Sorry to interrupt but is this about dixiecrats and the "party swap" in the US? I never understood that. Which page did you start this discussion? I'd like to follow it please.
Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts
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Lee Atwater was an ignorant, insignificant dirtbag, who was making the argument theoretically off the record that his generation of southerners was the first that wasn't racist. If you're not going to believe what he said, don't use the man as a citation.
" we're the first generation of Southerners that's not been racist. " Lee Atwater, literally same interview.
Lee Atwater (1981): Interview with Alexander P. Lamis: Rough Transcript: Weekend Reading
Lee Atwater (1981): To answer that question, Saul, you have to analyze the nature of Southern politics since the 1940s. I think Southern politics begins with V.O. Key. What he did was analyze the Democratic party, because you didn't have a Republican party. He came up with the idea that the...
www.bradford-delong.com
Read the whole thing. You're not going to come away taking him seriously. If you do, he wasn't saying what you think he was. And the part you were quoting was theoretically about other people's behavior, not limited by party. It's not an admission of guilt by anyone.
Started this way kind of on page 14, but you can trace conversations easily backwards by clicking the names inside of the quote blocks so long as people keep quoting each other.
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So ignorant and insignificant he managed Reagan's re-election and Bush I's election campaigns, was a partner at Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, and was RNC chair during Bush I's presidency.
Or is he ignorant and insignificant because after his terminal cancer diagnosis, he figured out he was a deplorable sack of shit and tried to make amends for creating a toxic legacy that would follow him thirty years after his death?
Not overtly racist. Using the same dumbass, self-contradictory, illogic I literally just described.
That's not what he said. This isn't important. You have one data point that you have to liberally misinterpret to give evidence to a claim that half a century of politics was secret coded racism. And this single data point came from someone who was too young to take part in the racism you're talking about, essentially repeating talking points the New York Times had invented over a decade before this interview happened.
The Southern Strategy is a myth. That you found one Republican advisor from the 80s trying to take advantage of the myth doesn't make a case at all. It's still all lies.
Not so secret given how infrequently black people vote for Republicans. The Southern strategy is a play for plausibly deniable racism that is only bought by white liberals and conservatives.
So now Republicans have been not secret racists (still coded so that the media has to explain what they're really saying, but it's just playing coy) because they want to deliberately not get votes from black people?
In what world does that makes more sense to you than "Democrats and the media lie about Republicans to scare people away from them"? The truth here is far simpler than the conspiracy. Being perceived as racist loses elections, so Democrats call Republicans racist.
Black people are around 15% or less of the country if I recall correctly, and many of them ineligible to vote. It's not about them. They want your vote. And the other whites who will absolutely support those elements of society which constitute structural racism just so long as they can be framed as technically colorblind however ridiculously.
Repetition does not change truth-value. It just makes the person repeating it an untruth-spewing automaton.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Republicans are out for the votes of the "white moderate" as King called them, who are 100% happy with racist policy so long as they're given the vaguest of justifications as to why it's "totally not racist, you guys". And there are more of them, and in strategically-important states in elections, than there are black voters in the whole-ass country. If you think covert racism, or hell overt racism for some demos, doesn't win elections you haven't been paying much attention to electoral politics for the last half century.
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Option A) Republicans say coded racist things while denying racism so they can get the secret racist vote that is actually so significantly a super majority of non-hispanic white people as to overcome the 40% of the country that is racial minorities. Because obviously literally half the country is so racist that they won't vote for any party that isn't racist, but they also really like to pretend they aren't racist even though apparently everyone knows they are.
Or option B) Political parties lie about their opponents, and being racist loses votes, so Democrats have been calling Republicans racist for half a century.
If being racist is such quality campaign tactics, that coded racist rhetoric is the path to winning all the white votes, why are the Democrats constantly making accusations of racism as loudly as possible? Your logic is ridiculous backwards nonsense. You start your reasoning with who you see as a villain, and then work backwards to imagine how they did what you want to accuse them of on purpose. That's not how reality works, you can't decide intent by results. Your cause and effect are inverted. And you can't act as though only the people you like the least have any agency. I'm sure you aren't a particular fan of the Democratic Party, why are you defending their lies?
I agree, repetition does not change the truth. But I'm speaking the truth, and you're repeating political propaganda that's been fed to you.
Why does everyone listen to the Democrats and their media friends when it comes to race? They don't do anything about it! They've spent 50+ years accusing Republicans of being racist, and then they oppose the Republicans, which they claim is them being against racism. They made up an enemy to take credit for fighting, and all of you, even the ones with no loyalty to the Democrats or the media, look at their shadowboxing partner and think "yeah, that's the real enemy". Why? I don't get it.
Because despite also being racist, they want the anti-racist vote. Have you not been introduced to the concept of controversy or division?
And I presume you'll suggest next the two sides split so perfectly because they coordinate the lies. Have you been introduced to the concept of conspiracy theories?
Way to just make up a position for me to hold and then condemn it. Strong argumentation!
Anyway, the reason that politics in a single-member district elected by plurality vote system tends toward representing two relatively equally sized groups (I'm not going to say "divide a country in half" because together they don't even comprise half the country) is both simple to understand and complex in all the various ways it manifests: if a single party is too dominant, the differences between its members become more salient which can cause the party to divide itself or give another party an opportunity to grab part of the coalition by better serving part of it. This occurs no matter who is able or inclined to vote (so voter suppression in the long run is relevant to what legislation occurs more than it is who actually wins elections; this is another reasons Democrats don't mind so much that their voting base gets suppressed: they want to triangulate toward Republican policy anyway.)
As to how this plays out with respect to racism and Republicans and Democrats, Republicans want to win the racist vote while competing for the respectably not overtly racist vote (white moderates) while Democrats neglect the anti-racist vote (because where are they going to go?) and also compete for white moderates. Antiracism (and "non-racism") is a lot more popular as a personal descriptor than it is an actual politics and for that you can thank a combination of things:
1)the civil rights movement for being absolutely correct, not limited to but especially about liberal hypocrisy going back to the founding of the United States
2)the Nazis and KKK for being so gratuitously distasteful
3)the way that the political establishment recast revolutionaries like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their own images once he was safely dead.
4)conservatives finding the label of 'racist' so odious (because of all the murder and whatnot) that they have for decades been arguing that things that are racist actually aren't rather than trying to defend racism directly.
Democrats are allowed to neglect their antiracist base because that base actually cares about real things that happen and so is inclined to perform 'harm reduction' calculations. This, naturally, leads to their base having almost no political power (as manifested in the results of elections, at least) because they will vote for better enemies over worse ones. "Democracy".
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That's a lot of effort to try and replace something as straight forward as "people are less racist now, but the politicians still lie."
I mean, do you need sources that racial prejudices have declined and politicians lie?
They don't comprise half the country, but together they do comprise a sizeable majority of politically-invested people. Most people who don't vote do not give a shit.
Those last 2 really stick in my craw. I can guaran-fucking-tee that if King were alive today, every conservative on this forum would be calling for his blood. He was a radical who fucked up racists' shit with style. And the sheer dishonesty of trying to redefine racism instead of owning one's own racism is a perfect indicator of an unexamined life and a selfish outlook.
Yes. Reminds me of British Conservative ex-MP Louise Mensch who said "Nelson Mandela was neither left nor right, but a humanitarian hero" after hed died. This will come as quite a surprise to anyone who had read his very extensive writings in support of socialism, and remembers that her party routinely called for him to be executed as a terrorist in the 1980s.
Thankfully these days she's infesting the US media circuit and failing to make political websites successful rather than bothering us in the UK.
Says someone who literally just tried to claim a man who was the campaign manager for two consecutive successful Presidential campaigns, and the party's national committee chair, was -- what was the term, again? -- insignificant. A certain clip from Transformers springs to mind.
That's not just Democrats saying it of course, and need I remind you, you're commenting on a thread about how Democrats are full of shit that I started. Case in point, are you capable of hearing these dog whistles?
User Clip: Biden the Iconoclast -- lock the SOBs up!
I am sure his friend for California get with that: How can you can progressive and be so "tough on crime"?
www.c-span.org
User Clip: Every Crime Bill has Joe Biden
Touting the record of Democrats on crime in comparison to Republicans, Joe Biden makes it clear that he's a "tough on crime" Democrat. "Every major crime bill since 1976... has had the name of the Democratic Senator from the state of Delaware, Joe Biden, on that bill..."
www.c-span.org
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