One commonly-played, and uncommonly dishonest, card that\nright-wing media likes to play is to perpetuate the lie that the present\nDemocratic Party is ideologically unchanged from the Democratic Party of the\n18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries, and thereby the Democratic Party of\nBarack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is solely responsible for the nation\u2019s\nsins of slavery and racial segregation, while Republicans are the party of the\nGreat Emancipator, Abe Lincoln, and therefore deserve credit for everything\ngood that has ever happened to black Americans. Sean Hannity detached his lips\nfrom Donald Trump\u2019s ass long enough to repeat this garbage in a recent\nbroadcast, but it appears to be a boilerplate script that resurfaces regularly\non Fox News and other conservative outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
The reality is, of course, far different. Hannity and his\nilk are playing sneaky games with party labels and ignoring the underlying\nphilosophy at work and the ideological shifts the parties have undergone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s true that, prior to the American Civil War, conservative<\/em>\nDemocrats from the South were the ones defending the peculiar institution,\nwhile their rivals, the Federalists, the Whigs, and finally the Republics, put\nup varying amounts of opposition to slavery. To be an abolitionist was to be not\njust a liberal<\/em>, but a dangerous radical in\nthe eyes of the conservative South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the end of Reconstruction, the social order of the Old\nSouth reasserted itself, and from the 1870s until the 1950s, movement toward civil\nrights for black Americans ground to a halt. Conservative<\/em>\nsouthern Democrats worked with conservative<\/em> Midwest\nRepublicans to stymie any and all efforts toward civil rights legislation put\nforward by both liberal<\/em> Republicans and liberal<\/em>\nDemocrats from the North and West.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1964, a coalition of liberal<\/em> Republicans\nand liberal<\/em> Democrats were finally able\nto pass the Civil Rights act, with an assist from the nation\u2019s grief over\nKennedy\u2019s assassination and the efforts of President Johnson, who previously had\nbeen a reliable member of the conservative<\/em>\nSouthern segregationist caucus as Senate Majority Leader. His fellow conservative<\/em>\nSouthern Democrats were appalled when one of their own betrayed them by helping\nto pass and then signing the hated Civil Rights Act, followed by the Voting\nRights Act the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1968, the ascendant conservative<\/em> wing\nof the Republican Party saw an opportunity to help Richard Nixon get the\nnomination and win the White House. Employing the coded language of \u201claw and\norder,\u201d Republicans signaled to disaffected conservative<\/em> segregationists\nthat Richard Nixon was on their side. So began the transition of the \u201cSolid\nSouth\u201d from a Democratic bastion, where voters would rather cut off their right\narm than vote for the \u201cParty of Lincoln,\u201d to an equally solid Republican\nbastion. This couldn\u2019t have happened if the Republican party hadn\u2019t dropped its\ncollective pants and taken a wet, steaming dump all over the legacy of our 16th\npresident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The right-wing pundit class is trying to sow confusion,\nconflating a party label with a position, trying to trick you into believing\nthat, because some Democrats were once slave owners and segregationists, and\nDemocrats today are liberals, that liberalism itself is inherently racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, when Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter or Tucker Carlson spew\nsuch pure nonsense about how today\u2019s Democratic Party is the party of slavery,\nsegregation, and the Klan, remember that Strom Thurmond, one of the last of the\nunrepentant segregationists, was a Republican when he died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember that the preservation of slavery was a conservative<\/em>\nposition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember that Jim Crow and segregation were conservative<\/em>\npositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember that the Klan was and is a conservative<\/em>\norganization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember that civil rights were, are, and always will be the\nliberal<\/em> position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the slave owners of the antebellum South were around\ntoday, they would be Republicans. If the segregationists of the Old South were\nstill a political force, they would be Republicans. David Duke, like almost all\nmembers of the Klan today, is a Republican. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The time when there were conservative<\/em>\nDemocrats fighting for segregation was a very different one in American\npolitics. The two parties weren\u2019t as ideologically monochromatic as they are\ntoday. There were liberals and conservatives in both parties. Bipartisanship often\nmeant liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats siding against conservatives in\ntheir own parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those days largely ended after 1968. Liberal or progressive\nRepublicans like Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, or Nelson Rockefeller are shining\nartifacts of the past. Even Richard Nixon, in many ways the architect of the\nsolidly conservative Republican party, would probably find himself dismissed as\na RINO (Republican In Name Only) by today\u2019s Tea Party, Freedom Caucus fanatics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today Republican politicians are the ones defending the\nstatues of Confederate war heroes, also known as traitors and losers. That\u2019s\nall you need to know, and it\u2019s why calling the modern Republican party the \u201cParty\nof Lincoln\u201d is an obscene joke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How can tell if a Republican is lying about race? His lips are moving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1878,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[346,241,345,75,338,344,308],"class_list":["post-1877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-venting","tag-conservative","tag-democratic-party","tag-liberal","tag-racism","tag-republican-party","tag-segregation","tag-slavery"],"yoast_head":"\n