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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
As soon as the Civil Rights Act was passed, the racist southern Democrats switched parties. That consequently led to the decline of the Golden Age of the 40s-70s. Ronald Reagan was the herald of the "stealth racist" Republicans who mouthed pretty words about fairness and freedom while targeting minorities for economic and political disenfranchisement.
The Republican Party since then has only gotten worse. Whether you consider yourself racist or not, you support a racist, plutocratic, theocratic party. That's pretty much it.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:27:55 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"yeah..we're all aware the dems were one the racist party. But only dems seem to be aware the Dixiecrats are the predecessors to the modern southern state republican.
and technically speaking, most of us socialists dont want to destroy religion, we just want christianity to shut up and stop acting like it deserves special treatment.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:30:14 AM by midgetsnowman
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Democrats were racist yes, nobody ever denied this. However those that support racist policies here and now are pretty much universally Republican.
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Socialists aren't running the Democratic party. The Tea Party and religious right are running the Republicans and most of them are indeed racists that want Christianity to be the law of the land.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:30:58 AM by Kostya
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Don't forget, targeting the poor by using loaded racial terms. The Welfare Queen myth was right from the start about a black woman.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:29:56 AM by Enkufka
Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen FryThis tends to need to be pointed out once in a while, but for the most part, the racist democrats (i.e. the Dixiecrats) ended up joining the Republican Party about the time the Democratic Party became less racist.
Robert Byrd is an exception (staying a Democrat), but then he got less racist over time.
Edit- ninjaed by Fighteer
edited 26th Jun '13 11:30:25 AM by Hodor
Edit, edit, edit, edit the wiki@Ringsea: It is not an exaggeration to observe that the modern Republican seeks to uphold exactly one Constitutional amendment: the second; while the modern Democrat seeks to uphold all of them except the second.
Also, we are all socialists in this country. If you get Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment, or Social Security, you're a beneficiary of socialism.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:31:33 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Ultimately if the Republican Party is going to survive, we need to start by bothering to confront the problem the same way the Democrats did a couple decades ago. They had a pretty visceral series of in-house arguments and rather painstakingly excised their more distasteful aspects — they still have some to be sure, just not the worst ones. Our party has become more uniformly lockstep and obstructive than anything the country has ever seen, up to and including the years leading up to the Civil War (aside from the obvious topics, party lines in the North and South were still regularly crossed and compromises struck for lesser things). The smart thing to do would be to kick out the Rick Perrys, the Scott Walkers, the John Boehners — and bring in more of the saner heads like the Jon Huntsmans, the Chris Christies, etc. instead of castigating them every time they dare to dissent from anything.
And ultimately, yes, we do need to change a good deal of our policy. The party's completely unrecognizable from what it was even just a few decades ago — a natural result of a few decades of one-two punch: regulatory capture by the businessmen that benefited from Reagan rolling back the New Deal, and getting hijacked by former Dixiecrats that left the Dems because of the Civil Rights Act and got picked up by Nixon for free votes.
Right now, the way we're reacting to the RNC autopsy is almost entirely procedural and refuses to admit the innate toxicity of some of our policies. "How do we repackage the same thing we're already saying?" One of the points the RNC report brought up was that people tend to be very supportive of tax cuts and subsidies the moment you mention small business — but rather than creating bills that actually benefit small business, their response was to just say "small business" more often while pushing the same bills that will clearly be targeted at the larger ones.
The tack we should be taking is applying "opportunity and small government" in more sane ways. Instead of viciously attacking social safety netsnote, we should be viciously attacking the surveillance and invasive military actions we currently overwhelmingly support. Logically we should be supporting gay marriage etc. instead of trying to suppress it. Gun control we're already on a logical side, but taken to a batshit crazy extreme (blocking background checks that the majority of our own party supports). And instead of pushing tax cuts for the wealthy, we need to push tax cuts for the middle class and oppose mechanisms that allow the wealthy to stifle competition.
One of the best things we can do is realize how recent the bulk of our platform is. A huge part of the RNC survey was trying to instill this feeling of tradition and age-old values, when we're currently an almost complete 180 from what we were as recently as the 70's.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:34:45 AM by Pykrete
technically the Repiublicans also want to keep a twisted version of the first in play. One that allows them to say whatever they want without any repercussions.
and restricting abortion isnt racist. Its sexist.
because 9/10 of the people arguing for it dont really care about human lives so much as they care about controlling women and paper it over nicely with protecting lives, nevermind the second that "careless slut who just wants out of having a child" has the baby, they then seek to rip away any finan cial entitlements that'd help her take care of the child.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:34:14 AM by midgetsnowman
Fighteer: Even that's not true. Many Democrats acknowledge we still need the amendment to some degree. They just think the first four words "A well regulated militia" need to actually be followed.
Ringsea: You're right, that's not racist however, it is sexist. There are reasons most women are Democrats and it's not to spite the Republicans. The same goes for minorities, poor people, and LGBT individuals.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:33:48 AM by Kostya
@Ringsea: Restricting abortion is anti-woman's rights, which is another keystone of Republican politics. But we have a ban on abortion debates, so let's not go there.
@Pykrete: That crap was simmering in the depths of Republican politics ever since FDR, but what happened in the 40s was that the New Deal Democrats earned such a dominant majority in government that the Republicans had no choice but to go along if they wanted anything to get done. The Dixiecrats' defection gave the GOP enough strength to start rolling back the New Deal, but it was always their intention to do so.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:35:01 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm aware. Reagan didn't happen in a vacuum, though I'm at least mildly willing to give him a certain amount of benefit of the doubt that he actually thought it would help.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:38:22 AM by Pykrete
Hmm. Maybe abortion was a bad example. You guys are right though, the Republican social platform is pretty much all wrong (not all of it.) and we need to kick the racist out. The point I was making is that not ALL the policies are racist or evil or whatever. Saying so just makes it harder to actually get anything done. I was pretty overdefencive, and I'm sorry for that. You get tired of people in the LGBT threads making the debate out to be "Democrats are good, Repubs are bad", for example.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:41:09 AM by Ringsea
The most edgy person on the Internet.And quite frankly we're getting tired of Republican politicians showing themselves to be heartless and willing to break the rules to get their policies through despite how actively destructive they've been.
Quite frankly, Republicans being actively terrible is what got me into politics in the first place. When the Tea Party rolled in Wisconsin, we saw rollbacks of everything that the state stood for. Union rights and representation, tax cuts for the wealthy while advocating "Fixing the budget" as an excuse to cut millions from the education budget, and almost literally taking orders from CE Os while hundreds of thousands of people protest in the street. Wisconsin's been a testing ground for Republican policies and we have the stellar award of 49th in job growth to show for it.
Very big Daydream Believer. "That's not knowledge, that's a crapshoot!" -Al Murray "Welcome to QI" -Stephen Fry![]()
well, I agree not everything the republicans say is pure evil. The problem is theyre still kind of in denial and need to do some serious housecleaning of radical elements. This happened to the dems too. In reagan's Heyday we had the same problem with convincing ourselves we were morally in the right and America would totally rally to our side if we became even more extreme about it,
We didnt recover and regain power till we finally got rid of that notion and told the crazies to shut the hell up.
edited 26th Jun '13 11:45:02 AM by midgetsnowman
The problem there is without data on what exactly Utah's policies are that doesnt say much. some policies work better in some markets than other markets.
so that says less "republican economics is right" and more "Utah's economic policies seem to be working"
edited 26th Jun '13 11:47:57 AM by midgetsnowman

edited 26th Jun '13 11:23:15 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"