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)