Posted on 12/23/2007 10:00:02 PM PST by Aristotelian
In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In the course of this speech, Reagan said he supported "states' rights." Mr. Krugman says this was code declaring his secret sympathy for Southern racism.
Others, including Mr. Krugman's Times colleague David Brooks and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, have come to Reagan's defense, denying that he was a racist or had any racist intent in his 1980 speech. That's fine but unlikely to change the minds of those like Mr. Krugman who are determined to smear the Republican Party with the charge of racism, and who are adept at finding racist code words like "law and order" by Republicans that are completely convincing to liberals and Democrats in support of this accusation, even though they are invisible to those with no political ax to grind.
However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Just read this on the OpinionJournal.com site and then checked to see if it was posted here at FR.
BTTT
The democrats accuse the republicans of having a mindset of “let them eat cake,” while they are busy scraping off the icing and swilling it down with champagne from the backside of the cake.
racist bump
Democrats celebrate depraved popular culture which has abetted destruction of that social fabric more than any other cultural force.
The Democrat Party upholds abortion which has done more to dissipate black political power than any other social force.
Krugman is therefore a charter member of the party of indentured constituency. They're a bunch of racist pigs.
This will be a good list to have.
Thanks.
However, you can count on the MSM to depict the "disaffected Democrats" as "conservative racists".
bump
The democrats accuse the republicans of having a mindset of let them eat cake, while they are busy scraping off the icing and swilling it down with champagne from the backside of the cake.
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Dr. Phil once had a black man on his show who said he had a problem because his black friends said that he acted too white. As it happens I know the man, he sat on my couch one day and we talked and he brought up the subject of how blacks vote so heavily for Democrats. He said that he just cannot understand why they do. I told him I certainly don’t understand it either, it seems to make as much sense as a Jew voting for Adolf Hitler. Most of them even seem to believe that Lincoln was a Democrat! Of course, almost none understand that Lincoln himself was convinced that blacks were inferior and wanted to send them all back to Africa.
The last part is not historically accurate; if you substitute sophisticated for superior and their antonyms, you will be closer to the mark.
Lincoln did entertain the notion of repatriation as a solution to the post-emancipation era but realized the economic and logistical impracticability of doing such a thing as an executive decision while the Congress and his cabinet were in negotiations over how to deal with reconstruction.
Booth closed the book on Lincoln’s personally-held convictions that would have altered the history had he been able to enjoy his triumph and set the order he so desired in place.
DJ, you’ve mentioned this in some of your prior postings.
Some say Booth dealt the cruelest blow of all to the south!
I don’t know what to believe about that.
Democrats—the party of slavery, segregation, and the welfare plantation.
The party of homosexual rights, gay marriage, and abortion.
The party of treason.
The party of socialism.
The party of unchecked illegal immigration and amnesty—guaranteeing a rebirth of slavery.
Did I miss anything?
The racism and anti-Americanism of the Dems needs to be shouted far and wide.
There is very little point in trying to define the parties by their positions decades, let alone centuries, ago.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, and the Democrats were the party of the South. After World War II, things began to shift.
Truman’s decision to integrate the military was the first crack in the New Deal coalition. Ike sent the 101st Airborne to protect the Little Rock seven.
There was actually a dust-up between Martin Luther King, Jr. and MLK, Sr., in 1960. King Jr. was a Kennedy supporter. King Sr. had always supported the party of Lincoln, which was largely a symbolic gesture, because a black man and a Republican were about equally likely to be elected in Georgia. Which is to say, not even a tiny bit likely.
In 1964, it was a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, a master of strong-arm back-room politics, who presided over the most significant advances in civil rights since the 13th amendment. He did so with an ad hoc coalition of northern Democrats and Republicans; Southern Democrats were almost uniformly opposed.
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the Republican party adopted Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: not opposing civil rights legislation, but downplaying it as an issue. Some of the former Democrats and former segregationists switched to the GOP: Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Trent Lott, for example. Some didn’t switch parties, e.g. Howell Hefflin, Robert Byrd, and George Wallace.
The parties have shifted constituencies enough times that a fifty-year comparison means jack squat. It was a Republican who wrote the emancipation proclamation, and the Republicans who passed the 13th and 14th amendments. It was a Democrat who desegregated the armed forces, and the wife of a Democrat who invited Marian Anderson to hold a concert on the National Mall when the DAR turned her away.
Affirmative action was the creation of Republicans. The first civil rights legislation was passed by Republicans. But they abandoned the high ground and Dems stepped into the breach. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, those were embraced by Republicans but driven by Democrats.
Neither party has clean hands, and no one is lily-white (an unfortunate phrase, but you know what I mean), Politics is the art of the possible, after all.
I grew up in the Segregated South which was run by Democrats, to the tune of about 90%. The Dems kept the Blacks suppressed and were the biggest biggots in history. It was a GOP President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who actually started the Civil Rights Movement when he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas to desegregate the public schools.
It was the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, who freed the slaves in the first place. But, there is no loyalty when the Dems guarantee to keep your family with a welfare check, food stamps and Medicaid for four generations. Someone needs to tell Jesse Jackson that is no way to “Keep Hope Alive”.
It’s like a gold mine.
Is that even a word?
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