READ THE CONSTITUTION

[garrett7855]

Favre-

That is all too true-the history I was actually referring to was the ancient (politically, at least) history of the 19th century. I think our most immediate focus needs to be on the recent past. That's the point I was going for.

Ancient history has value as well, but you are absolutely correct about the liberal revisionists.

[Favre]

Revisionism has become a religion in the liberal community. They have been successful in a campaign of "If you say the lie often enough, they will believe". It makes me sick and I have to constantly correct people that have bought into the lie. The liberals are masters of this. They still bring up the Gulf of Tonkin even though it was a democrat that created that lie, and somehow transfer the guilt to conservatives! We must be well armed in historical fact.

[AgentOrange]

lordjulius7 said:

Funny, I had always thought it was the Democrats who opposed civil rights and the Republicans who passed the civil rights legislation...

I believe it was a DEMOCRATICE President LBJ who signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

[MO]

About the 1964 Civil Rights act-
From www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/12/13/194350.shtml
"Remember that the Republicans were the minority party at the time. Nonetheless, H.R.7152 passed the House on Feb. 10, 1964. Of the 420 members who voted, 290 supported the civil rights bill and 130 opposed it.
Republicans favored the bill 138 to 34; Democrats supported it 152-96. Republicans supported it in higher proportions than Democrats. Even though those Democrats were Southern segregationists, without Republicans the bill would have failed. Republicans were the other much-needed leg of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

Most of the Dixie-crats became Democrats, not Republicans!

[ItWillNeverWork]

I Think it's a bit of an overreation to say that USA50 is trying to re-write history. It's all just an argument over semantics anyway. Who cares what catagories people fall under? If you are against slavery then you are against slavery, if you are pro welfare then you are pro welfare, neighther opinions neccesarily makes you a liberal or conservative.

It all depends what point of history you look at it all from, definitions of words change. Ask yourself what the original meaning of the word liberal was in the 18th century. Ask yourself what a conservative in monarchistic Britain would have believed. See how it all gets muddled?

[Ogilvy]

[quinwound]

USA50 said:

You guys are as ill-informed as Mo. You all still get all the historical terms mixed up: Lib/Conserv/Repub/Demo....

Here it is again:

During the time of the Civil War the Repubs were the Liberal Party and the Demos were the conservative party. See, that helps explain to you wits why Abe wanted to free the slaves, and the South (Demo) did not.

A transistion occurred over the next 100 years in which the Repubs became the conservative party and the Demos the Liberal (hence why Demos ultimately supported Civil Rights while the Repubs opposed it, and why southern Demo Conservatives changed parties in droves....ask John Connally about that).

Also, if you can find him in hell, ask the D-ck Nixon and his conservative supporters (who were Repubs...imagine that!) about his "Southern Strategy" on race and civil rights. Oh, then go ask LBJ (a Liberal outcast in the Southern Demo Part) what his position was.

This is not a Republican Political Forum....it is a CONSERVATIVE Forum (use your reading glasses). If you relegate your discussion to the conserv/Liberal issue,
you'll have to recant and apologize for the misinformed replies.

He is right 150 years ago the partys were swapped.

[remedios]

USA50, it is a nonsense for you to suggest that the democrats were conservative and republicans liberal during the civil rights movement.

lordjulius, ever hear of the 'Dixiecrats?' They were Strom Thurmond's wing of the Democratic party as response to the horrible evil of the Civil Rights movement. Now last time I checked, Thurmond was a member of the Republican party when he died, and was a racist bigot when he was a Dixiecrat.

Go figure. But somewhere along the line, either the political natures of the Rebublican and Democratic party flip-flopped, or their names did. Both I and USA50 believe it was the latter. If you refuse to acknowledge the FACT that it was one or the other, then you simply hold yourself up as ignorant. Any first-year political science book will tell you so.

[lordjulius7]

So tell me, Remedios, when did this miracolous transformation take place? When the sixties radicals joined the party it was still the segregationist party you claim to despise. If the two parties have changed positions, as you claim, there would presumably have been a period of quiesance. Their was not. The year McGovern was nominated as democratic contender, who was his main rival? George Wallace.
If the young political activists of the sixties had cared that much about racial equality, they would have joined the republicans, who were then leading the legislative programme of civil rights. Instead, they joined the party whose most prominent politicians stood full-square against even anti-lynching laws.
The democrats were never a colour-blind party. Thery swung straight from lynching and segregation to affirmative action and racial utopias. It has always been the right that treats each individual, of whatever colour, as a human being.

[Torremalku74]

Seeing all these people trying to blame the historical oppression of negroes on the opposing political party is just sad. All Americans were equally guilty of the horrors of slavery and racism. I am proud of Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves regardless of what political party he belonged to and I am proud of LBJ and JFK for the civil rights movements that they supported in the sixties.

[remedios]

lordjulius-

Funny, I had always thought it was the Democrats who opposed civil rights and the Republicans who passed the civil rights legislation...

I was mistaken, it's true, but so were you. Let's set this straight. After a little research, I came up with the following:

The Dixiecrats were a splinter group of Southern DEMOCRATS in the U.S. elections of 1948, who rejected President Harry S. TRUMAN's civil-rights program and revolted against the civil-rights plank adopted at the Democratic National Convention. A conference of states' rights leaders then met in Birmingham and suggested Gov. J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Gov. Fielding Wright of Mississippi for vice president. The group hoped to force the election into the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES by preventing either Truman or his Republican opponent, Thomas E. DEWEY, from obtaining a majority of the ELECTORAL votes.

The plan failed. Although Thurmond electors ran and won as the official Democratic candidates in four states -- Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—other Thurmond electors running as "States Rights Democrats" lost to Truman slates. Thurmond polled 22.5% of the total Southern vote to Truman's 50.1%. Nationally, Thurmond obtained 39 electoral votes with 1,169,032 popular votes. The Dixiecrat movement encouraged Northern blacks to vote for Truman, but it ultimately strengthened the Republican party in the South, for many Dixiecrats became Republicans.

Donald B. Johnson
University of Iowa

gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/side/dixicrat.html

So the Democrats weren't conservative during the civil rights era, but liberal Democrats sure as hell didn't support segregation. And the Dixiecrats weren't Democrats, they split from the Democrats and then became Republicans. The same kind of people who would have wanted to keep slavery legal also stood against civil rights and would, if they were alive today, be members of the REPUBLICAN party. Case in point: Strom Thurmond. He split from the Democrats because Truman backed civil rights and Thurmond couldn't stand that not only had the negroes been freed from slavery, now he was being expected to stand on the same footing as them.

[MO]

www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/12/13/194350.shtml

As a matter of fact, the record shows that since 1933 Republicans had a more positive record on civil rights than the Democrats.

In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.

Kerry also maintained that all the Dixiecrats became Republicans shortly after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, another big lie. Richard Russell, Mendell Rivers, Clinton's mentor William Fulbright, Robert Byrd, Fritz Hollings and Al Gore Sr. remained Democrats till their dying day.

Most of the Dixiecrats did not become Republicans. They created the Dixiecrats and then, when the civil rights movement succeeded, they returned to the Democratic fold. It was not till much later, with a new, younger breed of Southerner and the thousands of Northerners moving into the South, that Republicans began to make gains.

[lordjulius7]

Remedios :
"So the Democrats weren't conservative during the civil rights era, but liberal Democrats sure as hell didn't support segregation"

I didn't suggest that the liberal democrats supported segregation, but that the Democrats as a whole have never believed in colourblindness. The old Dems thought blacks were too dumb to vote. The new dems think blacks are too dumb to get along without government help. Same contempt, only now it's benign.

"And the Dixiecrats weren't Democrats, they split from the Democrats and then became Republicans"

As the lovely Mo points out, that's not entirely true.

"The same kind of people who would have wanted to keep slavery legal also stood against civil rights and would, if they were alive today, be members of the REPUBLICAN party. Case in point: Strom Thurmond."

That's rather a thin basis for an argument, one man. But as far as it goes, Strom Thurmond publicly repudiated his former racist views BEFORE he joined the Republican party.

[Walter]

This discussion is fascinating because it is attempting to define an artifice.

The designation "Liberal" historically has been associated with the present day term "libertarian," generally associated with conservatism, not with socialism or the left.

The economic strategies of JFK, clearly a Democrat, were far more "conservative" (see what he did with tax reductions) than were Richard Nixon's (see how well his price controls worked).

The Democrats/Dixiecrats of the Civil Rights era were totally different than the current party...primarily because the Democrats are not driven by any ideological principles but simply opportunism (see recent commentary by Susan Estrich).

In other words, this discussion is similar to the determination of how many angels dance on the head of a pin.

[Angmar]

Do you honestly think the conservatives neglect the constitution? It says that Congress shall make no law regarding the formulation of contracts. Hence, minimum wage regulations are unconstitutional. But the liberals don't want to talk about that. . .