The Roots of the GOP’s Race Problem

[DonViejo]

Michael Tomasky

Thursday is the 50th anniversary of the Great Society and the civil rights push. But if conservative hero Barry Goldwater had had his way, government would have stayed out of it.

Fifty years ago Thursday, Lyndon Johnson delivered the commencement address at the University of Michigan and first uttered the words “great society.” Before you click away, this is not one of those columns soberly assessing his vision’s accomplishments and failures. Rather, I ask a different question: What if there had been no civil-rights revolution, and we’d taken conservatives’ advice?

This question struck me as I was reading through a Great Society-at-50 assessment by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Being an AEI scholar, Eberstadt is, as you’d imagine, quite critical of a lot of Great Society anti-poverty and other “transfer” programs. But he ungrudgingly acknowledges one point: With respect to the civil rights revolution, which obviously was a key part of the Great Society, ending legal segregation really did take a massive effort, one that could only have been led by the federal government.

The country was largely united behind this effort by 1964. But not conservatives. Of course, most of those conservatives were Southern Democrats. Not all of them, though. 1964 was the year of Barry Goldwater, when the nascent conservative movement that had started in the 1950s took control—for the time being—of the GOP. Today, Goldwater is a hero of the conservative movement. Here is how he thought segregation could be ended in the United States, in a quote from his famous 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative: “I believe that the problem of race relations, like all social and cultural problems, is best handled by the people directly concerned. Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.”

Incredible. “The people directly concerned.” That was the whole problem—they were handling it, in their inimitable way. Those sheriff’s deputies turning dogs and fire hoses on children—why, they weren’t being racist at all. They were dethroning tyranny.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/22/the-roots-of-the-gop-s-race-problem.html

[Supersedeas]

1. Not all of them are united though...

[ConnorMarc]

2. Today's "Conservatives" Claim That Democrats Are The Racists

They say that it was the Dem Party that perpetuated Jim Crow laws and segregation.

They say that it was the Republicans that fought that.

They discount the fact that the Southern Democrats are today's biggest Republican base, in fact they often deny it.

[Supersedeas]

10. and yet what do their actions and policies look like today

[Exposethefrauds]

3. Seeing that Hillary Clinton is a Goldwater Girl and Barry is dead

The media should ask her about her memories of being a Goldwater Girl and how great it was to be one seeing that she was an active member.

[DonViejo]

4. She was 17 years old, raised in a GOP household....

and wasn't eligibile to vote in a Presidential race until 1972. OTOH, Elizabeth Warren was a Republican in the 90's (when Daddy Bush and Bob Dole ran against Clinton and when the GOP was impeaching him). Should we hold that against my U.S. Senator if she decides to seek the Presidency?

[Exposethefrauds]

5. So what she like Goldwater enough to become one of his girls

And I do not remember her ever repudiating being a Goldwater Girl either. Did her parents force her to become a Goldwater Girl?

Unlike Warren who has proven she is liberal and progressive Hillary has not.

[DonViejo]

6. ...

"I wasn’t born a Democrat," Hillary Rodham Clinton writes on page one of her autobiography, "Living History."

She grew up in Park Ridge, Ill., a Republican suburb of Chicago, and describes her father, Hugh Rodham Jr., as a "rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it" (page 11). Her 9th-grade history teacher was also a very conservative Republican who encouraged her to read Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book, "Conscience of a Conservative," which inspired Clinton to write a term paper on the American conservative movement.

Hillary Clinton ("Living History," page 21): I was also an active Young Republican and, later, a Goldwater girl, right down to my cowgirl outfit and straw cowboy hat emblazoned with the slogan "AuH20." … I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide.

Goldwater is remembered for saying, in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice … and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." He lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, eking out only 38.5 percent of the popular vote.

Clinton writes that she began to have doubts about Goldwater’s politics even before she left high school, when a teacher forced her to play President Johnson during a mock presidential debate in order to "learn about issues from the other side" (page 24). Later, as a junior at Wellesley College, she writes, "I had gone from being a Goldwater Girl to supporting the anti-war campaign of Eugene McCarthy," driving to New Hampshire on weekends to stuff envelopes and walk precincts (pages 32-33). Even so, she also worked as a Washington, D.C., intern for Gerald Ford, who was then the Republican leader of the House, and she attended the 1968 Republican convention to work for New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s unsuccessful effort to get the GOP presidential nomination (pages 34-35).

At Yale Law School, however, she completed her transformation from Goldwater Republican to liberal Democrat. At Yale, she met Marian Wright Edelman and helped in her investigations of the Nixon administration. She also met Bill Clinton, and in 1972 joined him in Austin, Texas, where they both worked for George McGovern’s campaign. There, she writes, "I quickly made some of the best friends I’ve ever had" (page 58).

-Brooks Jackson

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/hillary-worked-for-goldwater/

I keep forgetting, Hillary's not a pure enough liberal. I look forward to reading your post quoting Senator Warren renouncing her '90's affiliation with the GOP.

[Exposethefrauds]

7. Keep waiting because I am not playing this BS game with you and Still not supporting Clinton

For Any elected office

I do not think she is very liberal nor progressive

I go by her actions not self serving words.

She is of no use to me.

[DonViejo]

8. I'm glad you think this is a "BS game"...

tells me volumes about you and the type of person you are. And BTW, I could care less who you support for the Democratic nomination, that wasn't what this brief discussion with you was about, rather, it was calling you on some erroneous information. But, please have one helluva fabulous day.

[Exposethefrauds]

9. A self serving book is not proof of anything and hence BS

Gee and I thought the point if DU was to support Democrats guess I was mistaken