Civil Rights, Fifty Years On: Partisan Realignment and U.S. Foreign Policy
07/02/14
Peter Harris
Domestic Politics, United States
Fifty
years ago today Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into
federal law. The Voting Rights Act followed just one year later. Both
pieces of legislation were important nails in the coffin of Jim Crow,
the oppressive system of laws that had segregated the American South
along racial lines since the end of Reconstruction. A corollary was to
reshape U.S. party politics and, by extension, foreign policy for
generations to come.
As
well as keeping African-Americans subjugated and disenfranchised, Jim
Crow had been the political foundation of the Democratic Party’s
century-long lock on the so-called Solid South.
In approving the Civil Rights Act, Johnson is said to have confided
that he had signed away the South “for a generation.” The president
knew that white segregationists would not forgive the national
Democratic Party for supporting civil rights. Although he hoped
(misguidedly) that newly enfranchised blacks would be enough to buoy the
Democratic vote share, Johnson was mostly clear-eyed that embracing
civil rights would mean losing the South.
Johnson’s
concerns were well founded. Beginning with Nixon and his so-called
“Southern Strategy,” the Republican Party in the late 1960s began a long
march towards absorbing disaffected Southern Democrats and establishing
political control over the South. The process was slow, only to be
more-or-less completed by the 2000s, by which time most of the old
Confederacy was reliably GOP territory.
The
reconfiguration of America’s political landscape translated into new
partisan differences over policy, many of which last until this day,
particularly when it comes to the military. By the mid-1960s, the
American South was home to some of the biggest beneficiaries of the Cold
War military-industrial complex. Although the “gun belt” is not
strictly coterminous with the South, there is considerable overlap:
military bases were disproportionately located below the Mason-Dixon
while arms manufacturing and related industries brought much needed jobs
to a region with historically low income levels compared to the rest of
the United States.
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/civil-rights-fifty-years-partisan-realignment-us-foreign-10796
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