Daniel Shuster

It isn’t coherent to view history in terms of “conservative vs liberal” It should be viewed in terms of “Republican vs Democrat”

You’re missing the point. We’re talking about what happened to the southern planters themselves, those that controlled their states. They remained democrats. Most followed planter form, adapting and devouring, become servile to whatever would retain power. But no, democrats did not tell Wallace to pound sand. It’s hilarious you think him barely getting 3rd place by only a few percentage points was some noble rejection. The other Dems desperately tried to win his favor. McGovern had Wallace speak at the convention, said he would take a Dixie reunion tour, told Wallace his voice would be heard (be honest, how would you view such things if Republicans did them). After ‘72, they tried even more desperately to win his voters. They chose another planter, and longtime friend of Wallace, Jimmy Carter. Even in 1980, Carter launched his campaign with Wallace (and many other of the worst segregationists). After the crushing defeat in ‘72, the Dems were in lockstep, with media running cover for Carter. Carter is the perfect symbol of what happened to the final stage of planter political influence: no real ideology, willing to say or do anything, no idea what he’s doing, and Dems willfully ignoring his past

I agree that next generation are different, though we can look back to a time when there was a “white primary,” when blacks were literally not allowed to participate with one political party unless they had sufficiently proven loyalty, a time when there was a portion of the country completely undemocratic, unrepresentative, under a system of oppression, and one that could only exist because of protection from the party at the federal level, and most Dems I talk to today would still support that party if they could go back in time to this era (like supporting FDR). It is a political calculation liberals of the time made, continued to make through LBJ, and would still make. I’m not sure how unpledged electors shows “realignment.” Planters used every last ounce of their power as leverage against Dems, including protest votes in ‘48-‘68, with Dems typically caving. They did not have this relationship with Republicans. Smart Republicans like Nixon knew that it was in the party’s best interest to destroy the planters, and let the otherwise conservative region be more representative, vote on economics and defense. It was not “realignment.” Planters lost power, the South became free

1. Yes, of course, and that isn’t any kind of indictment. You also have to keep in mind that there are a lot of groups, like a feminist white supremacist, or New Deal segregationist, that just really aren’t types of people anymore in significant numbers. 2. They shifted based on priorities of the times, the entire time Rs being the more “conservative” party. It’s right to look at them in terms of coalitions, but we have the be specific (planters is a distinct faction. The “south” is not). I fully acknowledge that a modern liberal is not the same kind of a person as a racist planter that is enforcing Jim Crow and the white primary, but pretty much every modern liberal would still vote for FDR at a time when all of the planters power was fueled by the national dem party. So they should be able to perfectly understand that political calculation, that coalition, and really would seem to admit they would still make the same political calculation. I would not make that political calculation

You seem to think my point was that Carter was a bad person/racist. What I was getting at was the actual progression of planters and their political dynamic. I can explain further if you’d like. Early in Jim Crow development, planters united in the South for control under the protection of the Democratic Party to utilize the “white primary,” which was legal within a party, but illegal in national elections under 15th Amendment. So each state broke down into a more diverse ideology, but all under the umbrella of the Democratic Party and real elections decided in the primaries. In Georgia, there were essentially two factions, Talmadge vs anti-Talmadge. Both sides backed Carter (anti-Talmadge more-or-less evolving into getting behind Richard Russell). Carter came from a long line of rural oligarchs in Georgia. The county unit system disproportionately benefited rural counties, so essentially, elections were won because of Roy Harris of the white citizens council and his network of uniting rural planters from each county. Carter’s father, and then Carter, were chiefly concerned with protecting the county unit system. Planters in general were the white minority within the “black belt.” They needed racism the most, needed Jim Crow the most. They thought their existence depended on it. When the planters systems started to collapse, they quickly adapted, because there was always a non-ideological, power driven/survival element at their core. It’s funny to me when the left treats each of their conversions as some kind of miracle. So, yes, Carter was a bad person. He pushed school segregation further while head of the school board. He fought integration as a state senator (going against the grain to do so btw), he used Roy Harris to win, allied with all of the worst segregationists, used racist appeals when it suited him, took the most aggressively anti-busing stance in the country alongside Wallace, only won in ‘76 because of allegiances to MS segregationists like Eastland and Stennis, launched his campaign on stage in 1980 with unrepentant segregationists (note John Sparkman in the photo, back right), but more than being some kind of racist, he was a planter. Their main mode of being is to adapt and devour. You can be as forgiving as you’d like of planters, but that is the real progression, not “south bad.”

Not Harding and Coolidge, but a bit for Hoover, but even this is misread. Hoover was perhaps the most pro-civil rights of the three, but the situation for a Republican on this issue was helpless at the time. The South was not part of America. They were a colony of the Democratic Party. The “white primary” was a Democratic Party rule, sidestepping the 15th Amendment, that united Southern planters all under the umbrella of the party, despite differences in ideology. For a Republican to support Black and Tans in the South was purely symbolic. They had no chance of ever beating the planters, thus no chance of making any progress. Supporting Lily Whites in the South had a better chance of overthrowing the planters, which would have at least made the region vaguely democratic/representative rather than completely controlled by the small white minority that lived within the “black belt.” This would have opened the door for progress for blacks, and it would have broken the strangle hold in Congress where planters could hold the entire country hostage. It was a great example of pragmatism vs. empty symbolism. If you wanted to help fight racism in the South, you would have to support racist Republicans in the South. If you wanted to just hold a high opinion of yourself, then you would support Black and Tans with absolutely no chance of getting anywhere

This is what I would say are the top 3: 1. Gains in the South The struggle of civil rights was always more about the planter class (term used loosely i.e. Crump in TN not technically a "planter" but he was the regional ruling class). Planters only held power because of the Democratic Party of the time. Much more to this, but just as one example, you can look at someone like Eastland, who was on critical committees and held such power by Dem party rules of seniority, and boasted of shutting down over 100 civil rights measures. Even if Eastland was replaced by an even more racist Republican, that R would not have had the power of Eastland. Guys like LBJ continued to yield to Eastland. Put simply, R victories in the South meant uprooting planter power, which meant the South could join the natural progress of the rest of the country. Eisenhower revived a Republican Party on the ropes. 2. Legal foundation for the entire civil rights movement Ike put in 4 Supreme Court justices after the Brown ruling that all supported the decision, but implementation of Brown fell solely on the lower courts, and Ike's response was to fill the lower courts with some of the best judges to push civil rights, rejecting the deals proposed by Eastland and LBJ that would have resulted in segregationist judges (the only reason this isn't ranked higher, is because much of this was undone, when JFK took essentially the deal that Ike rejected, allowing Eastland to handpick dozens of judges in the South). Many of the most iconic moments in the civil rights struggle can be traced to an Eisenhower lower court appointment. It was Frank M. Johnson, an Eisenhower appointment, that struck down segregated seating of public buses in Montgomery after the Rosa Parks incident. It was Johnson again who ordered George Wallace to allow Martin Luther King Jr to march from Selma to the capitol steps of Montgomery. It was Harlan Grooms, an Eisenhower appointment, that gave a court order for the belligerent University of Alabama to admit its first black student, Autherine Lucy. It was Ronald Davies, an Eisenhower appointment, that nullified a previous ruling to block integration of nine students from the school in Little Rock. It was Elbert Tuttle, John Robert Brown, and John Minor Wisdom, all Eisenhower appointments, that led in the struggle to have James Meredith admitted to Mississippi University, and that ruled to permit MLK Jr. to conduct meetings and demonstrations in Albany, Georgia. The strength of the entire movement was using legal grounds to make real gains that hurt the planters, and these legal grounds were laid by Eisenhower. 3. Desegregating the military There are many small individual examples of things Ike did to push for advancement, but the reason this individual act makes the list is because I beleve military desegregation really did make a big difference in the mindset of the country, especially in the South that has strong respect for military service. Truman started this, of course, but his executive order was largely ignored. Much of the military desegregation under Truman happened out of convenience during the Korean War. Eisenhower pulled a lot more weight with the military, to say the least, and was able to personally convince even hard opponents within the military, even making personal calls and going as far as he could, pushing for any military base schools to be desegregated as well (this was before Brown). At the very least, Eisenhower should share credit with Truman on this, but rarely gets any

It was more about Republican vs Democrat than conservative vs progressive. For example, the 2nd biggest reason for black disenfranchisement was the “white primary” to evade the 15th amendment. The ruling planter class of the South arranged with even the most progressive Democrats so that the entire South would be under the Democratic Party, because it was a Dem rule that blacks couldn’t vote in the primaries. The South was ideologically diverse but all under the Democratic Party umbrella for this reason. The real elections were decided in the primaries in the South. Dems north and south, progressive and conservative, maintained this system of oppression for political gain, while any Republican victory intrinsically broke down this system. Planters stayed Dems

It’s good if you condemn them. Those screenshots go through to the ‘80s. Largely Dems do not acknowledge or condemn this stuff. More often I have Dems making every excuse for all of the people most responsible (planter class). Jokes aside, “cope” really does explain a lot of post-Nixon strategy. Dems did not want to get crushed again, and were in lockstep. They ran Carter, a literal planter and former segregationist, and they ran cover for him like crazy. No one knew about his defiance of Brown as school board head, his attempts to push segregation further, attempts to undermine CR64 after it passed, his continued alliance with all the worst segregationists. He would come out defending the “ethnic purity” of neighborhoods from “black intrusions,” and Shirley Chisholm would come out saying what a good strategy it was, broadening his appeal to racists. Even still in 1976, Carter was the deacon of a church that banned black members, and you would have Andrew Young defending it. Carter always defended Wallace, of course. Even McGovern and Ted Kennedy tried to buddy up with George Wallace. Even while Dems passed civil rights legislation, they tried to maintain their calculated alliance with the planters. Nixon, on the other hand, broke the back of the planter class, politically. A conflict that dated to the country’s founding all but came to an end with Nixon. He had an enormously positive effect on the South. So yes, the accusations against Nixon are hilariously absurd, and pure cope.

The charge of his “southern strategy” is even more nonsense, and absurd projection. The next election the Dems would nominate a former segregationist, backed by almost all of the remaining planters with political power

This claim is one of the best indicators that someone has no idea what they're talking about. It's hard to track the layers in which you are wrong. No, it was not recorded. No, Nixon did not record everything in the oval office. The recording system was set up in 1971. At any rate, the quote you keep trying to cite was from an interview in 1994, and has nothing to do with the oval office recordings. The interviewer released a book on the interviews in 1996, in which the incendiary war on drugs portion of the interview was strangely not included. Years later, Ehrlichman died. The interviewer finally released that portion in 2012. Ehrlichman's closest friends, family, and associates say that he would not have said such a thing. Even if we were to, for some reason set aside all critical thinking, and believe that Ehrlichman made that claim, knowing anything about Ehrlichman would force heavy skepticism. He went through phases of drastic resentment towards Nixon for not pardoning him. There were times when he would say anything he could think of to make Nixon look bad, and still he apparently didn't come up with the war on drugs hoax until that conspiracy already started to crop up more than 20 years later? And then of course, there are all the mountains of counter-evidence. The administration's reasons were well-documented and discussed. Drugs were an insanely big problem at the time, and although Nixon's "war on drugs" is often conflated with Reagan's, Nixon's was clearly beneficial and was pushed/supported by black groups of the time. Just as one example of the differences, Nixon's Controlled Substances Act of 1970 actually eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. In Nixon's advertising to black voters, fighting drugs was one of his appeals. It was seen as racist to let the black community be ravaged by drugs

One cannot possibly understand the dynamics of American history if they don’t understand the role of the planters. Those few racist democrats that never switched were the planters, and what happened was they lost control and Republicans never gave them the deals that even the most liberal democrats did. Those few racist Dems aren’t “irrelevant,” they are the entire issue. You can look at a map of Alabama and see that the white minority within the “black belt” was what drove Jim Crow, and they didn’t switch parties. It is a lie that Republicans of the era tried to appeal to racism. No reason whatsoever to do that. They could win nationally on conservatism. The graph you show is just the start of Republican dominance nationally.