“The entirety of Jim Crow was one huge near-century chunk of conservatives (and yes, segregationists were conservative) subverting the 14th and 15th Amendments.”
Hmm. I think that’s debatable depending on what is meant by the term conservative. Certainly Lincoln made an argument that the anti-slavery Republican Party was more conservative (he used that word) in upholding the spirit and letter of the Founding than its Democratic opponents. For decades, Jim Crow was the policy of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party was the party of civil rights. And, yes, the Democratic Party was reliably more progressive and interested in central planning during that period. As an aside, the Confederacy was into central planning.
Great conservative Republicans like Coolidge and Harding were both the most pro-civil-rights presidents until recent memory and pro-business/pro-market lovers of the Founding and the Constitution/Declaration. Our most progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was a member of the KKK and wanted a break with the past, an overturning of Founding tradition. There’s at least as much of a through-line from Wilson to Obama as there is from Coolidge to Reagan.
But in the sense that they were interested in preserving a traditional Southern way of life, yes the Jim Crow South was “conservative.”
Yeah that’s what I mean. Social conservatism generally means wanting to preserve the status quo, and at the time white supremacy WAS the status quo, which is why those “traditionalists” who wanted to preserve it were “conservative” by default. Think of it this way, white Southern conservatives were the ones who wanted to preserve Jim Crow, liberal Northern college students were amongst the main civil rights activists that wanted to end Jim Crow (I.e. the slain Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman from Harvard). I’m not saying progressives haven’t been and can’t be racist, they certainly have been and still are in many ways (John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism” is a helpful illumination of that phenomenon), but it’s literally called racial PROGRESS when we talk about the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, progressives are the ones who want progress, hence the rightful association between them and civil rights activism. National Review, arguably the most important conservative publication in America, was openly anti CRM (Buckley even congratulated Alabama state troopers for what they did on Bloody Sunday and basically defended the white South’s right to do what they pleased with race, Buckley also defended South African apartheid later in his life). Conservative whites are disproportionately Southern, and black people and liberal Jews are overwhelmingly politically left wing and left leaning, it’s at least highly implausible to assert that there’s no connection between these various groups’ historical view on racial equality and civil rights and how they tend to vote and think politically today. We rightly associate expanded power for the federal government with the left, and during both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement the federal government HAD to be deployed to end slavery and segregation at EVERY step of the way (ex. Civil War, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Brown v Board, 1964 Civil Rights Act, Loving v Virginia), respectively, all while Southerners were screaming about “states rights” to fight against desegregation. So while some of these guys may have been fiscally conservative and pro civil rights (like Coolidge), the fact remains that social conservatives/the most hardcore of conservatives were consistently on the pro slavery and pro Jim Crow side during the most critical junctures of American history (meaning during the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, respectively). I know people talk about Republicans being the party that opposed slavery and Democrats being the party that supported, but the Republicans who opposed slavery were liberal, heck, the faction of the Republican Party that wanted not just abolition but full racial equality were literally called the RADICAL Republicans because they wanted radical liberal change (there’s a reason we generally associate the term “radical” with people who are on the left), they were essentially the far left of the day (at the time white supremacy was so deeply entrenched even amongst Northern abolitionists, that only the far left of the day supported full racial equality), and the Democrats were conservative. I’m not a “party switch” guy (it’s way more complicated than the left wing narrative that the white South went from mostly D to mostly R simply because of racism), but I do care more about “liberal” and “conservative” rather than party labels, and that’s what I’m getting at here.
I don’t agree with most of that. The term radical wasn’t meant in the same way that we use radical today. Nor does social conservatism specifically refer to merely preserving the status quo. If that were true, social conservatives today would want to preserve the current status quo of out of wedlock births and social dysfunction.
If American conservatism has a through-line, it is this: the purpose of American conservatism is to preserve the American Founding. You can read George Will on this subject if you aren’t convinced by that basic definition. If that is the case, Lincoln was one of our most conservative presidents and Wilson one of our most radical. If American conservatism is conserving the American Founding, then there is a continuity between Lincoln and Coolidge and Reagan and Bush.
I think you are confusing the shift which occurred during the 1960s with the broader question we are addressing. If anything, the lefty kids in the 60s were more worked up about Vietnam and the heroes of the Civil Rights movement were very socially conservative (on sexual questions, church tradition, etc.) black churchgoers. Yes, I’m aware that early postwar fusionism included Southern Agrarians and that Buckley was too willing to tolerate segregation. He also later apologized for that and said he was wrong! Buckley also criticized George Wallace.
Goldwater, meanwhile, gets castigated as a racist for opposing the Civil Rights Act, when he spent lots of his own money on anti-lynching and pro-civil-rights legal campaigns back in Arizona. He opposed the CR act on economic grounds (as do I).
Moreover, while it is true that federal coercion was eventually necessary to end segregation (the name Eisenhower, a Republican, is germane there), for most of American history, the antislavery and antisegregation movements were associated with libertarians and individualists who were proponents of free market capitalism. Meanwhile, in the 1910s and 20s, when right and left finally became a thing in America (it took time for these lines to move over from Europe, but the socialists finally managed), the socialist left was filled with racists and apologists for slavery (Woodrow Wilson). Yes, you can find some who favored equal rights, too. But a lot didn’t.
Meanwhile, Harding and Coolidge were not socially liberal in any other sense of the term. They were in favor of religiosity in society, emphasized tradition, American culture, talked about God a lot, opposed secularism etc. But they did favor equal rights.
Unless we simply begin from the premise that social conservatism means racism, it doesn’t make much sense to draw a through-line which doesn’t exist between the Confederacy and the conservative movement. I will point out that it was Nixon - not a conservative - who developed the Southern strategy, and it was only then that this flip really occurred. More Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act! I had family members in Republican politics in the 40s and 50s when being a Republican in Kansas meant being on the side opposed to Jim Crow (the Democrats were still the party of Jim Crow) and they didn’t suddenly stop being Republicans when Goldwater and Reagan came along.
Yeah, I consider "libertarian" different from "conservative", I guess a lot of fiscal conservatives consider them similar or the same, but I'm viewing it more through a cultural lens so it's kind of different there (as libertarians generally favor more societal freedom so long as you're not directly violating another person's fundamental rights while social conservatives generally favor morality-based restrictions more when it comes to stuff like sexuality and low level drugs).
Perhaps I'm also viewing it too much from a religious point of view, as I state in my piece, I'm a conservative evangelical Christian who believes in the authority of Scripture, the history of Bible believing conservative evangelicals on race is almost nothing short of a complete disaster. Conservative Christians who upheld the authority of Scripture tended to be supporters/defenders of slavery in the 19th century and Jim Crow in the 20th, the Christians who fought against slavery and segregation tended to be the more theologically liberal ones who jettisoned or at least undermined the authority of Scripture, and since conservative Christianity has always been closely aligned to political conservatism (even before the Moral Majority in the 80s), I kind of just viewed (social) conservatives as a whole as the side that generally favored preserving the racial status quo.
I hear you on the point about conservatives wanting to "merely preserve the status quo", that was an error on my part. I should've said conservatives generally want to preserve "traditional values", and at the critical junctures of US history I mention (Civil War and Civil Rights Movement), white supremacy was the "traditional" way of life, especially (but far from exclusively) in the South, it was (as I mentioned) college liberals that were amongst the most supportive of racial change and the Civil Rights Movement, and these folks were understood both by supporters and opponents as folks who "went against tradition" or who wanted "societal transformation and change" (something else also generally associated with liberals).
I don't view Goldwater as racist, I know and understand that he opposed the CRA on libertarian grounds, what I do emphasize though is that to segregationists, what mattered wasn't why Goldwater opposed it, what mattered was that he opposed it at all, hence the reason so many segregationists who'd voted Democrat in previous elections flipped to him instead. Also, I guess we disagree on the Civil Rights Act then, I view it as something that absolutely needed to be passed to end Jim Crow, the South was so resolutely pro-segregation, that the federal Civil Rights Act was indispensable and necessary to finally force them to abandon Jim Crow.
I agree that black churches were socially conservative as a whole, but they worked with white lefties because they were the ones that were going to aid them in fighting for civil rights when their fellow white conservative churchgoers (as I mention earlier in this comment) were too busy opposing them and supporting segregation instead. This is why even Bible-believing Christian blacks today vote overwhelmingly Democrat, even though some of the Democratic Party's policies are blatantly anti Bible, it's cause of the history of white conservatives opposing the CRM and white liberals--however much their beliefs were at odds with the Bible and the black church--supporting their fight for civil rights.
Thank you for the recommendation of George Will, I will look into it, perhaps I'm confusing "conservative" with "traditionalist", I generally use the two terms interchangeably, maybe that's not the best way to use those two terms.
Yeah I don’t think our disagreement hangs simply on a question of conservatism vs. libertarianism. However, Will is an atheist and leans libertarian on size of government questions (not on drugs or trans issues etc.). However, with Buckley and Reagan and Irving Kristol gone, Will is essentially the closest to being the single person who can say, “conservatism is X.”
The word traditionalist would still apply to the religious views of most Republicans in the 1910s and 1920s when they won 95% of the black vote. Meanwhile, even at that time the Democratic Party was becoming the party of progressive thought (German historicism, relativism, technocratic “pragmatism” or rule by experts, nationalization/socialization of industry etc) while they were still the party of Jim Crow. Heck, you can find any number of hard left socialist atheist progressive thinkers at the time who believed firmly that eugenics was progress. As I will continue to point out, Woodrow Wilson called himself progressive (and ruined that word for three generations). He was right to use it. Modern progressivism owes more to his thought than to almost anyone else. And he was arguably our most racist president.
“The entirety of Jim Crow was one huge near-century chunk of conservatives (and yes, segregationists were conservative) subverting the 14th and 15th Amendments.”
Hmm. I think that’s debatable depending on what is meant by the term conservative. Certainly Lincoln made an argument that the anti-slavery Republican Party was more conservative (he used that word) in upholding the spirit and letter of the Founding than its Democratic opponents. For decades, Jim Crow was the policy of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party was the party of civil rights. And, yes, the Democratic Party was reliably more progressive and interested in central planning during that period. As an aside, the Confederacy was into central planning.
Great conservative Republicans like Coolidge and Harding were both the most pro-civil-rights presidents until recent memory and pro-business/pro-market lovers of the Founding and the Constitution/Declaration. Our most progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was a member of the KKK and wanted a break with the past, an overturning of Founding tradition. There’s at least as much of a through-line from Wilson to Obama as there is from Coolidge to Reagan.
But in the sense that they were interested in preserving a traditional Southern way of life, yes the Jim Crow South was “conservative.”
Yeah that’s what I mean. Social conservatism generally means wanting to preserve the status quo, and at the time white supremacy WAS the status quo, which is why those “traditionalists” who wanted to preserve it were “conservative” by default. Think of it this way, white Southern conservatives were the ones who wanted to preserve Jim Crow, liberal Northern college students were amongst the main civil rights activists that wanted to end Jim Crow (I.e. the slain Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman from Harvard). I’m not saying progressives haven’t been and can’t be racist, they certainly have been and still are in many ways (John McWhorter’s “Woke Racism” is a helpful illumination of that phenomenon), but it’s literally called racial PROGRESS when we talk about the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow, progressives are the ones who want progress, hence the rightful association between them and civil rights activism. National Review, arguably the most important conservative publication in America, was openly anti CRM (Buckley even congratulated Alabama state troopers for what they did on Bloody Sunday and basically defended the white South’s right to do what they pleased with race, Buckley also defended South African apartheid later in his life). Conservative whites are disproportionately Southern, and black people and liberal Jews are overwhelmingly politically left wing and left leaning, it’s at least highly implausible to assert that there’s no connection between these various groups’ historical view on racial equality and civil rights and how they tend to vote and think politically today. We rightly associate expanded power for the federal government with the left, and during both the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement the federal government HAD to be deployed to end slavery and segregation at EVERY step of the way (ex. Civil War, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, Brown v Board, 1964 Civil Rights Act, Loving v Virginia), respectively, all while Southerners were screaming about “states rights” to fight against desegregation. So while some of these guys may have been fiscally conservative and pro civil rights (like Coolidge), the fact remains that social conservatives/the most hardcore of conservatives were consistently on the pro slavery and pro Jim Crow side during the most critical junctures of American history (meaning during the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement, respectively). I know people talk about Republicans being the party that opposed slavery and Democrats being the party that supported, but the Republicans who opposed slavery were liberal, heck, the faction of the Republican Party that wanted not just abolition but full racial equality were literally called the RADICAL Republicans because they wanted radical liberal change (there’s a reason we generally associate the term “radical” with people who are on the left), they were essentially the far left of the day (at the time white supremacy was so deeply entrenched even amongst Northern abolitionists, that only the far left of the day supported full racial equality), and the Democrats were conservative. I’m not a “party switch” guy (it’s way more complicated than the left wing narrative that the white South went from mostly D to mostly R simply because of racism), but I do care more about “liberal” and “conservative” rather than party labels, and that’s what I’m getting at here.
I don’t agree with most of that. The term radical wasn’t meant in the same way that we use radical today. Nor does social conservatism specifically refer to merely preserving the status quo. If that were true, social conservatives today would want to preserve the current status quo of out of wedlock births and social dysfunction.
If American conservatism has a through-line, it is this: the purpose of American conservatism is to preserve the American Founding. You can read George Will on this subject if you aren’t convinced by that basic definition. If that is the case, Lincoln was one of our most conservative presidents and Wilson one of our most radical. If American conservatism is conserving the American Founding, then there is a continuity between Lincoln and Coolidge and Reagan and Bush.
I think you are confusing the shift which occurred during the 1960s with the broader question we are addressing. If anything, the lefty kids in the 60s were more worked up about Vietnam and the heroes of the Civil Rights movement were very socially conservative (on sexual questions, church tradition, etc.) black churchgoers. Yes, I’m aware that early postwar fusionism included Southern Agrarians and that Buckley was too willing to tolerate segregation. He also later apologized for that and said he was wrong! Buckley also criticized George Wallace.
Goldwater, meanwhile, gets castigated as a racist for opposing the Civil Rights Act, when he spent lots of his own money on anti-lynching and pro-civil-rights legal campaigns back in Arizona. He opposed the CR act on economic grounds (as do I).
Moreover, while it is true that federal coercion was eventually necessary to end segregation (the name Eisenhower, a Republican, is germane there), for most of American history, the antislavery and antisegregation movements were associated with libertarians and individualists who were proponents of free market capitalism. Meanwhile, in the 1910s and 20s, when right and left finally became a thing in America (it took time for these lines to move over from Europe, but the socialists finally managed), the socialist left was filled with racists and apologists for slavery (Woodrow Wilson). Yes, you can find some who favored equal rights, too. But a lot didn’t.
Meanwhile, Harding and Coolidge were not socially liberal in any other sense of the term. They were in favor of religiosity in society, emphasized tradition, American culture, talked about God a lot, opposed secularism etc. But they did favor equal rights.
Unless we simply begin from the premise that social conservatism means racism, it doesn’t make much sense to draw a through-line which doesn’t exist between the Confederacy and the conservative movement. I will point out that it was Nixon - not a conservative - who developed the Southern strategy, and it was only then that this flip really occurred. More Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act! I had family members in Republican politics in the 40s and 50s when being a Republican in Kansas meant being on the side opposed to Jim Crow (the Democrats were still the party of Jim Crow) and they didn’t suddenly stop being Republicans when Goldwater and Reagan came along.
Yeah, I consider "libertarian" different from "conservative", I guess a lot of fiscal conservatives consider them similar or the same, but I'm viewing it more through a cultural lens so it's kind of different there (as libertarians generally favor more societal freedom so long as you're not directly violating another person's fundamental rights while social conservatives generally favor morality-based restrictions more when it comes to stuff like sexuality and low level drugs).
Perhaps I'm also viewing it too much from a religious point of view, as I state in my piece, I'm a conservative evangelical Christian who believes in the authority of Scripture, the history of Bible believing conservative evangelicals on race is almost nothing short of a complete disaster. Conservative Christians who upheld the authority of Scripture tended to be supporters/defenders of slavery in the 19th century and Jim Crow in the 20th, the Christians who fought against slavery and segregation tended to be the more theologically liberal ones who jettisoned or at least undermined the authority of Scripture, and since conservative Christianity has always been closely aligned to political conservatism (even before the Moral Majority in the 80s), I kind of just viewed (social) conservatives as a whole as the side that generally favored preserving the racial status quo.
I hear you on the point about conservatives wanting to "merely preserve the status quo", that was an error on my part. I should've said conservatives generally want to preserve "traditional values", and at the critical junctures of US history I mention (Civil War and Civil Rights Movement), white supremacy was the "traditional" way of life, especially (but far from exclusively) in the South, it was (as I mentioned) college liberals that were amongst the most supportive of racial change and the Civil Rights Movement, and these folks were understood both by supporters and opponents as folks who "went against tradition" or who wanted "societal transformation and change" (something else also generally associated with liberals).
I don't view Goldwater as racist, I know and understand that he opposed the CRA on libertarian grounds, what I do emphasize though is that to segregationists, what mattered wasn't why Goldwater opposed it, what mattered was that he opposed it at all, hence the reason so many segregationists who'd voted Democrat in previous elections flipped to him instead. Also, I guess we disagree on the Civil Rights Act then, I view it as something that absolutely needed to be passed to end Jim Crow, the South was so resolutely pro-segregation, that the federal Civil Rights Act was indispensable and necessary to finally force them to abandon Jim Crow.
I agree that black churches were socially conservative as a whole, but they worked with white lefties because they were the ones that were going to aid them in fighting for civil rights when their fellow white conservative churchgoers (as I mention earlier in this comment) were too busy opposing them and supporting segregation instead. This is why even Bible-believing Christian blacks today vote overwhelmingly Democrat, even though some of the Democratic Party's policies are blatantly anti Bible, it's cause of the history of white conservatives opposing the CRM and white liberals--however much their beliefs were at odds with the Bible and the black church--supporting their fight for civil rights.
Thank you for the recommendation of George Will, I will look into it, perhaps I'm confusing "conservative" with "traditionalist", I generally use the two terms interchangeably, maybe that's not the best way to use those two terms.
Yeah I don’t think our disagreement hangs simply on a question of conservatism vs. libertarianism. However, Will is an atheist and leans libertarian on size of government questions (not on drugs or trans issues etc.). However, with Buckley and Reagan and Irving Kristol gone, Will is essentially the closest to being the single person who can say, “conservatism is X.”
The word traditionalist would still apply to the religious views of most Republicans in the 1910s and 1920s when they won 95% of the black vote. Meanwhile, even at that time the Democratic Party was becoming the party of progressive thought (German historicism, relativism, technocratic “pragmatism” or rule by experts, nationalization/socialization of industry etc) while they were still the party of Jim Crow. Heck, you can find any number of hard left socialist atheist progressive thinkers at the time who believed firmly that eugenics was progress. As I will continue to point out, Woodrow Wilson called himself progressive (and ruined that word for three generations). He was right to use it. Modern progressivism owes more to his thought than to almost anyone else. And he was arguably our most racist president.