Ashcroft

Hm, I didn't know Ashcroft was in deep with that sort of stuff - that's one of the things I hate most about the party.

That sort ofSouthern Republican(Southern Partisan is a good example) has only been around since the Nixon era,when there was a huge swell of southern report based around attempts to deny or restrictcivil rights- before Nixon, most of those Southerners were dedicated Democrats.

Remember, Strom Thurmond used to be a Democrat. Remember that whole Trent Lott brouhaha? It came about because he said that he would've voted for Thurmond's Dixiecrat party in 1948. What were the Dixiecrats?

The Dixiecrats were a party created as an offshoot of the Democratic party in 1948 in the midst of the Democratic National Convention. A Democratic majority had finally decided to support a bunch of civil rights policies in their platform (coming into line with the Republicans, who had supported this stuff for decades upon decades). In response, the Southern Democrats created the Dixiecrat party - basically the Democratic party platform with all of the racist stuff put back in. That's where Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, evidently John Ashcroft, have their roots - in the old Democrat party, the Dixiecrats.

I think that's something a lot of people missed - Lott's statement that he would've voted for the Dixiecrats was absurd for two reasons: 1.) Because the Dixiecrats were racist, but also 2.) The Dixiecrats were basically Democrats. A Republican today should've voted for the Republican then, not some 1948iteration of Democrat.

After that 1948 platform, as the Democrats began to leave their old anti-civil-rights positions, those Southerners were left out in the cold - a decade later, Nixon decided to appeal to those white southerners (when he was trying to get elected in the 50s/60s) by siding with those old Southern Democratson some of the anti-Civil Rights policies (he called it his "southern strategy").

It worked, it got him elected, but it was a betrayal of what the Republican party has always been about, and it alienated minority constituencies that had been committed to the Republicans since the Civil War. Real Northern Republicanism, the Republicanism of Teddy Roosevelt and Bush Sr., the kind of Republicanism that freed the slaves, has very little to do with people like Trent Lott and the writers of Southern Partisan. I wish the party had left those people with the Democrats.

By the way, this is one of the things that motivated my attempts to learn more about the Republican party. I couldn't figure out why, only 50 years ago, the evil Republicans were supporting civil rights when the Democrats were fighting against them - and I wanted to know what changed, why the Democrats were like that way then and why they weren't that way now, what happened to the Republicans, stuff like that. I think at some point I actually believed that during the Civil War days, the Republicans were just modern-day Democrats, and it went on that way until FDR, when things switched around. I dunno. It was stupid.

Calliander:
Now, to say that most censorship efforts over the past twenty years have been Democrat-driven is patently false. These are all hideously religious, unabashedly non-Democrat organizations. The CBN, I believe, is owned by Pat Robertson.

Look, a lot of these organizations, Ralph Reed and the Religious Right, are outside of the political spectrum - these movements for censorship cross political boundaries. Lieberman's the most noticeable figure if you're looking for someone to target regarding censorship. A censorship campaign is in no way a "right-wing" agenda - that's the sort of governmental control that Democrats at least philosophically support, and that Republicans fundamentally reject.

many older Republican candidates ran on the segregation ticket, but you can't do anything like that nowadays.

Calliander, read up on party history - that's bullshit. All of the major segregationists, Governor Wallace, Strom Thurmond, were Democrats when segregation was an issue. I sort of explained it above - but, simply, the Republicans fought segregation all of the way, and only began to take old Southern Democrats (like Trent Lott and Thurmond) into their fold after the battle against segregation had been functionally won.

That's something much of the media covers up - the hugely racist past of the Democratic party, and only a little over 50 years ago.

Stone