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People on here, including, apparently, lurkers like @BarackObama, are confused about the 20th Century party realignment, and that has led them to a confused understanding of politics today. The myth is that LBJ signed Civil Rights and said, well, there goes the south /1
He may have said some version of that, but that's beside the point. In fact, the realignment goes back at least to the New Deal. In the '30s, the GOP was still the Party of Lincoln and Dems were the bigger racists, but the New Deal was very good for everybody. And so in 1936 /2
for the first time that we have a reliable record, a majority of Black voters went Democratic. Elite columnists thought it was absurd that Black voters could ever side with the legacy of the Confederacy which was still dominated at the congressional level by white supremacists./3
They were wrong, as @mattyglesias notes in his latest dispatch https://www.slowboring.com/p/new-deal?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo3MDgxMzg3LCJwb3N0X2lkIjoyNDI0MzM3MiwiXyI6Ilo3OWpNIiwiaWF0IjoxNjA3Njk2MDMxLCJleHAiOjE2MDc2OTk2MzEsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xNTkxODUiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.gvBED8uDfqBAUWRCFjf14VCwUupMt6V_0Ijh8vPH1O4
I recently interviewed James Morone, author of the new book Republican of Wrath, about this realignment, and if you have the time, he tells the full story here (title of this video is a bit off)
We don't have good enough data to know for sure, but it's actually possible that the first Democrat to win a majority of Black votes wasn't FDR but Woodrow Wilson, who was a racist and segregated the federal government.But Black voters have never had good choices on the ballot...
Wilson was better when it came to lifting everybody's material conditions than the Republican, so he won a lot of Black support, especially since Republicans weren't doing jack by then for civil rights, just coasting on Lincoln's reputation and taking the Black vote for granted
Sound familiar? Anyway, could be relevant.
No party has a permanent lock on anybody's vote. You have to win it every time.
No party has a permanent lock on anybody's vote. You have to win it every time.
