01-28-2017, 06:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-28-2017, 09:26 PM by Eric the Green.)
(01-28-2017, 11:24 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(01-27-2017, 11:53 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-27-2017, 10:02 PM)taramarie Wrote:(01-27-2017, 09:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The John Birch Society, long considered extreme and ludicrous to conservatives, has stayed as far to the Right as possible without delving into calls for genocide (including enslavement or extermination) except perhaps against Communists. The Republican Party has gone so far to the Right that it and the Birch Society are now hard to distinguish.
I have heard that both left and right wing have become more extreme over the years. Not sure if that is true or not.
There is certainly less willingness to compromise. Yes, prejudice that was accepted as normal in FDR's time would generate outrage today. The civil rights and women's movements since the Awakening reflect vastly different expectations among the modern blue population. Aspects of red culture have been dragged in the direction of equality quite some distance. Given how stubborn and irrational cultures can act, it shouldn't be surprising that they are digging in and refusing to budge for a time. In this, I'm not speaking only of the red culture. The blue belief in equality is stubborn too.
What this fails to distinguish is the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. It has always been the red culture that champions equality of opportunity; it was the Democrats who fought the civil rights movement most strongly when that was what the civil rights movement meant.
Once they had lost on the civil rights movement, the blue culture, unable to comprehend the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcome, focused on forcing outcomes to be the same irrespective of fairness from an individual standpoint. LBJ, who like many on the left truly believed that blacks were fundamentally inferior to whites, redefined affirmative action to mean discrimination against whites, because he thought that without favored treatment, blacks could never attain equality.
This is, of course, fought by the red culture, which believes that all races are fully capable of achieving equality on their own, given the opportunity, and should do so.
Yes, and certain groups do not have full opportunity now. Roadblocks are put in their way, like racial profiling, unnecessary police brutality, access to voting, and discrimination.
You can't build a red/blue narrative based only on political party labels. Southern and Northern Democrats were not the same in their views in the 1960s, or earlier. The sixties were a political party realignment, just as happened in every previous Awakening and Crisis. Once Barry Goldwater voted against the civil rights bill and ran for president in 1964, and Nixon's southern strategy and Wallace's campaign in 1968 mobilized anti-civil rights sentiment among southern whites, the parties completely changed ideologically and geographically. By 1980 the pattern we see today was well-established; Republicans are now the party of anti-civil rights, while Democrats are pro civil rights. In deep southern states, people vote almost entirely along racial lines: whites vote Republican and blacks vote Democratic. In old border states, Republicans win easily because whites outnumber blacks more than in the deep South.
The Democratic program does not embrace equal outcomes for all. What it offers is programs that keep everyone protected against capricious greedy bosses and economic crashes. Sometimes it offers programs to help lift people out of poverty, and that's what LBJ provided until he put all his eggs in the fight against communism.
Bill Clinton said mend affirmative action, not end it. Not because blacks or others are inferior to whites, but because discrimination still exists and so does economic inequality. This inequality and poverty happens among blacks because of the heritage of racism. Many have been able to break out of poverty, but some remain. This inequality affects people of all races, because the bosses have appropriated the country's wealth, and no adjustment has been made to this increasing trend since 1980. One can't expect people of any race to rise out of poverty, when the policy of the country is to keep people IN poverty, by allowing a small group to hoard all the wealth and power.