Very few of the Dixiecrats became Republicans. (At least if your talking about members of congress which I was).
Also a number of southern Democrats were happy to support big government and the welfare state. That hardly makes them conservative. It seems Koan would define people who were segregationists as conservative, and therefore that conservatives supported segregation. That is a tautology, its saying "conservatives are or were segregationists therefore conservatives are were segregationists", it tells us nothing, and it doesn't properly apply the common political meanings of the terms liberal and conservative.
Since he's focused on the 1964 Civil Rights law it also ignores reasons to be against it other then being a racist, pandering to racists, or supporting segregation, but at the moment that point really isn't part of the conversation as I haven't raised it until now (not in this conversation), and it isn't directly relevant to most of the points either of us has raised. (I haven't really been challenging his implication that opposing the Civil Rights Law of 1964 was necessarily racist, even though it isn't, but rather pointing out that Republicans supported the law more than Democrats did, and that the Democratic opponents were not a uniformly or overwhelmingly conservative group).
Also the Democrats support now, and supported in the past, race conscious policies and discrimination based on race, far more than the Republicans (even if the specific policies have changed). |
