People who like their politics simple (read: Tea Partyists, libertarians, pseudo-conservatives, and other rightwingers who can’t tell that Rick Perry lacks an IQ above room temperature, Herman Cain is actually a cartoon character, and flavor-or-the-moment Chris Christie is a giant bullying spoiled toddler) have a hard time dealing with the complexity of the ever-shifting nature of political though and affiliation.  They cannot grasp that at various points in US history, certain crucial issues come along that shake up both party commitments and ideological orientations: Abolitionism in the 1850s, post-Civil War reconstruction in the 1870s, robber-baron capitalism in the 1890s, internationalism vs. isolationism in the early 1900s, the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s; all these issues reshuffled the decks of both party and ideology.

First, a little context for today’s pedantic rant: In a recent Facebook posting a beloved but benighted old friend posted:

“On April 8, 1865 congress passed the 13th Amendment banning slavery with 100% Republican support and 63% Democratic opposition. The libtards have always been the racist party.” (Stop snickering liberal friends, this is the new ‘populism’–the ‘vox ignorami’ if you will.)

This charming bon déclaration was followed by the simple correction:

“The parties have basically flip flopped from that time til now. As a result of the civil rights legislation passed under Johnson, the “Dixiecrats” switched from the Democratic party to the Republican party.” (One would think this both unobjectionable and unexceptional, however…)

This brought forth a stunningly malinformed (and hostile) series of responses from the kookerati. Apparently our cousins on the right are determined to rescue the ‘reputation’ of the Republican party from what they moronically insist is a revisionist history of American conservatism (which they, with stubborn ignorance, conflate with the history of the Republican party). One genius brilliantly offered this:

“Oh yes, the great Dixiecrat migration of Strom Thurman and uh…uh…oh yeah Strom Thurman. Never mind guys who were actually IN the KKK (like Robert Byrd) remained Democrats as did other southern Dems (like Al Gore’s dad!) who voted AGAINST the Act. The switch was a myth. New Republicans replaced old Democrats so the seats switched hands and the Dems now say it was new GOP racists for old Dem racists…Unfortunately, a lot of people…bought the lie and so many other lies so they reflexively think of Republicans as racists.”

Wow. The things people learn while attending private evangelical schools or receiving their pre-packaged homeschooling ‘curriculum’. Apparently our friend never heard of looking stuff up nor about the Republican Southern Strategy which won Sammy Davis, Jr.’s favorite racist, Richard Nixon, more than 70% of the popular vote in most of the Deep South (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina). Had our expert (in rightwing terms I guess he may actually qualify) taken two minutes he would have found that the list of names in what he calls the ‘myth’ of the ‘Dixiecrat migration’ contains a few more names than Strom Thurmond (as well as the obvious and unforgettable Jesse Helms). Here’s a short list of southern Democratic pols who switched to the Republican Party beginning in the early 1960s:

• James D. Martin of Alabama (US Senate)
• Floyd Spence of South Carolina (state senate and US House)
• Howard Callaway of Georgia (US House)
• Albert Watson of South Carolina (US House)
• Thomas A. Wofford of South Carolina (state senate)
• Winthrop Rockefeller, Governor of Arkansas
• Jerry Thomasson, Arkansas State Attorney General)
• Jesse Helms^[1]of North Carolina (U.S. Senate)
• C. Clemons of Louisiana (state senate)
• Bob Barrof Georgia (US House)
• Trent Lott (US Senate—the friggin’ SENATE MAJORITY LEADER who had to resign after opining that good ol’ Strom had it right…really, you didn’t just knowthis?)
• Mills E. Godwin Jr., Governor of Virginia
• J. McNamara, Louisiana House
• Lane Carson, Louisiana House
• Robert G. Jones, Louisiana Senate
• Thomas Blileyof Virginia (US House)
• Michael F. “Mike” Thompson, Louisiana House
• Charles Grisbaum, Jr., Louisiana House
• Ed Scogin, Louisiana House
• Frank D. White, Governor of Arkansas
• J.C. “Sonny” Gilbert, Louisiana Senate
• And while not exactly from the Old South, Phil Gramm’s switch while U.S. Representative from Texas is commonly understood to be part of the phenomenon (or what ignoramuses call a ‘myth’) of the party-switching by previously race-baiting Democrats to race-baiting Republicans

What seems to confound those who have trouble simultaneously thinking and polishing their antique SS pins is the historically fluid nature of American (and Western) political history. The policy commitments of American political parties have shifted on an almost continuous basis since the founding.

And this pattern of principle-drift is not limited to political parties. Even broad categories like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are not immune to transformation of terms and commitments. (…and here comes the pedantic part of the rant.)

Upon the coining of the political category ‘liberal’ in the 18th century, the word was used to refer to a line of thought calling for liberation from traditional norms and values and included the idea that class mobility would be enhanced by removing the constraints that governments (which were mostly non-democratic at the time) had traditionally placed on economic exchange. (Note that capitalism was in its infant stages at the time as most economies were mercantilist-transitioning-to-capitalist-markets at the time). Liberation from the traditional forms was seen as fostering equality and disintegrating aristocracy (aristocracy being guilty of consigning a rising class of merchants to second-rank status while taxing them heavily to support the lifestyle of the inherently superior class). The deep concern for liberals was equality which liberalization would allow free ‘men’ to achieve—equal status with one another—without being bound by traditional hierarchies.

In that era ‘conservatives’ were those who saw a danger from liberalization of economic and social traditional constraints; they believed that such liberalization would dissolve the traditional bonds that held communities and societies together. Indeed, part of what they wanted to conserve were hierarchies that benefited the aristocratic classes, but part of what they were concerned about was the emerging system of liberal capitalism and its corrosive impact on church, family, tradition, and community. (One branch of this stage of European conservative thought has been associated with one flavor of the Romantic Reaction.)

In America, by the 1820s, there was no actual ‘conservatism’ in the European sense. The fundamental assumptions of Lockean liberalism were part of the fabric of the new American republic. Written into the genetic code of the American ideology was the basic democratic hatred of Old World ideas about bloodline defined social ranking and divinely determined political status among fellow citizens. The new nation had other emerging fights to deal with—abolitionism vs. chattel slavery; agrarian localism vs. commercial cosmopolitanism; industrial capitalism vs. industrial socialism; etc. These arguments, however, took place as a family squabble WITHIN what Europeans of that era would have seen as ‘liberalism’.

Thus American ideological contention between liberalism and ‘conservatism’ arose as a schism WITHIN liberalism over how to define and promote liberalism’s main concerns: freedom and equality.

As we see it now, what we today call ‘liberalism’ is that faction that retained its concern for liberation from traditional forms, but transformed the original Old World conservative critique of the corrosive effects of unfettered capitalism into a genuine liberal concern that the complete liberation of capital in 19^th century America was destructive to families and communities increasingly beholden to factory systems that enforced savage conditions and work rules as the price of employment and was leading to a recapitulation of the Old World problems of class immobility and social inequality with a corporate-capitalist uber-class replacing the titled lords and barons of the Old World aristocracy.

Moreover, many liberals of the egalitarian faction began to see that among the traditions that bound people in status-determined inequality were issues such as racism and sexism. Liberalism opened up a critique of not only old traditions, but also of all status quo arrangements of social rank, power, and orientation—liberalism entered its progressive phase.

Meanwhile, the other faction of liberalism retained its concern for freedom from government tyranny which they continued to see as the greatest threat to liberty and, most importantly, the fundamental right of private property. This branch of liberalism (what we now know of as the American version of conservatism) grew alarmed over the shift of liberalism toward the then-emergent critiques and programs of the various versions of socialism developing in the 19th century; conservative-liberals (as we might call them at that stage) feared that government would invade private institutions and destroy their social authority. (Because all forms of conservatism have always arisen in reaction to the progress of modernity, and all bear the family mark of favoring status quo arrangements of power over intentional redistributive justice, the left recognizes ‘conservative’ thought as inherently reactionary.)

These freshly minted reactionary conservatives believed that using government to reform capitalism in order to ameliorate its most corrosive effects was a danger to freedom (a freedom in which individual differences in capabilities would result in ‘natural’ inequalities of poverty and social status unlike the old aristocratic system in which rank was determined by blood), and that a better way to avert the dangers of ‘modern society’ (which they preferred to critique rather than the capitalism which buttered their bread and paid for their domestic servants) was to reform the hearts of man through traditional means of church and community and to ameliorate the suffering of the ‘deserving poor’ (those who were impoverished ‘through no fault of their own’) through personal charity (thus reactionary thought transformed issues of egalitarian distribution of power and privilege into qustions of moral worth and the traditional virtues).

For these reactionaries, wholesome social order would be protected by private institutions of society and most assuredly not by government (which they believed had either been handed over to the mob by the emergence of democracy or had fallen into the hands of “Godless” socialistic technocratic elites). Given this perspective, conservatives also condemned progressivism’s growing impulse to attack traditional social values of racial segregation, gender roles, and so forth, which they believed were ‘natural’ arrangements and bulwarks against the chaos that unbound modernist liberalism would unleash. And here we see the roots of the reactionary handwringing over ‘liberal decadence’ as the source of social disintegration, while left-progressives point to unbridled capitalism as the universal solvent in which all human and social bonds, values, and commitments must dissolve.

The point of all this is to demonstrate the malleability of both party and ideological identities, positions, and concerns. And to emphasize the point that on a fairly regular basis, issues arise that disrupt all political commitments across party and ideological lines.

Take today’s debates around immigration and undocumented workers. Some of those most committed to punishing employers for hiring ‘illegal worker’ are in all other contexts ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’, while some of the most vigorous advocates of liberalizing ‘worker mobility’ across borders are in all other contexts ‘conservatives’ (along with many libertarians).

Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican president of a century ago championed environmental protection, the heavy use of eminent domain to create national parks and monument land, brute government intervention into the ‘private’ markets to regulate the building of corporate trusts and was a Progressive. All these positions would now earn Teddy a one-way ticket out of today’s Republican Party (or maybe just his bullet-riddled corpse) and instead are the domain of present-day progressives who compose the base of the Democratic Party.

And to return to the original question: During the debates over the 1964 Voting Rights Act there were nowhere near enough Democratic votes from the rightwingers in the Southern Democratic caucus to gain victory for the Democratic president’s initiative. Non-southern Democratic Party progressives (liberals) in the north, such as the heroic Hubert Humphrey and the brilliant Mike Mansfield, fully supported the Civil Rights Act. But they needed the votes and political power of progressive Republicans like the stellar Everett Dirksen (R-IL) and Tom Kuchel (R-CA) to overcome opposition from Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond, Richard Russell, James Eastland, and Robert Byrd who staged the longest filibuster in US history to block movement on the Act.

The factual case is this:

In the end the Democrats in the House Voted for the Act 153-91 (a wide majority of Dems supporting ending segregation, but not enough for passage) and could not have passed the bill without the overwhelming support of the 171 voting House Republicans who went for the Act a whopping 136-35. In the Senate, Democrats supported the Act by 2-to-1 majority, 46-21, while the Republican senators supported by almost 4-to1, 27-6. But though the Republican Party was at that time a strongly progressive party on matters of race, there were also a significant and growing number of Republican legislators who were every bit as opposed to it as the rightwing racist Dixiecrats. One of the most fierce opponents of passage was Barry Goldwater (the logic of whose position amounts to asserting that states rights supersede civil rights and, predicting the Rand Paul stupidity, Constitutional literalism precludes federal interventions in pursuit of justice), whom every vertebrate knows was THE father of the modern conservative movement (and a Republican, for you those suffering from Teabag Induced Reality Impairment Syndrome).

After the passage of the Act, the Democrats formerly “solid south” was solid no more. George Wallace split from the party to run for president as an independent racist and Richard Nixon successfully deployed the “Southern Strategy” to go after the votes of Southern redneck Democrats who believed the party had stabbed them in the back—a strategy of race baiting (now using dogwhistle techniques) as current as the GW Bush 2000 campaign against John McCain for the Republican nomination.

The loss of its former commitments to justice should shame today’s Republicans and instigate an impulse to reflection. Instead they give us tortured revisions of history along with the spoogespeak drooled by Michele Bachmann, Bill O’Reilly and The Weekly Standard.

Politics is complex. Simpletons should not try this at home.

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[1] I thought it might be helpful to bold the names of the famous examples that might commonly come to mind for anyone who is trying to be taken seriously as knowing anything about US political history. Thomas Biley, Jr. for example was the first Republican to win an undisputed victory in the VA-7 district since Reconstruction. (That’s right VA-7, as in the district now represented by Eric Cantor who, by the way, publicly courted Virginia’s rabidly neo-Confederate group, the Constitutional Sovereignty Alliance.