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0 pointsrayiner5y ago0 comments

The chronology of that association doesn’t work. Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights until the 1960s. Even then, more republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.

Even in 1976, Carter won with the traditional new deal coalition of southerners and northeast progressives. He won South Carolina by the same margin as Massachusetts. Even in 1980 against Reagan, Carter performed much closer to Reagan in the south than his overall national performance (outright winning Georgia, but coming close in most southern states).

The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.

Pinning this on Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act two decades before is one theory, but another is the industrialization of the southern economy. Southern New Deal Democrats represented agricultural states against protectionist northern industrial interests. But look at the economy of places like Georgia and Tennessee today. They’re built on low taxes and low regulation to draw companies away from high tax high regulation northern states. That started happening in the 1980s. Georgia is a really archetypal example of this: it’s probably the most openly pro-business big city in the country, and has a famously cooperative relationship between Atlanta Democratic mayors and Georgia Republican governors centered around attracting companies from places like New York: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...

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tptacek5y ago

All chronologies of the 2 major parties in the US are flawed because the parties spent the 20th century switching their positions. The exodus of southern racists from the Democratic party in the mid-century controls almost all the polarization in our politics. Reagan gets a lot of blame for being at the helm during the rise of the moral majority, but if you read Perlstein, the coalition Reagan was backed by has its roots in Goldwater's southern strategy.

It is no more reasonable to say that Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights into the 1960s (Truman integrated the military!) than it is to say that Republicans were religious conservatives. Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and Northern Republicans were New Deal economic populists.

I did the (probably pointless) exercise a few years ago of reading the GOP party platform documents from 1972 through 2012, tagging each with specific issues like "block grant benefits to states" or "oppose campaign finance restrictions". I don't believe for a moment that these documents are representative of the real party, but it's interesting that you can watch the GOP's position change so clearly over time. Into the late 1970s, the GOP was open to abortion!

The parties have held relatively coherent positions since the 1980s; I think when people talk about the roles the parties have had in US history, as opposed to specific politicians, we should probably limit ourself to the parties of Reagan and Mondale and their successors.

rayinerOP5y ago

There are broad features of the parties that haven't changed that are necessary to understand the timeline of southern realignment.

Republicans had been trying to win southern whites since the turn of the 20th century. That caused a large number of African Americans to abandon the party. They started voting overwhelmingly Democrat in 1936.

But the Democratic Party didn't support the Civil Rights Act until 1964. And the south remained solidly Democratic well into the 1980s, outside of Presidential contests. Many completely white rural southern counties voted for Carter and Clinton. What explains that timeline?

You have to look at the economics and the law. FDR's Democratic Party was recognizably modern: technocratic, and proponents of the administrative state, regulation, and economic redistribution. Southern whites stayed in this coalition because the south was poor and agrarian, and had interests averse to those of northern businesses. New Deal programs were instrumental in industrializing the southern economy: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/.... In 1930, the southeast was the poorest region, with half the national average income. By 1970, the gap had closed dramatically, to 80%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-wealth-u-s-geogra...

The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to be a small-government, anti-regulation party during this time. Goldwater tried to win the south by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on small-government grounds, and while that worked in a few deep-south states, he lost every normally Republican state except Arizona.

By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:

1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.

2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... ("However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory.").

With the illegality of de jure discrimination settled by Brown v. Board, and commercial discrimination settled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the debate shifted to addressing what we'd call today "structural racism." And on that point, the Reagan platform reflects the same limited-government Republican ideology that existed since before Hoover. And Democrats' support for government intervention and affirmative action reflected their broader 20th century ideology as well.

FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.

There is a good book that covers this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133898/th.... It gives a similar but slightly more nuanced take than Pearlstein, which I don't think is wrong, just incomplete and a bit misleading.

rayinerOP5y ago

TL;DR version

1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.

It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.

2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.

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0 pointsrayiner5y ago0 comments

The chronology of that association doesn’t work. Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights until the 1960s. Even then, more republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.

The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.

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tptacek5y ago

rayinerOP5y ago

There are broad features of the parties that haven't changed that are necessary to understand the timeline of southern realignment.

By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:

1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.

2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:

FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.

rayinerOP5y ago

TL;DR version

It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.

2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.

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