Political Ships of Theseus | The Party Switch

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Captions
Everyone knows that the parties flipped during the Civil Rights movement. It’s common knowledge, I mean how did the country go from looking like this to looking like this? And until recently, it was common knowledge. But there’s been a push to dispel the “party switch myth” for… reasons. The myth of the Southern Strategy is just the Democrats’ excuse for losing the South and yet another way to smear Republicans with the label ‘racist’ – don’t buy it. This video is brought to you by Skillshare. So this is the situation we’re starting with, Democrats in blue, Republicans in red (1908-1920). This is what the country looked like at the end of Reconstruction, Republicans were dominant in the north and west and Democrats in the South. Lincoln was a Republican and the states which formed the Confederacy were mostly Democrats. So yes, it is true that when the KKK was formed, they supported the Democratic party. But to say that the Democrats started the KKK is a bit of a stretch, that’s like saying Republicans started Unite the Right… wasn’t the KKK part of that? During the era of Reconstruction, federal troops stationed in the South, helped secure rights for the newly freed slaves. Hundreds of black men were elected to southern state legislatures as Republicans. And 22 black Republicans served in the US Congress by 1900. It’s interesting that she stops the count in 1900, when Jim Crow was firmly in place, because from 1900 to 2018, there’ve only been eight, three of which are serving right now. There’s been 117 black Democrats, 47 right now. But during these elections, there were zero black congressmen – so what happened here, why is this one yellow? That was Teddy Roosevelt who was the first Republican to really break with the party. Lincoln and the other previous Republicans were very pro-business, railroad tycoons were a thing because of them. Roosevelt was not, he was very progressive. He passed anti-trust laws to break up monopolies, wanted to stop corporations from donating to political campaigns, and was very environmentally friendly. The Republican party wasn’t and in 1912 Roosevelt said… My feeling is that the Democrats will probably win if they nominate a progressive. So when he lost the Republican nomination, he split off to form the Progressive Bull Moose party. Wilson won that election because of the Republican split. Both parties, then and now, subscribe to the economic philosophy of Liberalism – capital L – and more recently Neoliberalism, but the struggle between and within the two parties was over the government’s level of involvement in the economy. And that was really decided during the New Deal. FDR is president, the Great Depression has crashed the world economy, and the government decided to do something about it. FDR’s New Deal started several federal programs and borderline socialist economic policies. Many of his ideas were implemented in France, Germany, and Japan after the war, but he died before he could fully put them in place here. The New Deal caused a major political realignment, which is just the fancy term for party switch. Before this, there were fiscal conservatives and liberals in both parties, they were all over the spectrum. But now, if you believed in a conservative economic policy, you were Republican, and if you were more liberal, you were Democrat. Jim Crow was still very much in place, so very few black people who were allowed to vote, switched to the Democratic party because those economic policies benefitted them the most. But when it came to social issues, the parties were still very mixed. In 1948, Truman, a Democrat, desegregated the military and Hubert Humphrey gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention. The time is now arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. The time is now arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. This made southern Democrats so mad that they split off to form the States’ Rights Democratic party, more commonly known as the Dixiecrats, nominating Strom Thurmond for president. Keep an eye on him I think he becomes important later. The Dixiecrats later rejoined the rest of the Democrats, but still lost to Eisenhower in 1952. Won the states of Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia. And in 1956, he picked up Louisiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia too. You know, when she has it listed like that it sure looks compelling, but when you look at the maps, it tells a different story. This is the Solid South, the idea that they almost always vote together. Eisenhower, despite being a huge war hero was very much anti-big military, fearing what he called the Military Industrial Complex – corporations profiting from a perpetual state of war. The Founding Fathers were also against the idea, there are two amendments in the Bill of Rights addressing it. The Second Amendment created state militias, because they wanted that to be the country’s primary defense rather than a standing federal army. And then there’s the Third Amendment, the one everyone forgets, regarding quartering troops. Eisenhower was a Republican who was against having a big military, which was kind of the norm at the time, but he was also the general who defeated Hitler, so he was incredibly popular. These are the maps I want you to remember, because this is the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Technically, it started in 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education decided that separate was inherently not equal and ordered all public schools to be desegregated. Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott happened a year later. In 1956, the Dixiecrats, headed by Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell wrote the Declaration of Constitutional Principles, more commonly known as the Southern Manifesto, declaring that Brown v. Board of Education was a clear abuse of judicial power, and that defending states’ rights should be the official platform of the Democratic party. Three southern Democrats refused to sign it, including LBJ and Al Gore’s dad. The Dixiecrats were part of the Democratic party, but if it helps, you can think of them like the Tea Party being part of the Republicans. Part of it, but an extreme wing of it. And while the parties were pretty solid in their economic ideas after the New Deal, they were still split on social issues – more often than not, the Dixiecrats teamed up with socially conservative Republicans and defeated over a hundred civil rights bills. In 1957, Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of… 1957. There’s going to be a lot of these and they’re all named the same so, get used to it. This was the first major dismantling of Jim Crow, prior to this you could only serve on a jury if you were registered to vote and almost everyone registered to vote was white. So white perpetrators of lynchings tended to not get convicted while black people were almost always convicted of whatever they were accused. The new law made it so that federal jury selection was no longer tied to state voter rolls and set up several commissions on civil rights to investigate what future legislation might be necessary to ensure equal rights. Including voting. The Civil Rights Act of 1960, which outlawed poll taxes and other racist measures meant to keep blacks from voting- What?! No it didn’t! The 24th Amendment did that, it’s literally the only thing that amendment is about. Look, I don’t expect all of you to know what every civil rights law did, nor do I expect you to know all twenty-seven amendments. But you’re not a professor of Political Science attempting to teach people the “truth” about the civil rights movement. *Breath* The Civil Rights Act of 1960 made it a federal crime to not follow court orders, specifically in response to southern governors refusing to integrate schools. The 24th Amendment was proposed in 1962 and enacted in 1964. It abolished poll taxes, which meant you had to pay a dollar or two, which was big money back then, every time you wanted to vote. Every state in the South and about a dozen states in the north and west had some form of poll tax. No state in the Solid South ratified the amendment until after it was already in place. Even then, the amendment only applied to elections for federal office and it took yet another Supreme Court decision for it to apply to state and local elections as well. But let’s take a step back to 1960 when Kennedy was elected, what’s going on there in the south? JFK was socially liberal, he picked Lyndon Baines Johnson, a southern Democrat, as his running mate to try and secure the Solid South. But LBJ was socially liberal too. So when the election came, many southern electors protest-voted for Harry Byrd, a Dixiecrat who wasn’t even running. In 1963, two major events occurred, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the assassination of JFK. He had been working on a landmark civil rights bill that LBJ continued to push for when he assumed the office. No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. That bill became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination in employment, businesses, public housing, state and municipal facilities, schools, and any program which received federal funding. This is also the event that most people mark as the moment the parties flipped, so let’s take a closer look. The only serious congressional opposition to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 came from Democrats. 80% of Republicans in congress supported the bill, less than 70% of Democrats did. Democratic senators filibustered the bill for 75 days until Republicans mustered the few extra votes needed to break the logjam. Most of everything she said there is true or at least based in truth, but it doesn’t tell the entire story. This debate wasn’t between Democrats and Republicans, it was between the social conservatives and social liberals. Which for the most part meant the South versus everyone else. Most of the serious opposition to the bill came from Democrats, because most southern congressmen were Democrats. Southern Republicans who were part of the Conservative Coalition also opposed the bill and participated in the filibuster. Nobody ever seems to agree on how long the filibuster lasted, it really boils down to whether or not you count weekends when the Senate wasn’t in session. It was the longest filibuster in US history and lasted from March 30th to June 10th, which is 72 total days. The bill was finally voted on on June 19th, making it 81 days. So whether you count the weekends or the time after the filibuster was broken, you can end up with answers ranging from 60 to 80 days. Republicans didn’t break the filibuster… at least not alone. It was a combined effort from LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and Republican Everett Dirkson, an event dramatized by the HBO movie All the Way, which I highly recommend. So how did the votes break down? If you do it by party, she is correct. 80% of Republicans in Congress voted for the final version of the bill, and only 64% of Democrats. But, when you divide the votes by region instead, you see a completely different story. We’re going to consider the South to be any state was part of the Confederacy. Northern and western states voted 90% in favor of the bill, while southern states only voted 7% in favor. But we can break this down even further. Democrats in the north and west voted in favor by 95%, while Republicans voted in favor 85%. And here’s where it gets interesting, if you were a Dixiecrat, that is, a Democrat from the South, there was only an 8% chance you voted in favor, and if you were a southern Republican? There was a 0% chance you voted in favor. This bill was not decided by Democrats versus Republicans, it was the South versus everyone else. So, here we are at the beginning of the civil rights movement and here we are in 1964. LBJ won the election but lost the south to Barry Goldwater, a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act. How did everything flip around? PragerU likes to paint the flip that didn’t happen as black people deciding to vote Democrat. The Democrats came up with a new strategy, if black people are going to vote, they might as well vote for Democrats. As President Lyndon Johnson was reported to have said about the Civil Rights Act, “I’ll have them n*****s voting Democrat for 200 years. Forgetting for a moment that even Dinesh D’Souza says that black people switched to the Democrats during the New Deal, that is a pretty inflammatory statement. And do you know where it comes from? It’s not on tape, he didn’t say it in public. It’s comes from a 1993 interview with a flight attendant on Air Force One, who says he overheard LBJ say it 30 years earlier. That’s an ironclad, bulletproof source. So was the black vote really able to change the map this much? No, of course not. While 96% of them voted for LBJ, only 5.5 million African Americans were able to vote in that election, which is a huge improvement over previous elections for sure, but not enough to sway the results. LBJ won by 15.6 million votes, while still losing the South. The Democratic party just lost the South for the rest of my lifetime… and maybe yours. That quote, often used by Democrats, is also very poorly sourced. Southern Democrats, angry with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, switched parties. Fact, of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act, just one became a Republican. That one was Strom Thurmond, I told he’d be important. She leaves out the house, where two more switched, but that doesn’t matter. It wasn’t the politicians who changed, it was the people. While the South did overwhelmingly vote Republican for the first time in history, states like California and New York also switched. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was put in place, which made it a federal crime to obstruct anyone’s ability to vote and also got rid of literacy tests, put in place by the Dixiecrats in order to stop black people from voting. You might be thinking that it makes sense that if you want to vote, you should know English… but that’s not what the literacy test was. Write down the Bill of Rights… all of them… from memory. In 1968, they passed the Ci… you know what, we’re going with the alternate name for this one – the Fair Housing Act. This made it so you couldn’t discriminate who you rented or sold houses to based on race. Just because these civil rights bills were passed, doesn’t mean we have racial equality everywhere, it’s not like all of the sudden, segregated cities became homogenous mixes. Just because the civil rights era is over, doesn’t mean we live in a meritocracy where everything is equal, we had, and still have, a long way to go. Myth #3, Since the implementation of the Southern Strategy, the Republicans have dominated the South. Fact, Richard Nixon, the man who is often credited with creating the Southern Strategy, lost the deep south in 1968. She makes a compelling argument, until you look at a map and realize he didn’t lose to the Democrats. The Dixiecrats, yet again, split off to form a third party. He was running against this guy in the South. And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. Nixon still won that election and in 1972 won the South. This is when the second political realignment occurred, when social conservatives shifted to the Republican party, and social liberals to the Democrats. Nixon employed the Southern Strategy to win over the social conservatives. And the thing is, PragerU and Dinesh D’Souza both say it happened. They just disagree with why it happened. Why does the South vote overwhelmingly Republican? Because the south itself has changed, it’s values have changed. The racism that once defined it doesn’t anymore. Hah! Ahem, sorry. In an article that might as well be titled “The Switch That Never Happened, Why the Switch Happened” Dinesh D’Souza writes… Nixon appealed to these Peripheral South voters not on the basis of race but rather on the basis of Republican policies of entrepreneurial capitalism and economic success. He just described the Southern Strategy. Not winning over white southerners by directly appealing to their racial hatred, but by using dogwhistle politics. According to Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist and later chairman of the Republican National Committee… Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*****, n*****, n*****." By 1968 you can't say "n*****" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. You don’t say “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow” you say forced busing is an assault on our constitution and states’ rights. Most people will hear constitutional or economic argument and might even agree, but this guy just doesn’t want black kids in his school. Reagan was famous for using the term “welfare queens” – and despite the fact that plenty of white people are on welfare, we all picture the same thing. The Democrats did it too, the Clintons often used the term “urban violence” or “urban gangs” – they didn’t say it, but we’re all picturing it. The Southern Strategy is pretty well documented and even Dinesh D’Souza agrees that it happened, he just doesn’t agree that the policies were racial dogwhistles. And I’ve said this before, but that’s kind of the point of a dogwhistle, that you can deny that it’s a dogwhistle. We all agree that Nixon used “economic policies” to win over the South. In contrast, Democrat Jimmy Carter nearly swept the region in 1976, twelve years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet again, she’s leaving out pretty crucial facts. Nixon was the first president to resign in disgrace and left the Republican party in shambles, furthermore, Jimmy Carter was a southern Democrat. It’s extremely rare for someone to lose the region they’re from. But then Reagan was elected, a Democrat who switched to being a Republican in 1962. I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic party left me. He’s referring to the fact that the Democratic party moved left on social issues during the 60s, while the Republican party moved right. Which caused a major political realignment, or flip. In fact, almost everyone in Congress who ever switched parties, went from Democrat to Republican… there’s also a weird trend in where these people are from. But you also might notice that the majority of the politicians who did so, did so during the 80s and 90s. On average, those 20 seats didn’t go Republican for another two and a half decades. Republicans didn’t hold a majority of southern Congressional seats until 1994, 30 years after the Civil Rights Act. I like that she says on average there, because while some of them, like Al Gore’s dad were replaced immediately, others didn’t switch for 40 years or more, so when she averages them, she can make them all seem like they took decades. But there is a noticeable lag between how the South voted in presidential elections and how they voted congressionally and on the state and local level. And explaining that is something people devote their entire academic careers to. I guess that’s my cue-- Hi everyone. My name’s Peter Licari. I’m a PhD student in Political Science, specializing in political behavior and psychology and the host of the Professor Politics YouTube channel. So after decades of research, Political Scientists have largely settled on a few different reasons for why this happened. These reasons include generational replacement and the Republican's embrace of socially conservative positions. But they also include race. We know from decades of political science that the most stable and enduring political attribute people have, in the aggregate, is their Party ID-- you know whether they identify more with Democrats or with Republicans. And their ID is also the most important predictor of how people are going to vote, largely for two reasons: First, people tend to vote for their in-group and will only rarely deviate from that when very pressing issues are on the table. And, Second, because people use it as a heuristic when voting for candidates that they otherwise know very little about. For White Southern Democrats in the 1960's, race was absolutely one of those things. But, because Party ID is so stable, only a small percentage of them changed sides immediately, with those who did being younger and more politically active. They did, however, start voting Republican more frequently in national campaigns. State and local races, though, are low information environments. Think about it, do you know who your state rep is? Your agricultural commissioner? Who your mayor is? Do you even have a mayor as opposed to a city council? So these Democrats would use their party ID as a heuristic, giving the Democratic party a boost on the local level. At the same time Republicans were accelerating a push to the right, socially, as that they had been doing since the 1950's. In the 1970s, a number of other polarizing social issues came to the fore including abortion. These joined race under the umbrella term of “states’ rights”-- a platform championed by the GOP promising social conservatives a way to maintain the status quo on several social issues. Including, as mentioned earlier, racial segregation. At least at its inception. By the 1980's the Republican party itself no longer considered segregation a legitimate states’ rights issue but they continued to use the label for other issues. This continuation meant that the term would appeal to ordinary social conservatives who found racism appalling while also appealing to those who remember the racial connotation originally attached to the term. Now while all this is happening, you have millions of people coming of age in the South growing up socially and religiously conservative. But unlike their parents and grandparents, they didn't have an attachment to the Democratic party label. They started identifying with the party that was closer on their positions. Which was now unquestionably the Republicans. And when their conservative Democratic parents and grandparents started passing away, they became an increasingly powerful voting bloc in the south. And just as their parents would vote Democrat on low-valence races, they would start voting Republican. And local/state level politicians as well as party activists responded to the pressures of this shift, fielding the more conservative candidates under the GOP label. Now it's important to note that scholars are still debating over the relative import of these and other mechanisms. But what is clear is that the South flipped Party IDs, at least on the social dimension, and that one of the primary catalysts was race -- even if it took time for it to be felt in the electorate. Nobody, whether it’s me, Professor Politics, PragerU, or Dinesh D’Souza denies that the South went from voting like this to voting like this. And it’s pretty clear that something happened in the 60s and 70s to cause that. Did the Republicans and Democrats completely abandon their platforms and switch? No, but they did swap several planks both within their party and across parties during a few key realignments. The Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment where you take a boat and swap out planks until you have an entirely new boat, at what point did it cease to be the original boat? Now imagine you have two boats, swapping planks between them. Teddy Roosevelt wanted the government to be anti-big business and pro-environment, Nixon was the one who created the Environmental Protection Agency. But in the last presidential election, every major Republican candidate wanted to abolish the EPA. The Democrats adopted states’ rights as their platform with the Southern Manifesto, but Republicans are the states’ rights party today. Eisenhower was against a large standing federal army, while Trump is… I am the most military-based and the most militaristic person on your show. The KKK was founded to support Democrats and the Democrats put many Jim Crow laws in place that denied minorities the right to vote. But who does the KKK overwhelmingly support today? And which party is pushing for voting policies that disproportionately affect minorities? But you might thinking “all that’s in the past, what have Republicans done for women and blacks lately?” The answer you’d hear from professors, journalists, and celebrities is “not much” – and this time they’d be right. Prager University is not a real university, it’s a far-right conservative youtube channel that tells people what they want to hear. Like that climate change isn’t real or that if JFK were alive today, he’d be a Republican – but yeah, the switch didn’t happen. If you want to be told new things by a place that doesn’t falsely claim it’s a university, you should go to skl.sh/knowingbetter2. Skillshare is an online learning community with classes taught by experts in their field. Learn how to control people and build up your political base by brushing up on your Machiavelli. Maybe you can make up a new Southern Strategy. Learn how to make political cartoons to annoy conservatives or learn how to write persuasive articles to crush the libs. Or you can choose from 20,000 other classes to hone whatever skills you think will increase your viability in the free marketplace of ideas. So head over to skl.sh/knowingbetter2 and get 2 months of unlimited access to all of Skillshare’s courses for free, and you’ll be supporting the channel when you do. When people argue for or against the party switch, what they’re really arguing over is which party is the most racist. Neither of them are openly racist anymore. It’s the policies that either hurt or help minorities, like welfare, or immigration, or equal access to education and employment that are different. Nobody denies that the parties and people switched over certain issues, it’s why that’s up for debate. I’m not going tell you which party is more racist or whether their policies are dogwhistles, you have to decide that for yourself, because now, you know better. I’d like to thank ProfessorPolitics for helping me with this video, check out his channel in the card or down below. I’d also like to give a shout out to my newest legendary patron, Matt. If you’d like your name added to this ever growing list, head over to patreon.com/knowingbetter. In the mean time don’t forget to realign that subscribe button, follow me on twitter and facebook, and join us on the subreddit.
Info
Channel: Knowing Better
Views: 546,492
Rating: 4.4412775 out of 5
Keywords: knowing better, history, politics, political party, party switch, party flip, party switch myth, political realignment, civil rights act, civil rights era, democratic party, democrats, dixiecrats, states rights, republican party, republicans, new deal, southern strategy, party platform, progressive, conservative, liberal, jim crow, literacy test, poll tax, voting rights, strom thurmond, southern democrat, conservative coalition, civil rights act 1964, dogwhistle politics
Id: MwuFIJlY7fU
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)
Published: Sun Sep 09 2018
Reddit Comments

You really think some moron who would say some shit like that would watch a 24-minute video on political philosophy?

👍︎︎ 74 👤︎︎ u/Rularuu 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2018 🗫︎ replies
👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/project_twenty5oh1 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2018 🗫︎ replies

The LBJ air hostess quote lmao, now PragerU is prime example of why people should get deplatformed for shameless lies and misinformation.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/xtphty 📅︎︎ Sep 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

One of his best videos so far.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/getintheVandell 📅︎︎ Sep 10 2018 🗫︎ replies

[removed]

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Sep 09 2018 🗫︎ replies
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.