Talk:Conservative Democrat

Is this a joke?

• "the Democrat Party had a conservative wing for much of its history." This vague statement in of itself sounds like liberal agitprop to promote the notion that "yes, past Democrats were racist, but they were conservatives!" It's lazy research at best. Now yes, there was a persisting Bourbon element, though the party was usually overshadowed by the progressives.
• "The American South had a long tradition of electing conservative Democrats to office, including in presidential elections until they broke from the Democrats in 1964 to vote for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee." This is indistinguishable from standard academia brainwash. The intent is to portray the racist, segregationist Democrats of the past U.S. South as "right-wing" in the larger ploy to paint racism/white supremacy as "right-wing." Never mind the fact that nearly all Southern Dems in the 1920s were on the hard progressive left of the political spectrum!
• "From 1948 to the 1970s an even more conservative wing of the party, mostly from the South, was called "Dixiecrats". This Dixiecrat wing of the party has been essentially defunct since the 1970s, when the House contingent was led by the late Joe Waggonner of Louisiana. A few former Dixiecrats, including Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms" Helms was a Dixiecrat? I don't find any evidence that he affiliated with the States' Rights revolt of 1948, which is the technical constituting definition of a Dixiecrat. And the Dixiecrats weren't authentic conservatives; a large chunk were New Deal liberals previously in the 1930s, even if there were some old-school Bourbons like Coke Stevenson. The only reason they became identified with the anti–New Deal right by the late 1940s was due to the changes in left–right ideology itself. Wartime price controls increasingly alienated the old rural progressive base in the South, and the pro–civil rights policies enacted during the war years, such as the FEPC, contributed to distaste towards the modern liberalism of the New Deal by the old hardcore racist, Jacksonian/Jeffersonian progressive Democrats. A good example of this shift is evident in the voting patterns of John E. Rankin, a horrendous demagogue who defended the REA against "socialism" accusations in the early New Deal phases, though mostly joined the right by the 1940s; his old-school progressivism was evident in his continued support for the TVA and antitrust, though the concept of "liberalism" had changed by then, and thus his opposition towards labor unions (once they proved beneficial for civil rights, racist Southern whites began to resent them), price controls, etc. became indicative of a new supposed "right-wing" shift. That's what the standard narrative peddles, though my independent analysis concludes that those individuals themselves barely changed. Did Rankin and Bilbo actually become right-wing? No. Academia never ceases to produce massive piles of propaganda to bury the inconvenient truths it hates, but the factual reality remains!

—LT ^{(Matthew 26:52)} Monday, 00:07, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

I ratify these comments. And Dixiecrats died out in 1948. RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 02:15, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

Exactly, the official movement ceased when the Dixiecrat Party failed to stifle Truman's reelection. The remaining fragments were hardly in solid unification, and various authors, depending on the extent of their biases, examine the matter differently. For instance, notorious left-wing revisionist Kevin M. Kruse, who demonstrates profound stupidity in failing to consistently state distinctly what a Dixiecrat is (in one Twitter thread, he insinuated without evidence that William C. Cramer was a Dixiecrat, which is simply hilarious as you'd think a premier "historian" like him would actually comprehend the basics!), paints the Dixiecrats as predecessors to the modern Southern Republicans. However, the much more accurate book "The End of Southern Exceptionalism" clearly articulates that the constituencies, by congressional district, which supported Thurmond in 1948, were more likely to support Adlai Stevenson, not Eisenhower, in 1952.

Last year, I examined the county votes in Alabama between the Dixiecrat/GOP split in '48 (the state removed Truman from the ballot) and the Democrat/GOP split in '52, and sure enough, the general trend was that the harder the county leaned towards the Dixiecrats in '48, the harder it leaned for Stevenson in '52. (correlation coefficient was ~0.52) —LT ^{(Matthew 26:52)} Monday, 13:58, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

They claim the Dixiecrat movement continued past 1948 cause Strom Thurmond served in the Senate and voted against the 1957 and 1964 Civil Rights Acts; of course, Thurmond did not lead a Dixiecrat party after 1948, was not elected to the Senate on the Dixiecrat party ticket, and voted for the Democrat Party Majority Leader in the Senate. It's an effort to divorce the Dixiecrats from the Democrats.

We could use Bernie Sanders as parallel example; while he votes for the Democrat party Majority Leader, he remains outside the Democrat party. Thurmond was elected as a Democrat. RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 16:47, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

[EC] Fair point; the revisionists are quick to forget that the congressional Dixiecrats quickly returned to the Democratic fold. And they love to harp on the Bourbon faction of the Dixiecrats which supported Eisenhower while ignoring the masses which threw support to Stevenson. —LT ^{(Matthew 26:52)} Monday, 16:54, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

Technically right now, the GOP are the majority party in the Senate. There are 50 Republicans, and only 48 Democrats. Had Thurmond remained outside the Democrat party, the claim of Dixiecrats surviving post-1948 would be valid. RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 16:55, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

Let's suppose for example Mitch McConnell got dumped in favor of a real conservative. Whoever that may be, he could negotiate with Kirsten Sinema or even Joe Manchin to elect himself Senate Majority Leader while letting them remain independent. But as McConnell being a member of the Uniparty, from Sinema or Manchin's perspective, there isn't a dime's worth of difference between McConnell and Schumer, so they remain with whoever promises their state more federal spending (i.e. money). RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 17:15, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

The problem is that the term "Dixiecrat" has become a buzzword tossed back and forth between modern-day conservatives and liberals in generically referring to Southern Democrats as a whole even though its technical definition is a member of the States' Rights Democratic Party, which existed only in 1948; for example, Dinesh D'Souza has made this blunder. —LT ^{(Matthew 26:52)} Monday, 17:00, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

D'Sousa had 3 very interesting Youtube uploads yesterday. Seen them? RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 17:02, May 15, 2023 (EDT)

IMO, D'Sousa makes that 'blunder' cause he's talking to students raised in the Howard Zinn school of American history, so he has to use idioms they are familiar with. RobS^{Give Peace a chance} 17:04, May 15, 2023 (EDT)