Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Of course I knew that. Did you know that history is episodic?

"Did you know that the Democratic Nominee at the time Nathan Bedford forrest actually started the KKK. It was the republicans who fought for equality. I dont see how anyone could ever support the democrats with their history."

In our lifetimes the GOP of Lincoln morphed into the party that opposed SS, Medicare AND, during the '60's, civil rights.

Because of the LBJ civil rights and voting rights bills the white southern Dems left the Dem party for the GOP en masse. The GOP subsequently openly courted and encouraged white resentment and votes based upon racial appeals.

The chairman of the RNC apologized for that 'strategy':

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

"Following Bush's re-election, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager and Chairman of the Republican National Committee, held several large meetings in 2005 with African American business, community and religious leaders. In his speeches, he apologized for his party's use of the Southern Strategy in the past. When asked about the strategy of using race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once-Democratic South, Mehlman replied,

Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions [...] by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.


And so are you for cherry picking history by ignoring the more recent history. The party of Lincoln and Eisenhower is long gone.

I don't know how anyone can support the GOP Party of the past 60 years. Throw in economic policy that has given us recessions during every single GOP presidency, and I'm really puzzled.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335273057_The_Long_Southern_Strategy_How_Chasing_White_Voters_in_the_South_Changed_American_Politics

The Southern Strategy is traditionally understood as a Goldwater and Nixon-era effort by the Republican Party to win over disaffected white voters in the Democratic stronghold of the American South.

To realign these voters with the GOP, the party abandoned its past support for civil rights and used racially coded language to capitalize on southern white racial angst.

However, that decision was but one in a series of decisions the GOP made not just on race, but on feminism and religion as well, in what Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields call the "Long Southern Strategy." In the wake of Second-Wave Feminism, the GOP dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from its platform and promoted traditional gender roles in an effort to appeal to anti-feminist white southerners, particularly women. And when the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention became increasingly fundamentalist and politically active, the GOP tied its fate to the Christian Right.

With original, extensive data on national and regional opinions and voting behavior, Maxwell and Shields show why all three of those decisions were necessary for the South to turn from blue to red. To make inroads in the South, however, GOP politicians not only had to take these positions, but they also had to sell them with a southern "accent."

Republicans embodied southern white culture by emphasizing an "us vs. them" outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, encouraging defensiveness, and championing a politics of retribution.

In doing so, the GOP nationalized southern white identity, rebranded itself to the country at large, and fundamentally altered the vision and tone of American politics.

"Of course there will always be some foolish racists on both sides. But do define one party by this outlying group is just silly."

False equivalence. Not all Republicans are racists, but all racists have no other party to vote for but the GOP.

Trump encourages and embraces the support of those kinds of people with his 'many fine people on both sides' moral imbecility.