Savant on Both Parties

I think BOTH parties are racist, but the Republicans more militantly so. The Republicans TODAY are contemporary equivalents of the DIXIECRATS of 50 or 60 years ago--or earlier. In the time of Lincoln and Reconstruction the Republicans, though also racist, were the most progressive of the two parties. Indeed, even Karl Marx and other leftists and progressives became supporters of Lincoln and his party. The roles of the two parties have shifted since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and BEGAN shifting precisely DURING and BECAUSE of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. One could see this with the Barry Goldwater campaign, the campaign of a right wing Republican who wasn't a fanatic segregationist himself, but who campaign with its opposition to Civil Rights, began to draw support of the segregationist Dixiecrats---southern Democrats who became disaffected with their Party when it was pulled into support (albeit foot dragging support) of the Civil Rights program.

Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican who opposed the Civil rights Act of 1964, intensified the rightward shift of the Republican Party until we now have a former "Party of LIncoln" now imposing new restrictive voter requirement that reminds one of the restrictions imposed by Dixiecrats after Reconstruction. History is a ____. In a way, the Republicans resemble the Baptists who are today among the more conventional and conservative Christian denominations, even though their forbears--ANABAPTISTS--were in the 16th Century the most RADICAL and PROGRESSIVE form of Christianity in the West. The Republicans have become in political terms what the Baptists became in religious terms--reactionary offspring of progressive parents.

-Savant