Posted on 09/17/2007 2:35:27 PM PDT by Delacon
fair enough post X
“I beg to differ. It plays almost as much as one’s race does on this particular subject.”
WD, is libertarianism a regional thing? Y’all have a load of them in your corner. AND if some fool blue states try to leave the union like they threatened to do back in 04, well I sure as hell will take up arms against them. Pay back. ;)
Yep! It’s not by accident, for sure.
#####We are mostly whites for GOP now because we are more socially conservative and the Dems left us.#####
Yes. The only thing I’d add is that the South also switched to the GOP over national security issues when the anti-war crowd took over the Democrat Party at the same time as the social issues radicals. First, the South began voting Republican in presidential races, but continued voting for Democrats for Senate & House as long as they were conservatives (Eastland, Stennis, Allen, Russell, Byrd, Ervin, McClellan, etc.). In the House, there were a lot of conservative southern Democrats well up into the seventies and even eighties. When Newt Gingrich was elected to the House in 1976, he was the only Republican in the ten member delegation, but the nine Dems were all conservatives except for Andrew Young, the black congressman from Atlanta. The Democrats included guys like Larry McDonald, Dawson Mathis, Jack Brinkley, and others who were as conservative as any Republican. Even today there are a few conservative Dems from the South, such as Congressman Davis from here in Tennessee.
Of course, over time, as more southern whites switched to the GOP, the Democrat nominees became more liberal, relying on the black vote or Yankee Dems who have moved South to win nominations. The result has been the election of more and more Republicans to the U.S. Senate & House from the South.
This doesn’t mean that a liberal doesn’t sneak in on occasion. I just missed being able to vote in the 1976 election (turned 18 a month later) and I still remember Jim Sasser winning the Tennessee senate race by claiming that Washington was out of touch with our state’s conservative values. He was elected and turned out to be a liberal. His practice was to vote liberal for five years, turn conservative as re-election approached, then go back to being a liberal after winning again. He successfully pulled that off twice before the voters ousted him in 1994.
And as we’re often reminded in these threads, the South produced Jimmy Carter & Slick Willie. But the reason the last three Dem presidents have been from Dixie is because it takes an exceptionally skilled lying liberal to win down here. Liberals win with ease in much of the North, but down here only the most devious con artists can pull it off. Their skill at conning the voters makes them formidable in the general election for president.
Northerners moving south have caused much of Florida, Northern Virginia, and the Raleigh-Durham area to become as leftish as New England in recent years. If the South is lost to the left, even in part, it’ll be all over for this country because Indiana and the small population states in the Heartland/Rockies area can’t electorally compete with the population centers in the North and in California (already lost thanks to the 1965 Immigration Bill - Thank you Senators Kennedy & Dirksen).
Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy was a good book and movie(surprise). Grishams “Time to Kill” was his best book IMHO and a good movie. “The Chamber” otoh was a travesty. I stopped reading his books after that one.
I depise John Grisham...a southern lefty kook
I like Conroy though and imagine he is lefty to but not nearly as hamfisted.
in fact Santini and POT are excellent
Grisham is part of that smarmy Oxford Missisippi literary lefty bunch...it’s like a damned colony of them there...and the dadgummed Square Books kook is now mayor
Ron Shapiro too ran for Congress from there....I remember smoking ganj with him at his porn grindhouse back in the day...now he’s a Feingold style Yockananny lib
amazing how all those freaks are now respectable..lol
“in fact Santini and POT are excellent”
I was gonna say the same thing but left it out.
1976 was my first election and my mom and I voted for Carter...I was 18 and still a lefty and did not know Carter was Noam Chomsky with a southern accent...hell no one did and Ford was so lackluster.
I’ve never voted Dem again.....neither has my mom.
My dad never voted Dem nationally from Ike onwards..ever.
The notion that the South went GOP because Yankees moved down here is pretty good reaching. Most Southern states never even had a Yankee influx till pretty recent. South Florida being the exception.’
It’s all changed now though...I’d wager that the fancier parts of Nashville are 40% yankee...at least and they are young, well off, very educated and overwhelmingly social libs..
in favor of all race based garbage, homosexual marriage, anti-war, pro-uniuversal health care unless they are doctors, gun control....smoke nazis too etc
I go to my kids baseball games on the edge of Belle Meade near the Steeplechase and when I hear a southern accent I notice
We just elected a Massachusetts ultraliberal as mayor and local rich white liberal transplants arguably put him in office and right on the heels of 16 years of liberal Yankee mayors here....Phil Bredesen and Bill Purcell
More of these “conservative” Yankees down here we can do without thank you. The local paper even made fun of his opponents southern accent...imagine...a southern accent in Nashville’s mayor race..lol
Tennessee is in danger of going left permanently because of the transplants.
you are in east TN right?
#####you are in east TN right?#####
Yep! Johnson City!
one could do worse...I go thru there a lot....family home at Grandfather MT
‘
if i told u that before forgive me
Please explain how a slave being sold from Alabama into another 'new' state changed his 3/5ths count when it comes to congressional seats.
And while the slave population in the slave states increased far faster than the white population, that increase in population was totally dwarfed by the number of European immigrants going into the free states.
At the time of the founding, Virginia was the most populous trailed by New York and Pennsylvania and the House of Representatives was pretty much evenly split between "North and South". By 1860, controlling the House of Representatives was far beyond the hope of the Slave states. The then Free States had grown so much that with each census, they gained more and more seats in the House relative to the slave states. The slave states, because of their economy, had lost that battle because immigrants found far better opportunities north of the Mason Dixon and the vast percentage of those people were "Free Soil" advocates.
The Slave states, with 30 members of the Senate still had a virtual veto power over most legislation and especially any attempt to amend the Constitution (2/3 majority of each house and 3/4 of the states required) that even 30 Senators or 15 states could still block an amendment today even with 50 states vs the 37 then). They could have easily easily blocked any effort to amend the constitution to ban slavery, and, in fact, still could have to this day.
Again, I refer you to the very truthful words of the Mississippi Secession Commissioners Garrot & Smith in 1860 who stated very clearly the real cause of the Civil War -- demographics.
This population [slaves] outstrips any race on the globe in the rapidity of its increase; and if the slaves now in Alabama are to be restricted within her present limits, doubling as they do once in less than thirty years, the children are now born who will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors. Our people and institutions Must be secured the right of expansion, and they can never submit to a denial of that which is essential to their very existence.I can't claim that I would have reacted any differently if I were Garrot or Smith or any white person in the South then. It would have been a very natural response in looking to the future and seeing your way of life being put in jeopardy. (We are no different today in our opposition to unlimited open immigration.) But the discussion here is history, not relative morality, and the fact is the only cause of the Civil War was the fight over expansion and the deadly dilemma that the slave states faced if they could not expand the slavery "Ponzi scheme".
It's important that we get the history right. It's not a morality play or about us or where we were born. It's about understanding what those who came before us did. IMHO, it is vital that were strip away myths and understand that.
I would argue it was one cause but feel free to think as you wish.
I thought you lived in FL. Andrew Jackson was born there. I lived in Spring Valley outside of Chattanooga.
No, I’m right here in East Tennessee! Just about 25 miles from Andrew Johnson’s tailor shop in Greeneville, where the locals once gathered for political discussions (before FreeRepublic!).
Our congressional district, along with the neighboring one in Knoxville, is historically the most Republican in any former Confederate state. Even in the most solid days of the Democratic South, we sent Republicans to Congress. Even during the New Deal when GOP districts all over the country went Democrat, the Tri-Cities district and the Knoxville district stayed Republican.
My folks worked on Howard Baker’s first successful campaign for senator back in 66. First republican senator in TN since reconstruction.
They have enhanced the Democrat party here today...primarily in metro Atlanta, Piedmont North Carolina and here in Metro Nashville and of course Florida that used to be reliably Republican.
You're talking about different periods. Those areas were "reliably Democratic" for a century or so up until a generation and a half ago. It was Northerners who moved South, Southerners who'd been educated and lived in the North, some Chamber of Commerce boosters, and Old Republicans in the Appalachians and Ozarks who were the pioneers of the GOP in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
They included people like George H.W. Bush and Winthrop Rockefeller. Maybe Claude Kirk of Florida (born in California) falls into that category. Bruce Alger and Thad Hutcheson, early Texas Republicans, were educated at Princeton and had spent time in the North. Howard Baker was the son of an East Tennessee Republican congressman. In retrospect, he had more in common with his fathers-in-law, Midwestern Republicans, Everett Dirksen and Alf Landon, than with Southern politicians of their day. This was all back when most Southerners voted Democrat by instinct.
It shouldn't be surprising if Northerners who moved South more recently have strengthened the Democrats. It's the same with Californians who move to Idaho and Arizona, New Yorkers who go up to Vermont, or Massachusans who settle in New Hampshire. What's more significant, maybe, is that after so many Southerners moved to the Republicans that they became "the Southern Party," there's been movement away from the GOP in other parts of the country.
Wardaddy, My memories of politics trace back to the 1950s. My father was a news junkie even back then and passed his genes of to all of his children. (How many people do you know who had National Review lying around the house in the 1950s?)
I recall quite clearly the Democrat filibusters in the Senate and the floor fights at their conventions over seating delegates from the Southern states over the racial issues. All of that ugly histrory has fallen into the media black hole or if it raises it's ugly head, the same lie is told that all of those hard core segregationists somehow became Republicans. I don't recall George Wallace, Wm. Fullbright or Al Gore Sr. ever switching parties and those guys were hard core segregationists.
I also recall my brother being in Biloxi in the late 50s, and later in Albany, GA. In 76 when Carter, 30 miles up Rt. 19 in Plains, was running for president I drove down to visit my brother and at the time was actually considering voting for the grinning ass----. I was informed by my brother about the kind of people flying regularly into Albany to 'advise' Mr. Peanut. I held my nose that year and voted for Ford. Today, it is no surprise to me that Carter has exposed his Moonbat status. I had figured that out in 1976 thanks to a transplanted Yankee -- my brother.
As I said, the key to the Republican growth in the South in those years were transplanted Yankees. By the 1980s, their influence from the local level on upward had spread enough to make a real difference.
You both have perspectives on the south I will never share. The notion you both have on how the South switched to GOP is simply arrogant and self serving and one shared by almost no one except some black conservatives and guilty whites looking to expunge the South. It's simply nutty to claim Strom Thurmond went GOP in 1964 becasue Yankees invaded South Carolina(?)....the South was going GOP long before any Yankees in numbers moved south.
I can only imagine that we are both representative of our distinct identities and perspectives.
Ironically I just spent the evening with a writer from Chicago at my home who came down here to visit Carnton Plantation at the Franklin battlefield and we discussed some of what you two guys and other NeoYankees often write here.
Not every northerner shares ya’lls views.
I’ve been following y’alls exchanges with some interest. I am curious though, why no mention of the Dixiecrats or Nixon’s “southern strategy”?
“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.” Kevin Phillips(Nixon strategist)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.