Are Libertarians Racist? Salon thinks so.....

[AmmoManAaron]

I know that's not what you were saying, but certainly you can see how easily inferred that is. When progessives say that, it's where they're going with it. You said it and without qualifying it. By the time you did minds already were at the inferred destination.

And this right here is where the problem is coming from...and it looks to me like a lot of this done on purpose. Certainly some people like Strom and his supporters switched parties post-CRA and that put the Republican Party "over the top" in the south and helped them win elections at that time, but those people are gone now and racism is NOT why the south is deeply red today. To purposely imply otherwise, or inadvertently leave out key information about why the south is strongly Republican today (as opposed to the time immediately post-CRA), simply helps give credibility to the moonbats over at Salon...and I won't stand for that regardless of the reason. I think Kut's recalcitrance on the topic belies something other than innocent omission though...Devil's Advocate or Troll? I'm just pointing out that it seems purposeful to me, you folks can decide for yourselves what you think his motivation is.

 

[Kutnupe14]

Kuts list was supposed to be former democrat-racists-turned-Republican.

Trent Lott: Check
There seems to be some evidence that Trent Lott was a racist. He entered congress as a Republican but he was formerly a Democrat. So, yep. He switched parties, not because his ideology changed, but because Democrats were supporting civil rights.

William Colmer: No.
It seems he was probably a racist. He entered his political career as a New Deal Democrat, supported FDR. His ideology changed and he became more conservative. But he stayed in the Democratic Party throughout his time in office, even though he often supported Southern Republican candidates.

Ronald Reagan: No.
Reagan was originally a New Deal Democrat, but turned more conservative and switched parties for ideological reasons. His ideology changed while employed by GE. No reason for me to believe that he switched because he was racist.

Strom Thurmond: Check.
Do I even need to explain?



I'm not going to go through each one on the list. Some clearly are examples, some just aren't.

However, to look at what actually happened and still deny that Southern Democrats switched parties because they did not support the CRA is intellectually dishonest. You can honestly believe the history and not buy into the myth that the Republican Party is racist.

I'm on the fence about Ronnie. I think he probable wasn't a racist, but he did support a racist (Truman), and has his infamous "strapping young buck buying t-bone steaks with food stamps" comment. I don't think it difficult to figure out the image he's trying to convey. But, I think Ronnie was playing racial politics rather than actually be living it himself. He has a number of other comments that in the same tone, so it makes one wonder.

Oh, and one more "democrat to republican" who i can believe I missed, Jesse Helms. Nevertheless, I think a lot of southern politicians, during that time, can avoid being called racist, as most weren't ideologues (like Thurmond), they were simply politicians who swayed with the beliefs of their constituents.

 

[AmmoManAaron]

Kuts list was supposed to be former democrat-racists-turned-Republican.

Trent Lott: Check
There seems to be some evidence that Trent Lott was a racist. He entered congress as a Republican but he was formerly a Democrat. So, yep. He switched parties, not because his ideology changed, but because Democrats were supporting civil rights.

William Colmer: No.
It seems he was probably a racist. He entered his political career as a New Deal Democrat, supported FDR. His ideology changed and he became more conservative. But he stayed in the Democratic Party throughout his time in office, even though he often supported Southern Republican candidates.

Ronald Reagan: No.
Reagan was originally a New Deal Democrat, but turned more conservative and switched parties for ideological reasons. His ideology changed while employed by GE. No reason for me to believe that he switched because he was racist.

Strom Thurmond: Check.
Do I even need to explain?



I'm not going to go through each one on the list. Some clearly are examples, some just aren't.

However, to look at what actually happened and still deny that Southern Democrats switched parties because they did not support the CRA is intellectually dishonest. You can honestly believe the history and not buy into the myth that the Republican Party is racist.

That is exactly my point. Not everyone who switched from Dem to Rep was some hidden racist. Heck, even the great Charlton Heston changed his views on guns over time when presented with facts. Reagan and many of the others could just as easily have switched from Dem to Rep because they learned facts about things in the Dem platform that they didn't like.

Some racist southern Dems did switch parties, but that isn't why the south is Rep today and it isn't even the main reason they were Rep post-CRA. It did decisively put the Reps over the top post-CRA, but they had been gaining popularity in the south for some time prior to that. Some racists came into the Rep party post-CRA, but they have died out now. They came and went...and the south would've eventually still turned Rep regardless of the post-CRA influx of former Dem racists.

 

[jamil]

And this right here is where the problem is coming from...and it looks to me like a lot of this done on purpose. Certainly some people like Strom and his supporters switched parties post-CRA and that put the Republican Party "over the top" in the south and helped them win elections at that time, but those people are gone now and racism is NOT why the south is deeply red today. To purposely imply otherwise, or inadvertently leave out key information about why the south is strongly Republican today (as opposed to the time immediately post-CRA), simply helps give credibility to the moonbats over at Salon...and I won't stand for that regardless of the reason. I think Kut's recalcitrance on the topic belies something other than innocent omission though...Devil's Advocate or Troll? I'm just pointing out that it seems purposeful to me, you folks can decide for yourselves what you think his motivation is.

When I first started posting here and read Kut's posts, I though he was in left field. But time has given enough data points for me to decide that he's not a progressive moonbat. I don't usually agree with him. He does like to challenge typical Conservative rhetoric. But I have to be honest with myself and admit when he's right about something.

Purposeful? Not meaning to speak for him but I suspect he let people think what they were going to think, knowing full well what they'd think. Right or wrong, it's a datapoint under your fingers now. If you jump to conclusions about what you think he's saying, you'll likely infer conclusions that are not completely accurate.

 

[AmmoManAaron]

they were simply politicians who swayed with the beliefs of their constituents.

There is a whole lot of truth in that! Politicians gonna politic

I'm not a huge fan of Ronnie, but he was pretty good and I don't think he was a bad person at all. Jesse Helms, meh, never cared for him. Trent Lott I really only know as Majority Leader and from what I remember he did OK with that. Strom I just facepalm about, lol.

 

[jamil]

That is exactly my point. Not everyone who switched from Dem to Rep was some hidden racist. Heck, even the great Charlton Heston changed his views on guns over time when presented with facts. Reagan and many of the others could just as easily have switched from Dem to Rep because they learned facts about things in the Dem platform that they didn't like.

Some racist southern Dems did switch parties, but that isn't why the south is Rep today and it isn't even the main reason they were Rep post-CRA. It did decisively put the Reps over the top post-CRA, but they had been gaining popularity in the south for some time prior to that. Some racists came into the Rep party post-CRA, but they have died out now. They came and went...and the south would've eventually still turned Rep regardless of the post-CRA influx of former Dem racists.

Reagan became an individualist and abandoned his lefty ideology during his time speaking for General Electric. Basically that's when he became a capitalist, and is why he switched parties. He shouldn't have been on that list. But someone like William Colmer, technically no, but ideologically yes. He became more at odds with the Democratic party as they supported civil rights more and more. But he stayed a member until he called it quits.

 

[rhino]

I rest easier knowing there are clearly no racists in and among the Democrat Party. Whew!

 

[T.Lex]

Nevertheless, I think a lot of southern politicians, during that time, can avoid being called racist, as most weren't ideologues (like Thurmond), they were simply politicians who swayed with the beliefs of their constituents.

I think there's a generational factor that needs to be accounted for. It is unfair (IMHO) to judge Boomers or pre-Boomers based on Gen-X era racial sensibilities. In some ways, being able to comment on someone's race is LESS racist than what we have today.

My grandmother describes black people as "colored" because that's the word she grew up with. I have seen her interact with people of all races (well, not recently, I mean, she is in her 90s, so she doesn't get out much) and treat them all the same: kinda cranky.

My point is, those comments before the 80s should have a discounted racism quotient. People then grew up in a racial culture that "we" can't fully appreciate.

 

[Kutnupe14]

And this right here is where the problem is coming from...and it looks to me like a lot of this done on purpose. Certainly some people like Strom and his supporters switched parties post-CRA and that put the Republican Party "over the top" in the south and helped them win elections at that time, but those people are gone now and racism is NOT why the south is deeply red today. To purposely imply otherwise, or inadvertently leave out key information about why the south is strongly Republican today (as opposed to the time immediately post-CRA), simply helps give credibility to the moonbats over at Salon...and I won't stand for that regardless of the reason. I think Kut's recalcitrance on the topic belies something other than innocent omission though...Devil's Advocate or Troll? I'm just pointing out that it seems purposeful to me, you folks can decide for yourselves what you think his motivation is.

What innocent omission did I make? My posts within this thread have been consistent. I addressed the historical reason why Democrat then, became Republicans. I made no such claim as to why the South has remained red afterwards, but I did acknowledge that there's a difference between those who initially changed parties and those in the GOP now. My motivations? Say something that catches my eye as a misrepresentation, and ill address it. If you feel give been trolled by facts, then so be it.

 

[Kutnupe14]

I think there's a generational factor that needs to be accounted for. It is unfair (IMHO) to judge Boomers or pre-Boomers based on Gen-X era racial sensibilities. In some ways, being able to comment on someone's race is LESS racist than what we have today.

My grandmother describes black people as "colored" because that's the word she grew up with. I have seen her interact with people of all races (well, not recently, I mean, she is in her 90s, so she doesn't get out much) and treat them all the same: kinda cranky.

My point is, those comments before the 80s should have a discounted racism quotient. People then grew up in a racial culture that "we" can't fully appreciate.

I know a ton of white and black people that use the word colored or negro. I can't speak of today's generation, but in the 90s when there was a rebirth of the "black is beautiful" movement, that world wasn't considered as offensive. Personally, I find African-American more offensive than the other two.

 

[AmmoManAaron]

When I first started posting here and read Kut's posts, I though he was in left field. But time has given enough data points for me to decide that he's not a progressive moonbat. I don't usually agree with him. He does like to challenge typical Conservative rhetoric. But I have to be honest with myself and admit when he's right about something.

Purposeful? Not meaning to speak for him but I suspect he let people think what they were going to think, knowing full well what they'd think. Right or wrong, it's a datapoint under your fingers now. If you jump to conclusions about what you think he's saying, you'll likely infer conclusions that are not completely accurate.

I agree. Sometimes he does speak plainly and I think I even repped him once. Also, I agree about what he's doing and not jumping to conclusions, but I've never cared for that type of discussion tactic because it can be far to easy to use it to humiliate rather than enlighten, not to mention that it can lead off into meaningless tangents and drivel. Devil's Advocate can be a way to help hone your viewpoints, but sometimes it's nice to just have someone one your team help illuminate things directly...although I also know that there are some who will refuse to be enlightened unless they think it was their own idea.

 

[IndyDave1776]

Haven't you heard, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were accidents.

Frankly, moving off "The Union as tyrannical overlord and the south as innocent victim" to "both sides were douchebags" is an improvement.

I think "both sides were douchebags" is probably most accurate, though I think the bigger douchebags at that time were the Southern Aristocrats who conned poor whites into dying to perpetuate their own prosperity because "States Rights".

No, I think human nature prevailed. When the perceived right of states that was in contention favored the North, Southern lawmakers had no qualms about ignoring states' rights. It's no different on INGO. Humans tend to act like hypocrites, but really we're just spin doctors. We find righteous ways to justify what we want to do, even when what we want to do has no righteousness to it.

These problems add up to federalism as the solution which has been in practice thrown out of our system of government. States' rights amount to reading the Tenth Amendment and acting accordingly which has not been done since the Civil War, and the failure has been multiplied in more recent times.

I cannot even assign one side or other the distinction of being worse. Southern Aristocrats used the perception among poor white southerners of having a social class beneath them to gain support to the point of fighting in a war to defend their cash cow. Northern Aristocrats used a ginned-up noble cause to motivate poor while northerners into supporting them to the point of fighting in a war do defend their cash cow (i.e., the captive audience/market the north had in the south). It is hard for me to find a moral high ground here. In terms of governance, states' rights is more defensible than we are simply going to use a tariff to force you to buy our more expensive goods at your expense because we can, not that this really changes the fact that two self-serving political interests had a showdown on the battlefield and it ended the way it ended.

 

[AmmoManAaron]

What innocent omission did I make? My posts within this thread have been consistent. I addressed the historical reason why Democrat then, became Republicans. I made no such claim as to why the South has remained red afterwards, but I did acknowledge that there's a difference between those who initially changed parties and those in the GOP now. My motivations? Say something that catches my eye as a misrepresentation, and ill address it. If you feel give been trolled by facts, then so be it.

jamil has already touched on it, your original post had the appearance (to me at least) of being designed to get people to jump to the conclusion that you were saying that the south is Rep because they are racist. You left out the fact that the Reps had been gaining popularity in the south before the CRA and the south would've eventually went Rep regardless of the temporary surge they experienced from racist former Dems.

 

[T.Lex]

Personally, I find African-American more offensive than the other two.

Troll.



BTW, Strom Thurmond was a monster to my ideological self until after his death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond#First_daughter

Six months after Thurmond's death, Essie Mae Washington-Williams publicly revealed that she was his daughter. She identified as African American...

That really humanized him to me. Of course, it revealed that he was probably more racial politician than real racist, but whatevs.

And, to her credit:

Washington-Williams later joined the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, as she was eligible through her Thurmond ancestry. ... She encouraged other African Americans to learn their ancestry and join the lineage associations, to promote a wider sense of American history, including its long history of interracial families.

Pretty cool that she joined a "confederate" legacy group.

 

[jamil]

I think there's a generational factor that needs to be accounted for. It is unfair (IMHO) to judge Boomers or pre-Boomers based on Gen-X era racial sensibilities. In some ways, being able to comment on someone's race is LESS racist than what we have today.

My grandmother describes black people as "colored" because that's the word she grew up with. I have seen her interact with people of all races (well, not recently, I mean, she is in her 90s, so she doesn't get out much) and treat them all the same: kinda cranky.

My point is, those comments before the 80s should have a discounted racism quotient. People then grew up in a racial culture that "we" can't fully appreciate.

This is a good point. Who doesn't have an experience hearing some really socially whacked out stuff from an old person? My dad drop out of the 5th grade in the 1920s to pick cotton. The context of his social coming of age was the South Carolina during the great depression. I'm not astonished that he held the views he had, or that he used the language he did. People evolve through their lives, but they also hang on to a lot of their social sensibilities from that point. To the day he died he still made fluent use of many of the terms that were socially acceptable back then but not now.

 

[Kutnupe14]

jamil has already touched on it, your original post had the appearance (to me at least) of being designed to get people to jump to the conclusion that you were saying that the south is Rep because they are racist. You left out the fact that the Reps had been gaining popularity in the south before the CRA and the south would've eventually went Rep regardless of the temporary surge they experienced from racist former Dems.

They may have, but that's conjecture. I think you'd be hard pressed to come to that conclusion, if the Democrats had maintained a commitment to segregation and Jim Crow. And I'm pretty sure I made mention, in this thread, that it was around the time of FDRs New Deal that the wheels got turning in regards to the party switch.

 

[Kutnupe14]

This is a good point. Who doesn't have an experience hearing some really socially whacked out stuff from an old person? My dad drop out of the 5th grade in the 1920s to pick cotton. The context of his social coming of age was the South Carolina during the great depression. I'm not astonished that he held the views he had, or that he used the language he did. People evolve through their lives, but they also hang on to a lot of their social sensibilities from that point. To the day he died he still made fluent use of many of the terms that were socially acceptable back then but not now.

My dad picked cotton until 18, part of a share cropping family. And then the son of the family that owned their land hit the "lottery." And so a debt was paid, the son stayed in Alabama, and my dad got an all expenses paid vacation in Southeast Asia.

 

[rhino]

This is a good point. Who doesn't have an experience hearing some really socially whacked out stuff from an old person? My dad drop out of the 5th grade in the 1920s to pick cotton. The context of his social coming of age was the South Carolina during the great depression. I'm not astonished that he held the views he had, or that he used the language he did. People evolve through their lives, but they also hang on to a lot of their social sensibilities from that point. To the day he died he still made fluent use of many of the terms that were socially acceptable back then but not now.

You have inspired me to pick a previous era and deliberately tailor my behavior and speech to be consistent with what was acceptable then.

 

[T.Lex]

You have inspired me to pick a previous era and deliberately tailor my behavior and speech to be consistent with what was acceptable then.

Can we pick for you?

I vote for the Netherlands in 1714.

 

[rhino]

Can we pick for you?

I vote for the Netherlands in 1714.

Well thank you very much mister helper.

Now I'll have to learn some obscure dialect of Dutch.