Thoughts On Where We Are, and Where We're Going

[David Horn]

(09-25-2018, 01:21 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-24-2018, 03:02 PM)David Horn Wrote: A recent study made a point I hadn't given much thought to myself.  Things started to go south when the civil rights movement started to make real gains.  All of a sudden, Silents decided that they weren't for well-funded schools for THOSE kids and unions started changing rules to make newer member less a part of the union because THOSE people were coming to join and take white jobs.  It was both self defeating and bound to fail.  Test scores dropped as the children of lesser schooling started rising to the grades where testing was measured.  Unions started to fall apart as workers saw less benefit in joining.  

This all started in earnest in the early 1970's, and accelerated under Reagan when the racial dog whistles came out.  It's gotten worse ever since.

Yes.  That was the realignment where LBJ basically bought the black vote, the Republicans countered with the Southern Strategy, and the two parties got rid of the idea of conservative and progressive wings.  Part of the red preference for small government and weak labor movements was to take money away from THOSE people.

I often wonder that the National Malaise came on the heels of the Southern Strategy.  There was the old notion that America could do anything it put its mind to, that in part made America great.  Small government and the Southern Strategy ended that in part, but how much a part?  Were the fall of Saigon, the oil crisis, the hostage crisis, all made inevitable by LBJ's assault on poverty?  Or were those things mostly international, the result of real overconfidence, of trying to do too much?

LBJ's tortured 6 years in the White House had many huge successes and created massive blowbacks.  Were they all interrelated?  Good question.  Civil Rights and Vietnam were the two biggies, and the linkage there is poverty rather than race.  Poor whites got pulled into that war, along with people of color, but poor whites were much more likely to see that war as righteous.  That may have contributed to the animosity that developed about that time.