The Progressive Republican Party Of 1956

[johnlucas]

10. Everything changed in 1964

No one really wants to admit that one major reason American political parties form the way they do is because of the Issue of the Black People.

This goes back to the very beginning of the political camps. All the way to the 1780s & 1790s with their immoral 3/5 of a person rule.
Remember they divided the country into Free State & Slave State after not being able to come to a decision on what to do with the Blacks which built the backbone of this country.
That Compromise of 1820 which unraveled in the 1860s in that famous war.

Every time the Issue of the Black People comes up the political coalitions realign & transform.
Frankie Roosevelt began a realignment in the 1930s that wasn't finished until John Kennedy & his boy Lyndon Johnson signed that Civil Rights Act in 1964.

We've been dealing with that general realignment ever since & now with the reality of a Black President, the coalitions are realigning again here in 2012.

Bigoted Whites are the bane of this nation & are the faction that keeps the nation from improving.
Roosevelt did many things right but these bigoted Whites were pissed that he wanted to include Blacks in all the fun.
So these Democrats who descend from Southern slaveowning plantation dude Tom Jefferson renamed themselves Dixiecrats or "States' Rights" Democrats in protest of these traitor Democrats who desegregated the Military allowing Blacks in.

The Republican Party which used to be the ones fighting those slaveowners in the 1860s left Blacks in the lurch after ending Reconstruction in 1877. And with the FDR's new model of Democrats being responsible for ending the Great Depression with the New Deal & helping to win World War II, they needed to get every bit of support they could muster in order to stay solvent as a party.
Hence your Progressive Republican Party platform of 1956 which includes support for the still-disenfranchised Blacks.

But after LBJ finished Kennedy's work & opened the doors for Blacks with that 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans knew they lost their chance & could end up like the Whig Party.
These new Democrats are getting ALL the big business done!
Meanwhile, the Dixiecrats felt it was the last straw & left the Democratic Party in exodus.
This was the last chance for the Republican Party to stay alive so they absorbed all of those Bigoted Whites & formed a new coalition abandoning whatever you saw in that 1956 platform. Ironic that these former Dixiecrats joined the party which once opposed their ancestors & freed the slaves.

With the power of the Bigoted Whites who would wreck the country just to get back at the Blacks (& other ethnic groups which could be equated with Blacks), Rick Nixon then Ron Reagan then George Bush and George Bush the Sequel began rolling back all the advances made with Roosevelt's New Deal & its descendant policies like the Great Society.
Instead of pushing back the post-1964 Democrats let themselves get pushed over in order not to offend that giant angry bigoted White mass. There must be a Third Way to coax those bigots back on our side.

After running virtually unchallenged or barely challenged for 3 decades, George Bush the Sequel allowed this political coalition to MAX OUT unchecked & wrecked the power of the coalition in the process.
In the aftermath of this destructive excess came the first Black President, Barack Obama. Delivered by the Democrats.

Unfortunately Obama still plays these Third Way games & stalls the inevitable dissolving of the coalition represented in Republican Party. Yet even still this election is once again the crossroads for the Republican Party. This coalition containing the Bigoted Whites is crumbling & splintering. And once again it all comes down the Issue of the Black People. Especially when some of those Black People are the President & the rest of the First Family.

This country was built on White Supremacy. It was built on Racism.
The only reason it changes is because some Whites actually believe in Equality for ALL people.
However those numbers are not quite enough to offset the Whites who don't...yet.
But each time a White casts aside the mentality of White Supremacy & picks up Equality, more Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, First Nationals, Gays, & every other devalued group get to add to the numbers that offset those bigots.

Obama has the power to finish off that bigoted coalition forever.
He hasn't used it. He NEEDS to use it.
End those Third Way tactics. Let's get back to the First Way & make some New Deals.

It's not just the crossroads for the Republican Party.
John Lucas