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a significant event in converting the Deep South to the Republican Party; in that year most Senatorial Republicans supported the Act (most of the opposition came from Southern Democrats). From the end of the Civil War to 1961 Democrats had solid control over the southern states on the national level, hence the term "Solid South" to describe the states' Democratic preference. After the passage of this Act, however, their willingness to support Republicans on a national level increased demonstrably. In 1964, Republican presidential nominee Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, won many of the "Solid South" states over Democratic presidential nominee Lyndon B. Johnson, himself a Texan, and with many this Republican support continued and seeped down the ballot to congressional, state, and ultimately local levels. A further significant item of legislation was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which targeted for preclearance by the U.S. Department of Justice any election-law change in areas where African-American voting participation was lower than the norm (most but not all of these areas were in the South); the effect of the Voting Rights Act on southern elections was profound, including the by-product that some White Southerners perceived it as meddling while Black voters universally appreciated it. Nixon aid Kevin Phillips told the New York Times in 1970 that "Negrophobe" Whites would quit the Democrats if Republicans enforced the Voting Rights Act and blacks registered as Democrats. The trend toward acceptance of Republican identification among Southern White voters was bolstered in the next two elections by Richard Nixon.
Denouncing the forced busing policy that was used to enforce school desegregation, Richard Nixon courted populist conservative Southern Whites with what is called the Southern Strategy, though his speechwriter Jeffrey Hart claimed that his campaign rhetoric was actually a "Border State Strategy" and accused the press of being "very lazy" when they called it a "Southern Strategy". In the 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, the power of the federal government to enforce forced busing was strengthened when the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts had the discretion to include busing as a desegregation tool to achieve racial balance. Some southern Democrats became Republicans at the national level, while remaining with their old party in state and local politics throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Several prominent conservative Democrats switched parties to become Republicans, including Strom Thurmond, John Connally and Mills E. Godwin Jr. In the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, however, the ability to use forced busing as a political tactic was greatly diminished when the U.S. Supreme Court placed an important limitation on Swann and ruled that students could only be bused across district lines if evidence of de jure segregation across multiple school districts existed.
In 1976, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter won every Southern state except Oklahoma and Virginia in his successful presidential campaign as a Democrat, being the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of the states in the South as of 2024. In 1980 Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan won every southern state except for Georgia, although Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee were all decided by less than 3%.
(Continued in Part 2)
1981–2008
In 1980, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan announced that he supported "states' rights." Lee Atwater, who served as Reagan's chief strategist in the Southern states, claimed that by 1968, a vast majority of southern Whites had learned to accept that racial slurs like "{expurgated by RHP: (the N-word here)]" were offensive and that mentioning "states rights" and reasons for its justification, along with fiscal conservatism and opposition to social programs understood by many White southerners to disproportionally benefit Black Americans, had now become the best way to appeal to southern White voters. Following Reagan's success at the national level, the Republican Party moved sharply to the New Right, with the shrinkage of the "Eastern Establishment" Rockefeller Republican element that had emphasized their support for civil rights.
Economic and cultural conservatism (especially regarding abortion and LGBT rights) became more important in the South, with its large religious right element, such as Southern Baptists in the Bible Belt. The South gradually became fertile ground for the Republican Party. Following the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the large Black vote in the South held steady but overwhelmingly favored the Democratic Party. Even as the Democratic party came to increasingly depend on the support of African-American voters in the South, well-established White Democratic incumbents still held sway in most Southern states for decades. Starting in 1964, although the Southern states split their support between parties in most presidential elections, conservative Democrats controlled nearly every Southern state legislature until the mid-1990s. On the eve of the Republican Revolution in 1994, Democrats still held a 2:1 advantage over the Republicans in southern congressional seats. Only in 2011 did the Republicans capture a majority of Southern state legislatures, and have continued to hold power over Southern politics for the most part since.
Many of the Representatives, Senators, and voters who were referred to as Reagan Democrats in the 1980s were conservative Southern Democrats. But there were notable remnants of the Solid South into the early 21st century.
One example was Arkansas, whose state legislature continued to be majority Democrat (having, however, given its electoral votes to the Republicans in the past three presidential elections, except in 1992 and 1996 when "favorite son" Bill Clinton was the candidate and won each time) until 2012, when Arkansas voters selected a 21–14 Republican majority in the Arkansas Senate.
Another example was North Carolina. Although the state has voted for Republicans in every presidential election since 1980 except for 2008, the State legislature was in Democratic control until 2010. The North Carolina congressional delegation was heavily Democratic until January 2013 when the Republicans could, after the 2010 United States census, adopt a redistricting plan of their choosing.
In 1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton was elected president. Unlike Carter, however, Clinton was only able to win the southern states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. While running for president, Clinton promised to "end welfare as we have come to know it" while in office. In 1996, Clinton would fulfill his campaign promise and the longtime Republican goal of major welfare reform came into fruition. After two welfare reform bills sponsored by the Republican-controlled Congress were successfully vetoed by the President, a compromise was eventually reached and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was signed into law on August 22, 1996.
During the Clinton administration, the southern strategy shifted towards the so-called "culture war," which saw major political battles between the Religious Right and the secular Left. Chapman notes a split vote among many conservative Southern Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s who supported local and statewide conservative Democrats while simultaneously voting for Republican presidential candidates. This tendency of many Southern Whites to vote for the Republican presidential candidate but Democrats from other offices lasted until the 2010 midterm elections. In the November 2008 elections, Democrats won 3 out of 4 U.S. House seats from Mississippi, 3 out of 4 in Arkansas, 5 out of 9 in Tennessee, and achieved near parity in the Georgia and Alabama delegations.
Republicans first dominated presidential elections in the South, then won a majority of Southern gubernatorial and congressional elections after the 1994 Republican Revolution, and finally came to control a majority of Southern state legislatures by the 2010s.
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I hope this clears things up for you, Earl.
The conservative Southern Democrats (who came to be known as White Democrats) were from a conservative party. The shift from conservative to liberal marks the Democrat Party into today. Lincoln's Republican Party was basically a liberal party, concerned with freedom for all, and especially the oppressed black population after the Civil War.
Since then, nature has taken its course and moved the Democrats left and the Republicans to the right. The Republican Party of today more closely resembles the Southern Democrats of the past, far, far more than the Democratic Party of today.
So, as I keep telling you, your seeming hatred of Democrats should be aimed towards those who are responsible for those things you hate: the current Republican Party. Republicans today are the spiritual successors of the Southern White Democrats who did, and continue to, make life ridiculously hard for non-white Americans across the board.
One marker for the conservative mindset is "states' rights". The Republicans are totally on board with this concept. So were the Southern Democrats who wanted to continue slavery and so seceded and started the Civil War.
Your support of the Republican Party is tantamount to supporting the Southern Democrats you claim to hate. Ideologically, they are so similar as to be brothers.
This is why your ranting and raving about Democrats gains no traction in this forum. Today's Democrats are NOT the Southern Democrats of old. Those are now Republicans.