The small-businessman/self-employed-farmer/tradesman as icon, central to Lincoln's concept of a 'right to rise' in the world, runs as a straight line through the Homestead Act, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan, even the 2012 Romney campaign's reaction to "you didn't build that."
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The fact that Democrats were simultaneously the party of big, urban machines full of immigrants *and* the party of slave plantations only makes sense once you accept the transactional rather than principled nature of the D party. The same dynamic explains Joe Biden in the 1970s.
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Fernando Wood, the Tammany Hall Democrat Mayor of New York, wanted NYC to secede from the Union with the slave states, & opposed the 13th Amendment. Upstate New York was full of abolitionist Republicans like William Seward; the City remained Democratic.
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Given the longstanding nature of each of the 2 parties, the answer today for frustrated Republicans is not to join the Democrats, who will never be the party that stands for the general interest or the classical liberal, Lockean principles of the American Founding.
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The answer, instead, is to stay and fight for the long, proud legacy of those principle in the Republican Party. Every great Republican leader had to accept compromises of those principles & adapt them to new times, but we can always return to them. They haven't left, even now.
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I have a second set of thoughts to maybe append here later, but I'll leave off here for now. Keep the faith, and never let anybody tell you it's not a faith worth keeping.
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So far, an hour later, this is only one Tweet, but it seems likely from the framing of the initial Tweet that it's going to completely ignore everything I actually wrote, from the broad themes to the specific examples to the numerous caveats.https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152241043573825538 …
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Nearly all of the focus of "the parties switched" narrative is on the South, & there are reasons for that, but it impoverishes history to just ignore the whole rest of the country. Moreover, even the South is not a monolith. Let's look at the presidential vote in the South.
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I'll use R vote share rather than 2-party vote share for these purposes; both have their uses, but the challenge for Republicans for years was to get a hearing with white Southerners, even when they started abandoning Ds.
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"Deep South"=FL/GA/AL/MS/LA "Border South"=TX/TN/VA/AR "Border States"=MD/DE/MO/KY/WV. The two latter had mostly caught up to the nation in R vote share by Ike's time. The Border South states shifted sharply R between 1940-52.pic.twitter.com/ZAf1KS8whz
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The Deep South was also trending more R by the mid-1940s, but its wild swings from 1964-80 are (unlike the Border South states) more directly attributable to the Dixiecrat 3d party vote & the Southern swing back to Carter. In 1980, the Deep South was still less R than the USA.
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This, too, is an incomplete picture, however; you have to drill into downticket races like the House & state legislatures to see the long trajectory of Republicans breaking through with white Southerners, much of which was generational & tracked the region's economic progress.
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I've written at more length some years ago about the seductive oversimplicity of the "Southern Strategy" mythos, which simply assumes that there are no such thing as national security issues, economic issues, or non-racial social issues. http://baseballcrank.com/archives2/2012/07/politicshistory_6.php …
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The behavior of the various Dixiecrat politicians after 1965-68 illustrates my view of the continuities of the two parties' patterns of behavior. Dixiecrats were, as a group, pandering populists. You'd expect their behavior to track what they believed would win them votes.
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Some of the Dixiecrats who stayed in the D party - the guys Biden was buddy-up with in the 70s - stayed mostly unrepentant, yet won plenty of black votes. Why? Because Democrats are a coalition party. Go back & read some of the NAACP statements in that era.
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End of conversation
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