RandFan,
Hi! I'm glad you and kimiko were able to talk out some of your disagreements. It's always enjoyable to watch a pair of reasonable people dispelling smoke rather than blowing it.
I don't want to re-kindle the fire here, but I would like at some point to start a separate thread to respond to the following:
Originally posted by RandFan
You are compressing history to suit your thesis. Republicans for decades were strong supporters of civil rights. The Democrats advocated segregation.
I think you are doing the same here of which you accuse kimiko. It is true that
in the 19th century Republicans were strong supporters of civil rights and Democrats were not. But in the 20th century that has not been the case.
The division in the 20th century over civil rights was not
Democrat/Republican but
liberal/conservative. The liberal
movement supported the civil rights movement and the conservative
movement opposed it.
I qualified that statement with the word
movement, because obviously it is possible to find
individual conservatives who broke ranks to support the civil rights movement and
individual liberals who broke ranks to oppose the civil rights movement. But on the whole it was liberals who supported the civil rights movement, conservatives who opposed it, and a coalition of liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans who fought together to win passage of civil rights legislation -- legislation which was vigorously opposed by a coalition of conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans.
One thing that has changed significantly in the past few decades is that the parties are not nearly as diverse as they used to be. Today the term
liberal Republican may sound to many people like an oxymoron. But there used to be a lot of them around, and the term was commonly used to describe them. If you check the list of Republicans who sided with Democrats in the struggle to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, I think you will see that it was
liberal Republicans (who have since been largely purged from the party) who supported and helped pass this legislation, just as if you check the list of Democrats who voted against such legislation you will see it was mainly the
conservative Democrats (who have since then largely converted to Republicans) who opposed it.
There were liberals and conservatives in
both political parties in the middle 20th century, but the Democrats (especially outside the South) were generally the more liberal party and the Republicans were generally the more conservative party. Blacks supported the Democratic Party because the party was working
toward the promotion of racial equality (even though not all its members agreed with that direction) and the Republican party was working
against the promotion of racial equality (even though not all of its members agreed with that direction). Yes, it was a Republican (Earl Warren) who presided over the court that handed down
Brown Vs Board of Education -- and conservatives howled about it for the next decade. Yes, it was a Republican who ordered federal troops to Arkansas to enforce the integration of schools -- but that, too, was denounced by conservatives. In both cases, conservatives of the time felt angry and betrayed because it was the kind of action they expected from Democrats.
I am over-extended at the moment, and am about to be away from the forum for several days, but what I would like to do at some point (perhaps around mid-March?) is start a thread
The Conservative Record On Civil Rights to examine the record and discuss this issue. Wm. F. Buckley's
National Review began publication in 1955, and is widely respected as a voice of the conservative movement, so what I suggest is that we go through
NR slowly, year by year, from 1955 to 1965, examining the stands their writers took on civil rights issues (including, but not limited to, passage of the civil rights laws). What did
NR have to say about
Brown? About Eisenhower sending troops to Arkansas? About the Birmingham bus boycott? About Martin Luther King and other civil rights advocates? About the White Citizens Council and other segregationist groups? Lunch counter sit-ins? The assaults on and murders of civil rights workers? Who did
NR believe was working for the passage of civil rights legislation? Against? And what was
NR's stand on the legislation itself?
The discussion need not be limited to
National Review, but I am suggesting that as a focus because it is widely available (in bound volume or microfilm) at many libraries, and it is considered a voice of mainstream conservativism. But I'm open to people using
Human Events,
American Opinion, or other right-of-center journals if others would prefer to refer to these.
Would you (or others) be interested in such a discussion? If so, is March 20th or thereabouts an agreeable time to start such a thread? (I would like to catch up on other commitments before getting too involved in a new project, plus I would like to allow time for you or others to look up what
NR said back in those days. I have a head start, and already know much of what is to be found in
NR's pages for those years.)
[NOTE: If you (or others) are interested, we could also have a parallel thread,
The Liberal Record On Civil Rights, to avoid letting jabs about liberals divert or derail a discussion of the conservative record. If we do a discussion of the liberal record, I suggest using
The Nation in the liberal thread in a similar fashion to how I have proposed using
National Review in the conservative one.]
