Everyone is applauding this because they hate Trump, but take a step back and see the bigger picture. This could backfire in serious ways, and it plays to Trump's base's narrative that the mainstream media and tech giants are colluding to silence conservatives (and maybe there could even be some truth to that.) I know the Valley is an echo chamber, so obviously no one is going to ever realize this.
One way to look at this is that that's exactly what Twitter has started doing. The president violated the TOS, and got the treatment prescribed under the TOS. His EO yesterday essentially asked for everyone to be treated in accordance with the TOS, so he's (ironically) getting exactly what he asked for.
It remains to be seen whether, in compliance with the EO, they apply this to everyone in a transparent and uniform way from now on. I hope they do.
0 - https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-19/trump-...
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” Trump said at a South Carolina campaign stop in February 2016. “Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
I know I'm probably pissing in the wind here, but I was looking forward to a president ceding some of his power back to congress, so this one really sticks in my craw. Oh well.
Generally, if you run the federal government, you don't want states objecting to your agenda. And if the opposition is running the federal government, you insist on your right to do things at the state level.
Watching Democrats and Republicans make the exact same arguments depending on whose in power is absolutely hilarious, and it leads to great soundbites, like those of Trump and McConnell talking about what the President should and shouldn't do... depending who the President is.
Civil Rights Act? States' rights issue. Same–sex marriage? Let the states decide. Abortion? States should be free to ban.
Edit: swapped "Republican" with "Conservative", since the parties' ideologies have shifted over time.
Every law called "the Civil Rights Act" passed with overwhelming Republican support. All but one passed with more Republican support than Democratic support. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 received 80% of the republican vote in the house, but only 61% of the democratic vote.
Contrary to your statement, the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." That doesn't even make sense--why would politicians who were against civil rights join the party that much more strongly supported every Civil Rights Act from 1957 to 1968?
The realignment of southern democrats actually occurred much later. Nixon did not win a majority in any southern state--to the extent he won with a plurality, it was only because the Democratic vote was split between Humphrey and Wallace. In 1976, Carter won with the same east-coast south/north coalition that long voted Democrat; with Ford winning the west coast and mid-west. Reagan won almost every state, but his margins in New York were larger than his margins in Alabama or the Carolinas. Reagan did blow out Mondale in the south in 1984, but I'm not sure how much that tells us. Even by the time of Clinton, he won Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Georgia, not to mention Arkansas.
I think the more accurate take is that the political realignment of the parties on "civil rights" issues happened more in the mid-late 1980s through 1990s. And it happened because the nature of the "civil rights" debate morphed over that time. The battle fronts during the 1980s and 1990s was not eliminating de jure and overt discrimination (the aim of the 1950s and 1960s legislation republicans supported), but measures like affirmative action, which sought to use the power of government to shape private conduct to eliminate existing inequities. That of course maps very cleanly onto longstanding republican versus democrat positions.
(I'll give another example of situations where political alignments change because the issue has changed rather than the "mix of platforms" of the parties. On the abortion front, for example, a significant amount of the debate has moved from talking about whether it should be legal at all, to talking about whether religious organizations should be required to provide healthcare coverage for them, whether the government should support them with public funding, etc. If you're a consistent libertarian, you might have found yourself more aligned with Democrats back in the early 1990s, but more aligned with Republicans today.)
You normally have the facts on your side, or else you make generous and clear concessions. What is happening here? You are saying such incorrect (or confusing) things.
In point of fact, Democratic presidential candidates began to lose in Southern states because of integration well before the 1970s. Formerly-Democratic Southerners splintered from the Democratic party for explicitly segregationist reasons, and carried several Southern states under a third-party banner, in two different presidential elections (1948 and 1968).
(One of them, Strom Thurmond, is a direct counterexample to your argument that the Civil Rights Acts were not a "precipitating event for politicians switching parties." At least according to Wikipedia, he switched his affiliation to Republican because of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)
Is this, like, something you haven't read about yet? Or do you have a strong argument that explains the above, which I don't get yet?
Some Democrats like Thurmond did switch in 1964, because once Democrats abandoned their support for segregation, they found they shared other principles with Republicans. But focusing on those isolated instances overlooks and downplays the deep alliance between Democrats and segregationists. Woodrow Wilson, a pioneer of modern progressive “governance by expert bureaucracy” re-segregated the federal workforce. Segregationist Democrats were a key pillar of support for FDR’s New Deal. George Wallace was a segregationist, and also a New Dealer, a champion of labor who called for expanding Social Security. From 1930-1970, the Democratic coalition was glued together by the New Deal, with northern Democrats agreeing to look the other way at what southern Democrats were doing. (I use 1970 as the end date, because those alliances were in place even by Carter’s time: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jimmy-carters-racist-camp.... Carter would not have won without the South.)
In fact, a minority of Republicans in the 1960s, like Barry Goldwater, did make overtures towards anti-integration forces, in an effort to win southern votes. But they never managed to dismantle the Democratic New Deal coalition in the south. That didn’t happen until much later. And at that point, two major things had happened. Southern states has transitioned from agricultural to industrial. The economy of places like Georgia had boomed by drawing businesses from northern states with lower taxes and less regulation. At the same time, the focus of the “civil rights” movement changed. It moved onto very different issues like affirmative action. I happen to support affirmative action, but it’s hard to deny that it’s an ideologically very different thing than the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its the class “negative right” versus “positive right” dichotomy that’s always divided conservative versus liberal thought.
The reason I take an exception to the characterization above is that through omission framing, it attempts to tarnish Republicans for something they were on the right side of, while absolving Democrats of something they were for a long time on the wrong side of. It also falsely equates very different civil rights policies. It goes to Biden’s “[Romney] wants to put y’all back in chains” rhetoric. No, it was Democrats who wanted to do that. Romney, and modern Republicans, don’t want to use the power of government to affirmatively erase historical inequities. But it was the Romney-type pro-business Republicans that were a bulwark of the Civil Rights Acts.
1) Democrats were the party of white ethno-nationalism, starting in the 1800s. 2) Democrats abandon that plank by the 1960s, joining with longstanding Republican efforts and overturning Jim Crow. 3) Much later, for unrelated reasons, the South becomes Republicans.
Is that about right?
I agree with #1 and #2. I disagree with #3 and I don't see how the facts support it.
First, there's the "much later" part of #3. Here [1] are presidential voting records for the 13 states of the confederacy. In every case but Missouri, there is a) a period of near-uniform Democratic domination from 1880-1944, b) a string of Democratic losses, and at least two Republican victories, by 1972.
(Yes, Carter won several of those states after Nixon's disgrace. To some degree I contest the conclusions you're drawing there: so did Hoover, Clinton, etc to lesser degrees. I acknowledge that many of these states were purple in the 1970s, but I don't think that supports the timeline of #3 in context.)
Second, there is the claim of "unrelated reasons". The idea that "a minority of Republicans in the 1960s" made overtures to segregationist Dems is equivalent to saying "Nixon didn't do anything like the Southern Strategy", right? (Or were you talking about regional races?) Doesn't that assertion, in turn, hinge on the idea that "states' rights" (to pick one example) is not an overture? If so, I would call it a weak argument.
[1]
https://www.270towin.com/states/Alabama https://www.270towin.com/states/Georgia https://www.270towin.com/states/Louisiana https://www.270towin.com/states/Mississippi https://www.270towin.com/states/Missouri https://www.270towin.com/states/North_Carolina https://www.270towin.com/states/South_Carolina https://www.270towin.com/states/Tennessee https://www.270towin.com/states/Texas https://www.270towin.com/states/Virginia