Everybody living in the United States knows about the partisan divide. There's the big break between the left and the right - liberals and conservatives, in office and out of office, are always at each others' throats. And then the partisan groups are divided into their own partisan group. The left is a loosely-allied coalition of moderate Democrats, socialists, social liberals, and fiscal liberals. The right is split into factions, the three biggest ones being the moderate Republicans, the far-right Tea Party, and the libertarians, who are all over the spectrum. And, of course, everybody knows that America is split into red states and blue states. The Northeast, the contiguous Pacific coast and Hawaii tend to be blue, whereas the South, Midwest and the Last Frontier are red.
And, in recent history, this was almost exactly the opposite.
Before I go on, it's important to note that, for the most part, this post will be referring to the Deep South and the Northeast and the Pacific States, as these regions saw the most stark changes in ideology.
Take the election of 1864. The Union's election, that is. The only states that voted democratic were Kentucky, New Jersey, and Delaware. In the aftermath of the war, when Radical Republicans made life extremely difficult for Southern Democrats (as briefly mentioned in last week's post), the South became deeply democratic. This didn't manifest for several elections, since the Radical Republicans made it extremely difficult for ex-Confederates to do things like vote, but it eventually did. During the early part of the 20th Century, things became more unified. With the fragmentation of the Republicans into Republicans and Progressives in 1912, it's no surprise that the Democrats won most of the electoral votes that year. And in the years of the Depression, the Democrats won big throughout. Even Eisenhower managed to win most of the electoral votes - though the Solid South remained staunchly Democratic. In each of the aforementioned situations where the democrats won big, the only states that cast their votes for Republicans were in the Northeast or on the West Coast. Things start to change with Kennedy. The Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts won a decent chunk of the Northeast while maintaining the Democrats' grip on the south.
Then we get to Johnson in '64, where the situation from Eisenhower's day flips entirely. In '64, only six states voted Republican, and only one of them had done so in '60, that one being New Mexico. The other five were the states of the Solid South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. And, with the exception of Louisiana casting its vote for Eisenhower in '56, none of those states had voted for a Republican since '76. 1876, that is.
The issue at hand in this matter was race. This is where the "racist republican" stereotype comes in. Because, to their credit, Republican ideology is not in itself racist. The Republican Party, after all, was founded to combat slavery. After that goal was achieved, Republicans (in general) didn't put much effort into racial equality. But the Democrats (in general) of that period from the Civil War to Kennedy were much, much worse. The KKK was founded, among other sinister reasons, to intimidate minorities in the south so they wouldn't for Republicans. FDR himself refused to pass anti-lynching legislation. Jim Crow was, more or less, the Civil Wark-Kennedy Democrats. In 1957, the Democratic governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, sent state troops to block efforts to integrate public schools there. In response, the president sent federal paratroopers to enforce the integration efforts. That president, of course, was Ike Eisenhower, a Republican.
This is what went down: the democrats of the five southern states felt so betrayed by Johnson's support of the Civil Rights Act, they voted against him out of spite. The republicans in those states - ironically enough, the liberals - kept voting for their own party. Even though nothing in history or current events (roughly four-fifths of Congressional republicans favored the act, compared with about two-thirds of the democrats) supported the notion that the Republicans were suddenly the party of racism, the South still switched its voting platform. Most of those southerners who'd voted Republican in the past (the liberals of the south, ironically enough), it seems, saw little reason to change their stance. And so the south became thoroughly Republican, with the north beginning to favor the Democrats. The cultural revolution that took place in the '60's also played a role in the partisan divide - the deeply conservative southern states were in no rush to accept counterculture. Since hippies were often associated with democrats (though this was rarely by the democrats' choosing) and had more of a presence in the states that became our modern blue states, many conservative Americans were put-off from voting democratic. And likewise, the liberal culture that was generated in the '60's began to view the Republicans as the figures of the establishment. And all this isn't to say that there weren't exceptions to the rule, and plenty of them. In '72, almost every state voted for Nixon. In '76, almost every state voted for Carter. And in the '80's, with Reagan...do I even have to say it? Clinton received a mixed-bag of votes, mainly due to his southern heritage. But when things finally settled in and around 2000, it was tied to these factors, and still more.
So there it is: a simplified version of how our country reversed its politics and became more partisan than it has been since the days of the Civil War. This is why America is a mess. I miss the days when politicians stood up for what they believed in and actually worked to get things done. I miss the days when we did what was right and compromised with those whose views were different from our own. I miss the days when America and her people came first. And to be quite honest with you, I'd vote for Harry Truman or Dwight David Eisenhower over just about any candidate running in 2016. I don't care that one was a Democrat and one was a Republican, and that their political ideologies contrasted in more ways than they compared. I care that they were honest men who worked their asses off to do right by their nation. And that was most of the American people cared about in days gone by.
The good news is, the last time the nation was as partisan as it is today, it eventually went through a healing process and the partisan divide shrank down to the point that states who voted Republican in one election voted Democrat in the next, and vice versa. The bad news is, it took a civil war for that to happen. But we can hope that our elected officials, as much as we sometimes doubt it, remember the past, and will do anything they can to avoid repeating the horrors of civil war. Because if the worst should happen...well, that's a story for next week. Stay tuned.
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