“The black civil rights issue was the last one liberals were unequivocally on the right side of morality and history and (most) conservatives were unfortunately on the wrong side of both.”
I may be misreading your statement, so I’ll apologize in advance if I am misreading it. That said, you are completely incorrect to state that democrats were on the right side of the racism issue. They were not. They were the Jim Crow folks, they were the lynchers and they were to segregationists. The Repbulicans fought them to a final victory, then the Dems began the process of taking credit for what they were completely against...
I’m sorry, but your comment is not accurate history.
For one thing, I never mentioned Democrats or Republicans. I said liberals and conservatives. Prior to the 1970s, neither party was exclusively one or the other. Both were national coalitions of regional parties that included both liberal and conservative branches.
You can call the Jim Crow boys many things, (and I’m happy to join you in doing so), but you can’t call them liberals, neither in the original classical liberal sense or in the modern leftist/socialist sense. They were conservatives, even reactionaries, although in my opinion a variant of conservatism that deviated so widely from the American conservative mainstream as to have a whole lot more in common with fascism and Nazism.
You are quite correct that those oppressing blacks were Democrats. But then so were almost all those leading the fight against them. The GOP pretty much sat on the sidelines.
While it is a truism that more GOP than Democrat congressmen voted for the Civil Rights Act, it is also irrelevant. On the ground few if any mainstream conservatives were leaders in the fight for civil rights. This was left up largely to Democratic liberals, leftists and even communists. For instance, I think you would have to search long and hard to find influential conservatives who participate in the various marches in the South.
Most conservatives, such as Goldwater and WF Buckley, saw the civil rights issue as a local or states’ rights issue, rather than a national constitutional one. The fight against Communism was much more important to them than the fight for equal rights for all Americans. While this opinion was defensible and understandable, I believe it was utterly and disastrously wrong, and later in life both of these gentlemen agreed.
The problem is that liberals gained enormous moral capital by being on the right side of this issue, and conservatives acquired an equivalently-sized moral deficit. For 50 years now the major rhetorical tool of liberalism has been to wave the bloody shirt of civil rights, and it has worked beautifully. (Though the shirt is getting a little ragged.)
I believe conservatives should have led, or at least participate enthusiastically in the fight for civil rights, rather than considering it an unimportant side issue. Conservatives today, and the country as a whole, IMO, continues to pay the price of their failure of vision in the 50s and 60s.