I've never doubted it. I just think it's frequently overapplied to dismiss valid criticisms.
Impeachment 2, the reckoning revenge redemption.
- Thread starter Worgen
- Start date
I fully agree that partisanship can blind people. Say for example 4 years worth of being blind, leading to someone believing in conspiracies about Jews stealing an election and ghosts possessing voting machines, culminating in fake indignation at like-minded people being labeled as terrorists for their attempt to overthrow a democracy. That's a level of blindness that would be worrying in an individual, let alone an entire party.
Or, he believed constitutional order was a prerequisite for civil rights to exist, and believed cavalier violation of the constitutional order was the bigger threat to civil rights overall.
My defense of Goldwater is basically an analogy to my overall resentment toward Johnson as a politician. Johnson was in many ways the last president of his kind. One could argue Nixon was as much a partisan sleaze as Johnson (and many of their predecessors), but Johnson was really the last "party over country" president from the bygone era. And he managed to deliver a parting shot that still ruins political discourse to this day.
As an example, see your own comment: I can't accept that Democrats made the breakthrough and scored the great victory? Why do you see it as one big breakthrough? Why do you see it as a Democratic victory, when the majority of the support in the legislature came from Republicans? What about the century of progress leading up to that point? Johnson's political success was his ability to cast himself as the great savior that scored the great victory, and paint the other party as evil for the rest of time.
You want a great breakthrough? How about the breakthrough where we had one racist party and one non-racist party and Kennedy was the catalyst that gave us two non-racist parties. What did Johnson do? He planted the idea that we still had one racist party, it was just the Republicans now. Because even though bipartisan efforts to fight racism would be genuinely good for the country, creating the narrative that his opponents were the racists now was good for him and his party. The man broke American politics and it still isn't fixed.
One of those that attended the riot in Washington D.C. whined that the police were supposed to shoot BLM, not the "patriots" who were busily attempting to overturn the election in favor of the Republican incumbent.
I know, I was making the point that both parties have rioted in DC, so if one is saying that rioting is evil, they have to accuse themselves as well.
It's like you completely missed the entire point of the post. "Riot" was just a description of the setting.
If your constitutional order permits the denial of basic human rights to swathes of the country on the whim of some local politicians, your constitutional order is a crock of shit.
The racist party is essentially the party most of the racists tend to vote for. If LBJ basically made the Republican Party the racist party, he did so by motivating the racists to switch party allegiance. He couldn't ever make the Republicans be the racist party like you think. Let's face it, to at least some extent the Republicans took a look at those abandoned racists, and thought to themselves "Mmm, voters!" and hoovered them up quite happily on their own. And that means they then got the burden of catering to them, which is at least partly why they then did pretty much nothing for black people for decades except throw them in prison.
It's a Democratic - LBJ's - victory because they (he) forced the issue and hammered it through. That's the way it goes. That's why we say Napoleon won the battle of Austerlitz, not the drill sergeants who trained the troops, logisticians who fed the army, etc. Sure, the Republicans supported it too, and all credit to them for joining in when they had the chance.
Let's be quite blunt here, there will always have been an axe to grind between the two parties. If it weren't race, there'd be something maginified to equal toxicity instead. But perhaps it would be race, because race is such a defining, critical, weeping sore for the USA all its existence to this day. It's not really about the Democrats and the Republicans in a sense, it's a far, far deeper thing, in the bedrock of the very society. It's just the way it goes that in the end, the Republicans got stuck holding the racism stick, why even now they're anti-immigration and anti-foreigner. I don't think that was a devious plan, some fiendish and evil LBJ plot to forever tar them. It's just how things worked out through a thousand little decisions. Goldwater had a vulnerability on race from his votes, and Johnson opportunistically exploited it. But that alone doesn't explain how things ended up as they did, because of the many other decisions so many other people made across so many years.
His "constitutional stand" turned out to be entirely misguided, then, didn't it? Civil rights were undeniably advanced by its passage, and his particular interpretation of "constitutional order" didn't turn out to be a requisite for basic human rights after all. After all, that "order" he was acting to protect had utterly failed to establish those civil rights before then, hadn't it? It had merely allowed local racists to rule by whatever whim they followed.
He acted to protect a status quo that denied basic rights to people on the basis of ethnicity. I don't much care why he did it. If he did it to protect "constitutional order", then he's made a specific judgement call that he considers that "order" of greater importance than immediately ceasing the denial of civil rights. And he can rest with the consequences of that call.
- May 6, 2020
- 1,133
- 1,213
- 118
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- White Male
Even if there's no chance for the Senate to convict him before he leaves office, I think a second impeachment isn't a bad idea. At least to have on the record that he's the only president to have been impeached twice. And that the only reason he wasn't thrown out of office is that he ran out the clock.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,505
- 3,453
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
a) That's all easy to say in hindsight, but he was absolutely right that this was unprecedented stuff that immediately and permanently changed the Constitution as much as any actual amendment has. For better or worse, this was the moment the federal government starting sticking its hands directly into people's affairs in a way it hadn't before.
b) We'll never know what would have happened if his objections had been followed. We flipped directly from Jim Crow forced segregation to federally banned segregation, without a moment in between where the Democratic Party wasn't telling people what to do. Goldwater was for the desegregation of all the laws and government institutions, that's hardly allowing local racists to rule by whatever whim they followed.
c) It hadn't utterly failed before it any more than it utterly failed after. Far more progress towards racial equality as done before that bill than after, and it would still be silly to say we've reached anywhere near civil rights perfection, so why characterize that moment as some single meaningful pivot?
I think you misunderstand my position here. He didn't make the Republican Party the racist party. Neither party is the racist party. He just kicked off a continuous chain of propaganda accusing the Republican Party of being the racist party.
I mean, said propaganda tends to be helped dramatically by one party continuously deciding to cater to racists while the other at least makes noises contrary to that
- Apr 1, 2009
- 14,505
- 3,453
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
There have been murmurs about them, but for as much of scum as they are, their objections are part of the process. Although considering some of what they have tweeted, I don't know.
And if he thinks this concern is more important than ending racist segregation, then that's a shit call and he didn't care as much about the latter.
And yet, that would have been the practical immediate effect if his objections had been followed: no federally banned segregation; racist segregation continuing. If a representative votes, they can damn well bear responsibility for the practical impacts of that vote.
Who gives a shit if we don't have "a moment in between"? Jim Crow-forced segregation is entirely, irredeemably wrong. We don't slow down the ending of racist segregation just so... racist segregationists don't feel bad.
"Why characterise the civil rights act as a meaningful pivot"? Because it was, and no serious historian disputes it. If you don't think "flipping directly from Jim Crow forced segregation to federally banned segregation" is a "meaningful pivot", then that's utterly absurd.
Whatever. That's no good reason to unfairly deny him the credit for what he achieved.
Nor to deny that he had a genuine compassion for Americans and deep belief in improving their lives. Whilst scooting around, I found plenty of bits from autobiographies. There seems to be a consistent theme across his life of people who knew him saying that was what he genuinely believed in. Credit where credit is due.
It would be nice to assume America has no racist party instead of them having one or even two of them. That would hinge on the Republican party not being the racist party which as of now they can't very well claim. The Republican party is not consistently racist. Presidents like Bush arguably did little to gain such a reputation, but other Republican presidents did.
The big orange elephant in the room is of course Trump. If the Republican party wasn't racist before him it undeniably became the racist party as soon as he became its leader. The man who for years insisted the American president simply couldn't be a real American because he was black, who's opening speech was a massive dog whistle about Mexicans being racists and who was caught discriminating against black tenners during his business career.
But before that you also had Nixon who certainly did look at all the disgruntled racist and thought ''mmmm, voters'' as Agema described. His whole law and order rhetoric was something of a dog whistle against both blacks and the more left leaning aspects of American society.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Maybe the Republicans(aside from Trump) aren't racist at their ideological core, but they are disturbingly quick to coddle the racists in exchange for vote. The damage gets inflicted whether they do it for the glory of the white race or just as an opportunistic hunt for extra votes. And if you combine that with voter suppression tactics that primarily target minorities, an apparent apathy about police violence against the black community, and their downright fanatical opposition to Obama then things don't look very good.