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.
You really think some moron who would say some shit like that would watch a 24-minute video on political philosophy?
Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYAYFgmOWAI
The LBJ air hostess quote lmao, now PragerU is prime example of why people should get deplatformed for shameless lies and misinformation.
One of his best videos so far.
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