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0 pointsdctoedt6mo ago0 comments

> Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of course, they didn't.

Your revisionism is pretty glaring to anyone who was paying attention during the mid-1960s, as I was — my USAF dad was stationed in east Texas then, which was more deep South than Old West.

Let's just say we have very different takes on what can motivate humans, individually and in groups. At the risk of sounding condescending: I used to feel somewhat the way you seem to. My naively-rationalist and very-judgmental views evolved as the years went on. The evolution was driven largely by life experience, which drove home the brute facts of human inadequacy, irrationality, and just plain fuck-ups — principally my own, along with those of friends and loved ones — along with the pervasive role of random chance. It took quite a while to figure out how my rationalist, judgmental worldview could accommodate those brute facts (spoiler: it couldn't).

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rayiner6mo ago

Highly conscientious white people often can’t view these issues logically. They get hung up on moral outrage over racism, which has made them susceptible to the decades of emotional blackmail and misinformation peddled by the left.

Imagine a robot or alien who has no moral reaction either way to individual prejudice. Do you think they’d analyze the history and reach the same conclusion? I think the robot would realize that you’ve got a part of the country that was building its economy on deregulation and low taxes. And it was also the most religious part of the country, at a time when the defining issue globally was the atheist, communist soviet union. Of course that region shifted to the GOP.

dctoedtOP6mo ago

Certainly social- and economic considerations were factors in the southern white migration to the GOP. But it was no coincidence that Ronald Reagan gave a(n in)famous "states' rights" speech in Mississippi in his 1980 presidential campaign [0]. This followed Nixon's southern strategy [1].

Let's get back to the topic at hand [2], namely your assertion that it was Robert Bork's party — the GOP — that supposedly got the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. Yes, liberal northern Republicans such as Sen. Everett Dirksen definitely contributed — as I said.

But you appear to be implicitly memory-holing the (northern) Democrats who drove the process from the White House and the majority in both the House and the Senate: President Lyndon Johnson; Sen. Hubert Humphrey; and Rep. Emanuel Celler. The Senate cloture vote to end the southerners' 60-day (!) filibuster was 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights_speech

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45132122

[3] https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/...

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