03-10-2021, 12:30 PM
(03-09-2021, 06:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(03-06-2021, 10:06 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(03-06-2021, 04:49 PM)Einzige Wrote: Nobody cares; Eisenhower was a piece of shit too.
So tell me who really was good. Sure, I can fault people for voting for Donald Judas Trump in view of all the warning signs. We never get "perfect" because nobody is perfect.
The analogy between Obama and Eisenhower can be taken too far. After all, Ike appointed the car dealers to replace the new dealers, and supported a lot of cold war shenanigans. But brower's point is that today's political spectrum has gone so far right that Ike's so-called conservatism is almost as liberal as today's liberalism. And the voting pattern among states does seem to reflect the change, largely because the formerly democratic, racist southern and plain-state whites have jumped ship since 1964 and have joined the other conservatives, forgetting whatever populist liberalism they may have embraced back in W.J. Bryan's or even FDR's times.
Bryan and FDR knew enough to tread lightly on "race". FDR sought what was then called the Negro vote Up North, but there was no meaningful Negro vote in most of the South. The local pols decided what the New Deal meant in their states. The last 4T was likely an ineffective and counterproductive time for challenging Jim Crow. After all, the KKK was not yet quite dead, and all that the Klan could find wrong with a similar organization in Germany (initials NSDAP) was that it was 'foreign' and 'exotic'. In Bryan's time, the Republican party was still the Party of Lincoln, which it remained until FDR co-opted Lincoln.
It may be ironic, but Southern agrarian racists were quite liberal on economics. They liked Big Government for the TVA that electrified much of the South. They also distrusted Big Business for different reasons than the Northern, mostly white ethnic and Catholic, blue-collar workers Up North who were generally Democratic. Before 1932 any Democratic win of the Presidency after the Civil War depended upon a coalition between unionized workers and Southern racist agrarian types to get the electoral votes. That coalition started to founder in 1948 with Strom Thurmond's racist breakaway States' Rights Party and the 1964 election (the Goldwater vote mostly a protest vote against the Civil Rights Act) and the George Wallace candidacy of 1968. The New Deal Coalition remained relevant in the Carter win in 1976 (Carter winning all former Secessionist states in 1976 except Virginia) and the 1990's, when Bill Clinton won six states (Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia) for the last time for at least 24 years (and I expect the Republican to win all six of those states in 2024. Indeed I expect the Democratic nominee of 2024 to have a better chance of winning Texas (ironically Virginia is now a near lock for the Democrats in 2024) than any of those six states that Bill Clinton won for a Democratic Presidency for the last time in 1996.
Politics is never neat and clean because human nature is anything but neat and clean. As for the Cold War... Communism was apparently a clear and present danger, as the Communist takeovers of China and behind the Iron Curtain in Europe were recent memories. Suppression of popular uprising in East Germany in 1952 and Hungary in 1956 did nothing to relax the tensions.
How states of the Mountain South and Deep South have voted since 1976 in elections not won by either side with more than 400 electoral votes:
ST 76 92 96 00 04 08 12 16 20
AL D R R R R R R R R
AR D D D R R R R R R
FL D R D R R D D R R
GA D D R R R R R R D
KY D D D R R R R R D
LA D D D R R R R R R
MO D D D R R R R R R
OK R R R R R R R R R
NC D R R R R D R R R
SC D R R R R R R R R
TX D R R R R R R R R
TN D D D R R R R R R
WV D D D R R R R R R
I make a distinction between the Mountain South and the Deep South due to very different cultures in those regions. To be sure, southern parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio are really "Mountain South" and not included here, but the Ozarks and Appalachians have as radically different a political and social culture from the Deep South as from more clearly "Yankee" parts of America in which the only derogatory things said about Yankees are about the New York Yankees who are rivals of their Red Sox, Indians, Tigers, White Sox, Twins, Mariners, and A's. Arguably Angels, too. If you want to see a clear delineation between the Mountain South and Deep South, then just look at the electoral results on a referendum of secession in Tennessee. Cotton-growing western Tennessee voted for secession and eastern Tennessee voted against it.
A white person remembered when getting a high-school diploma, having indoor pluming, and household electricity was a rarity in the Mountain and Deep South was probably from the New Deal era and saw the Democrats benefactors for such. If one took those for granted, one was not likely to stick with the Party of FDR after Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy".
Here's a big point: the Eisenhower and Rockefeller Republicans were always incompatible with Southern agrarian racists. That shows in Eisenhower and Obama wins. I have no good explanation for the High Plains, though.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.