Orange Countification: Part 1

Modern Conservative ^ | May 06, 2008 | By Steven Travers

[thinkingIsPresuppositional]

Orange Countification: Part 1

Excerpt from One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation
By Steven Travers

Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years.

– President Lyndon Johnson talking with aide Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act

In 1964, the Democratic Party dominated U.S. politics. Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater with 64 percent of the vote. He had enormous filibuster-proof majorities in the House and Senate. The imprimatur of John Kennedy’s legacy hung solidly on LBJ. A majority of America’s governors and state legislatures were Democrat. The Civil Rights Act and the Great Society were ongoing accomplishments of massive impact on American life, on a scale that experts felt would approach FDR’s New Deal. LBJ had effectively erased the Democrats’ “soft on Communism” label, still resonant from the McCarthy era, by launching a bold war to stop the scourge of Red advance in Vietnam. This was a war that surely would be won in massive victorious fashion by the Hitler-conquering U.S. forces.

Goldwater and his party were out of the mainstream, a fringe element of the “extreme Right.” Furthermore, Goldwater’s refusal to back the Civil Rights Act had swung the black vote, already leaning toward the Democrats after JFK’s charismatic intervention in Dr. King’s 1960 Birmingham jailing, solidly into the Democrat column.

If politics could be explained through the metaphor of baseball, the Democrats were the 1964 world champion St. Louis Cardinals—young, hip, urban, mixed races, aggressive. The Republicans were the New York Yankees, so yesterday in their pinstripes, so token in their African American representation—country club Wall Street elites...