[tomohawk]

The KKK is a footnote in history at this time. The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat. Obama said the eulogy at his funeral, and Hilary Clinton said he was "a friend and mentor".

The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats. In fact, the modern Senate is based on cloture, which was finally used to break the decades long delay.

Only six Senate Republicans voted against the bill in 1964, while 21 Senate Democrats opposed it. It passed by an overall vote of 73-27. In the House, 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act, passing with an overall 290-130 vote

[dragonwriter]

> The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats

Yes, and it was support by the Democratic President, the resulting alienation of Southern racists from the Democratic Party, and the exploitation of that alienation by the Republican Party that were key factors in the political realignment that moved the US from the post-New Deal Fifth Party System to the modern Sixth Party System.

[chrisco255]

This is a myth and lie. The civil rights act was passed in the 60s. Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.

Johnson was from Texas. Reagan was from California. This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus. Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.

[dragonwriter]

> This is a myth and lie.

Nope, Johnson's not support for the CRA and the Republican Southern Strategy in response are actual things that actually happened.

> Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.

And your point is...what?

> Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.

Senator Byrd left the Klan a year after joining in 1946, and spent a lot of time repudiating both his long-past Klan membership and his actions up to and during the civil rights fight in the post-CRA Democratic Party specifically because the center of mass in that Party had shifted radically after the CRA.

[chrisco255]

No, check your history. The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases. Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act? No.

You might have an argument with regards to abortion. But the civil rights act? Nope.

My point with regards to Bill Clinton should be obvious, he was a Democrat from Arkansas (the deep South). He was governor in the 80s and early 90s. Al Gore was a Senator from Tennessee. Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.

[dragonwriter]

> No, check your history.

I’m quite familiar with the history.

>The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases.

Yes, the realignment driven by Johnson's CRA position and the Republican Southern Strategy took about 3 decades to complete, with the last notable bit occurring just after the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Partisan realignments do tend to take time.

> Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act?

The proponents of a new Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the 1964 CRA (or the 1957 or 1960 acts) in the same way that the proponents of the original Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the Civil War Amendments or the CRAs of 1866, 1871, and 1875, but on subverting their intent and effect by other means.

> Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.

The 1960s-1990s realignment driven by the Johnson's shift on Civil Rights and the Republican response is not a myth. It's a real thing which really happened. It's why the people flying the Confederate battle flag today are almost excludively Republicans (if they are in one of the major parties), not Democrats, despite having the same ideology as the people that rallied under the same banner almost exclusively (insofar as they were in a major party) in the Democratic Party in the 1920s through the 1960s.

Just because (like other political realignments) it didn't happen overnight doesn't make it a myth.

[cmurf]

Presidential elections lead the transition in the parties, and you can see this as early as 1948, and clearly by 1964, directly traceable to the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater fought against the CRA, and he won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina that year.

In the 1968 election you can see the transitional effects strongly, as George Wallace won 4 of those 5 states, and the Nixon Southern Strategy succeeds by 1972 with all the southern states voting Republican. And that was the end of the Southern Democrats. 1976 is an outliar, and it's 1992 before there's a crack in the armor and Clinton wins a few southern states. And the strategy as told by Lee Atwater is hardly a myth. https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...

That there are additional reasons why southerners flipped to the Republican party, including opposition to increasingly social liberalism of Democrats, does not mean the Southern strategy is a myth. An example of myth is the "lost cause" of the confederacy, revisionist history.

[0815test]

Barry Goldwater had significant reservations about the CRA's constitutionality, that's the only reason he voted against it. And he freely let people use that vote against him, without ever trying in the slightest to make it sound like a good thing to some fraction of voters. He was sort of like the Rand Paul of his day.

[specialist]

"This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus."

The USA's two major parties had previously flipped alignment every 70 years. We're overdue.

Contemporaries conflate liberal / conservative, left / right, Democrat / Republican (nee Whig). A less wrong mental model is that parties are coalitions.

LBJ understood this and correctly predicted that CRA would result in the white supremacists switching from Democrat to Republican.

The big political science mystery now is why each party's coalition has become more homogeneous. Where a voter's position on one issue (abortion) is a very strong predictor for many other issues (climate crisis). Stated another way, the need for an explanation for why so many policy issues have become partisan issues.

PS- It is distressing that you dispute the claims of the actual players involved. If you don't trust the first hand accounts, who do you trust? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Roots_(1963%...

[undersuit]

This comment is "historically accurate" but misleading. Even though the comment they are replying to tried to clarify the situation this commenter continues to push for their agenda without heeding the facts stated.

Political Parties are not set in stone, their goals and morals can change just as easily as your own personal affiliation can change.

[tomohawk]

I'm addressing the original point, which was claiming that America (implication - in whole, or uniformly) supported Jim Crow. It did not. One party supported that, but the other did not.

I don't belong to any political party, mostly because of the point you are making, but I don't think it is fair to tar all Americans with what only some of us did. Many fought for years against it and credit is due to those who did, and shame is due to those who resisted the change.

Both main parties have moved past this, more or less, and it's great to see slavery, Jim Crow and KKK in the rear view mirror.

I do not agree that the Republican Party is somehow a racist party or that it has somehow "swapped" with the Democrat party on this.

[dragonwriter]

> The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat.

The person who was most recently a KKK member who served in Congress during or after the time of their KKK membership was a Republican at the time he served in Congress. The same is true of the most recent member of the American Nazi Party to serve in Congress. And these are the same individual, David Duke.

The most recent person to serve on Congress who had ever been a KKK member was a Democrat (Robert Byrd), but he left the Klan about 3 years before Duke was born, 5 years before Byrd first ran for Congress, 20 years before Duke joined the Klan, and 30 years before Duke was elected to Congress as a Republican.

[tomohawk]

What are you talking about? Duke was never elected to Congress. He was never even the Republican nominee for any Congressional seat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke