Even Democrats don't believe the parties switched sides

For the last few years, Democrats have been pushing this meme about "taking back Texas." The goal is to turn Texas blue in order to create a permanent power shift that will make it impossible for Republicans to ever win any more presidential elections. But there's something interesting about the phrasing here. Something that you would think the semantics-conscious Dems would have noticed.

In order to take "back" Texas, it would have had to be Democrat before. Which we all know it was. But that was during the Dixiecrat era. And according to modern Democrats, Dixiecrats were supposed to be modern day Republicans. So then how can you take Texas back if it never belonged to you in the first place?

Oops! Looks like the truth squeaked out there, didn't it?

 

Actually Texas was blue '88 to '92 when Ann Richards was Governor of Texas. Texas took a hard swing right with George W. in '92.

 

You mean the majority of Texas citizens voted Democrat? I doubt it.

 

Well no... The majority of Texans didn't vote at all.

 

It seems to me that we were hopeful of Texans' threat to succeed.

 

Dixiecrats were socially conservative. Many of them ended up switching to the Republican party later on, like Jesse Helms.

Strom Thurmond was another.

So, the truth is that the South has always been the most socially conservative part of the country. Party affiliations have changed somewhat, but the relative conservatism and liberalism of each major region of the country hasn't much.

Texas is still a pretty conservative state compared to the national average, but Democrats who seek to take the state back are probably banking on the economic liberalism of the Hispanic vote. Hispanics tend to be socially moderate on most issues, so this fits in with the "Blue Dog" wing of the party.

 

Most Texas Democrats are Blue Dogs, so I wouldn't say they were particularly left wing to begin with.

I guess the confusion that can result is that "blue" doesn't necessarily mean liberal. Democrats have both a liberal wing and a moderate wing in the party, and much of the blue South is blue dog (moderate).

 

Jesse Helms was never a dixiecrat.

Almost all the Dixiecrats remained in the democrat party for the rest of their lives.

The truth is, the liberal democrats for decades were the party of segregation and Jim Crow laws and black codes in the South and in non-Southern states. Do you think Plessy vs Ferguson only applied to the South?

Since the 1850's to the present, the conservative GOP has been the party of civil rights, for decades trying to pass civil rights, voting rights and anti-lynching legislation. The democrats thwarted these efforts for over 100 years.

 

You're correct that Jesse Helms never officially joined that splinter party of the same title, but he held the same views as them. He supported segregation and held a very negative view of black people in general. Colloquially, dixiecrat is a term used to describe many segregationist Southern Democrats.

The ones who either retired or died by the 70s surely did. The ones who lived into the 80s and later usually switched however.

Nothing about segregation was liberal. That's like saying that abolitionism was conservative. In the beginning, the GOP was the more socially liberal of the two major parties. It's why it was the party of the more liberal parts of the country socially back then.

Before Nixon's Southern Strategy, the GOP was the more liberal of the two parties on many social issues. You're correct that they were better at pushing forward social reforms.

It's why a lot of black people (including MLK's father) were Republican.

That changed dramatically by the 70s and 80s, however, due to the switching territories of the parties.

So again, the parties switched, but the regions of the country remain at the same spots in terms of relative liberalism and conservatism.

New York has always been socially liberal, while Texas has always been socially conservative.

 

if all the south decided to become bluedogs (democrats in name only), liberals would have to split off from the conservative bluedogs once again

.

 

Way to slander someone in their grave. Dead people can't defend their reputation. So Jesse was a dixiecrat because you decided he was like a dixiecrat 50+ years later. Keep in mind, not only were Southern Democrats segregationists, many non-Southerner Democrats were also segregationists.

Assumes facts not in evidence.

Except for the fact that it was mostly the policy of the liberal party which was the democrat party for over 100 years. Abolitionism was a conservative evangelical Christian campaign for decades before the Civil War even started. The Republican party was started by many of these same conservative evangelical Christians. You are just simply wrong about the GOP being a liberal party. If they were a liberal party, what issues were they liberal on?

Please explain the Nixon Southern Strategy? I have proved on many occasions that the Nixon Southern Strategy is nothing but a myth created by the MSM and liberals in the last couple of decades.

Actually it is because they were conservative Christians and more closely aligned with the Booker T. Washington civil rights group than the liberal socialists of the NAACP lead by W.E.B. DuBois.

No, actually blacks were backing the democrat party because of the liberal socialists in the NAACP since the Wilson Administration in the 1910's.

So the parties did not switch, but if you want to tell us they did, can you tell us when they did?

Texas was in the liberal democrat camp from the 1880's until the 1980's & 90's.

 

what happened was the bluedogs went to the religious right, and no one on the left missed them...

 

Patriot, you made a thread about all of this and got completely crushed in it a few years ago.

I'm not going to bother retreading it, because you clearly have no capacity to learn from your mistakes.

 

Yeah I linked to it in my previous post. That doesn't mean I'm going to let you get away with untruths. You can refuse to answer especially since you can't answer without more untruths. You are the one who needs to learn the truth.

 

Conservative Bluedog camp you mean

same reason we did not have the votes for a public option.... bluedogs vote like repoublcians

 

But Texas still voted for Bush in the presidential election of '88.

Abolition was conservative. Just as segregation was liberal. Black conservative Alfonzo Rachel has addressed this at length many times. What made the Republican party conservative was that it always stuck to conservative definitions of constitutional principles. Whereas Democrats have always taken liberties with those definitions and applied them however they've seen fit; often bending and warping them for personal gain and arbitrarily excluding certain groups. We see the exact same things today in their position on abortion.

The southern strategy is a fallacy. It's been thoroughly debunked and the only people who still believe in it are those who either A) haven't done their research or B) don't care about the facts.

^True.

^Once again, true. The facts really don't support the southern strategy meme. The deeper you dig, the more it falls apart and the more obvious it becomes that it's just more empty smear propaganda designed to improve Democrat PR.

I'm disappointed in you, Serf. You don't usually run from debates. I would expect this kind of cop out from a lesser poster. But not from you.

 

Franklin Roosevelt who became president in 1933 and Harry Truman whose term ended in 1953 both moved towards desegregation and Eleanor Roosevelt is often credited with being one of the driving forces behind the civil rights movement. All three can be described as nothing short of liberal.

 

Why is it that the only people that I ever run into who are openly prejudicial towards blacks are conservatives? Same with Hispanics. When I hang out with my liberal friends there are blacks and Hispanics among us. When I see groups of conservatives they are all white.

 

You can rewrite history however you want to assuage your white guilt or your guilt of association with the democrat party, but in the end you can't change history.

 

Five straight terms of democrats and no civil rights legislation. FDR put Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Truman issued edicts to desegregate the military, but it was IKE that actually desegregated the military. There were many civil rights violations during these years that I won't list because it would take too much time. FDR did put a Klansman on the Supreme Court.

 

Why is it that the only people who look at other groups of people and prejudge them by race are always liberals or democrats?

 

Bluedog does not necessarily mean conservative. It can, and often does mean democrats that are center-left moderates.

 

I think I can agree with this distinction. My wife was born and raised in Garland in a very solid Democratic, union truck driver home. In the 60s and 70s, she could not conceive of a Republican Texas, but my inlaws were the prototypes for Redneck. Boots, cowboy hats, dairy farms, dance halls and pick up trucks. Every stereotype you'd like and proud of it. But one other thing was also stereotype, a heart as big as Texas. Love of the outdoors, love of children, love of everyone. A true Bleeding Heart if there ever was one. Seeing Texas near the bottom education and services brings her to tears.

 

Unifier, don't take this the wrong way, but this is where this forum veers off into crazy farm territory. This is one of the only places I've found people who make these kinds of arguments.

Ask most historians from outside of the U.S., and you'll get a very different answer from the one you and Patriot are giving. I guess certain Americans just define liberal and conservative differently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

The only sources that claim it's a myth are heavily conservative. It would be like asking a neo-Nazi about the validity of the Holocaust.

You'll have to excuse my skepticism.

 

FDR was definitely liberal on many things, but he represented the northern branch of the Democratic party. Many of his southern colleagues were not so liberal.

At the time, Republicans were mostly present in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and West. These were areas that tended to be more liberal about certain social issues.