On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Nathan Newman wrote:
> I thinks that more complicated. On union labor issues, the GOP was always
> rightwing and changed little, but on issues like civil rights and the
> environment, there was a full-scale purge of the Rockefeller civil rights
> and Teddy Roosevelt style environmentalists from the party over the
> decades.
In both cases you are talking about minority New York Republicans, who haven't been in charge of the national party since 1908 (and were only in charge then because McKinley got shot and TR was a dynamo). The Rockefeller wing was mainly the Eisenhower moment (when is how Rocky got elected). There's a reason he never get nominated while Nixon/Goldwater/Nixon/Reagan did. (Ford was the exception that proved the rule.) There's a reason Rocky left congress after Ike stepped down and spent the rest of his political life as governor of New York.
> Goldwater himself was actually more of a libertarian, but he ended up
> being a stalking horse for the southern conservative takeover of the GOP.
As did Nixon, his supposed foil, and as would everyone else. This just emphasizing how little difference Goldwater himself made. And he was certainly to the left of Nixon on this issue -- he personally was neither a racist nor an anti-semitie. Nixon was both.
The key thing that happened was that the Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Southern politicians were arch reactionary -- the whole political and economic system was semi-feudal. They were always to the right of even the Republican nutjobs. The only reason they were in the Democratic party was because a century early the Republicans had inaugurated the Civil War and Reconstruction. Reconstruction ended in 1877. No civil rights bills were passed until 1958. The first real one was in 1964. At that point, the arch conservative and on top of it feeling betrayed South moved to their natural home in the other party, giving them the natural electoral majority the Dems had had previously. That changed the entire playing field.
The irony here is that what fucked the Dems was standing up for their principles, not giving in. It's when they stopped cowering, kicked their conservative wing in the balls, and passed a law that really meant something they'd they paid for it big time.
I don't mean to diminish the complications. On the contrary, I want to increase them. I think the current simple stories -- Franks, Perlman, Teixeira -- are all wrong, along with the simple moral, that the party that wins is the one that is more combative. I think the problem, and the solution, is much more complicated than that.
One thing the marxian and post-marxian tradition hates is sectionalism, which it considers epiphenomenal. But it has defined this country's politics since the writing of the constitution.
Michael