Of course, once the racist Jim Crow Democrats were replaced by Republicans in the south, it was no longer necessary.
[Update a while later]
Hysterical race derangement from the Left.
[Update late morning]
The Left’s false narrative:
In our real nation, the VRA was always of dubious constitutionality. The Supreme Court expressly recognized that in originally upholding it, just as Congress recognized it in originally limiting its duration to five years. It was a distortion of the constitutional principles of federalism and equal sovereignty among the states — absent which there would have been no union. The distortion was tolerated because of the gravity of the evil it addressed, just as surgery must traumatize the body in order to cure it. But the VRA was a remedy, not a new order of things. It was supposed to vanish once the disease — the denial of a core privilege of citizenship through systematic, pervasive racial discrimination — was cured.
The disease was long ago eradicated. That does not mean racism is over. There are vestiges of racism in our society. Because we are dealing with human nature, some of them are to be expected. But many are a direct result of the Left’s race-obsessed narrative, dominant on the campus and in the media for over a generation. It tirelessly promotes — it needs — the destructive canard that racial animus is the cause of every effect, and thus that systematic reverse discrimination, far from a temporary remedy, must be a lasting framework and a thriving industry.
Racism would otherwise die its natural death. It is a violation of the self-evident truth that we are all created equal. That government and our society failed, for a very long time, to keep faith with this truth is incontestable. But the truth is self-evident because it does not come from any government or society. It is part of our nature, a gift from our Creator, and an immutable tenet of our Judeo-Christian heritage. If we hold to what makes us Americans, all racism — including the purportedly benign kind — will be seen as immoral. For now, racism of the sort that drove the VRA to passage in 1965 is aberrational.
But the Left can’t admit it, because it takes away one of the foundations of their justification to rule us.
Thought the “Jim Crow democrats” abandoned the Democratic Party after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislative victories in favor of the Republican Party. That Nixon famously quipped that they (the democrats) had lost the majority of white male vote for 50 yrs
Not really, though it’s a popular myth among Democrats. Very few of them actually switched parties, at least among elected officials. For instance, George Wallace never became a Republican. Nixon was right, though — new generations of white males did tend to go Republican, not because they were racist, but partly because of the reverse racism of affirmative action, and other noxious Democrat policies (e.g. gun control). The sixties broke the old Roosevelt coalition.
few of them actually switched parties, at least among elected officials
Considering only Southern Senators, those “very few” included Strom Thurmond, Thad Cochran, Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Elizabeth Dole, Richard Shelby and Lauch Faircloth. That’s a fair fraction of the Southern GOP Senators elected in that period.
Only Thurmond, Cochran and Helms were “southern Senators elected in that period.”
Come now, Mr. Simberg. If your party (Bull Connor was part of the D.N.C.) had set dogs on little girls, you would be desperate to change the topic as well. What were the Democrats supposed to do, get rid of the racists in their party? Look at the KlanBake. If the Democrats had done the right thing, they wouldn’t of had a quorum. What’s next, bringing up Senator Jim Wright (D)?
Little dude, Lauch Faircloth and Liddy Dole weren’t elected until decades after Lyndon Johnson left office, and Liddy is about as Southern as Hillary Clinton.
You’re pretty ignorant, aren’t you?
Here’s some info from an admittedly dubious source (the New York Times) on the Myth of the Southern Strategy:
The two scholars support their claim with an extensive survey of election returns and voter surveys. To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican Presidential candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent, respectively. Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t.
From another source:
In the 1930s and 1940s, FDR performed worse in the South in every election following his 1932 election. By the mid-1940s, the GOP was winning about a quarter of the Southern vote in presidential elections.
But the big breakthrough, to the extent that there was one, came in 1952. Dwight Eisenhower won 48 percent of the vote there, compared to Adlai Stevenson’s 52 percent. He carried most of the “peripheral South” — Virginia, Tennessee, Texas and Florida — and made inroads in the “Deep South,” almost carrying South Carolina and losing North Carolina and Louisiana by single digits.
Even in what we might call the “Deepest South” — Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi — Eisenhower kept Stevenson under 70 percent, which might not seem like much until you realize that Tom Dewey got 18 percent in Georgia against FDR in 1944, and that this had been an improvement over Herbert Hoover’s 8 percent in 1932.
In 1956, Eisenhower became the first Republican since Reconstruction to win a plurality of the vote in the South, 49.8 percent to 48.9 percent. He once again carried the peripheral South, but also took Louisiana with 53 percent of the vote. He won nearly 40 percent of the vote in Alabama. This is all the more jarring when you realize that the Brown v. Board decision was handed down in the interim, that the administration had appointed the chief justice who wrote the decision, and that the administration had opposed the school board.
Actually it was LBJ who said “We have lost the South for a generation” after signing the Civil Rights Act.
Many blacks like MLK voted for Republicans before the mid 1960s because southern Democrats were the ones who enacted and enforced the Jim Crow laws. LBJ started the War on Poverty which has spent trillons of dollars in various welfare programs. Today, about 95% of blacks vote for the Democrats.
Actually the Democrats didn’t lose the South till 1994. Johnson was wrong. An entire generation of racist Democrats had to shuffle off to the grave before the Republicans could win the region.
In Black and Black’s “The Rise of Southern Republicans” (a very academic work that I highly recommend), they noted that many wealthy businessmen in the South wanted to vote Republican and dismantle segregation the whole time (an enlarged available labor pool would mean more people competing for jobs, higher productivity, and greater profits), but they knew that if local white Democrats found out about their leanings, their businesses would likely suffer profoundly.
The problem of Jim Crow and southern states politically in general was, and in many parts of the south still, is LOCAL Democrats, not how southerners voted for POTUS. NC has it’s first (R) Legislature in over 100 years and the first (R) Legislature and state house EVER. Most of the ingrained racism here NOW is liberal (D)’s beating that old drum of HELP being NEEDED.
God forbid that they be on the side of business, and job creation, instead of hand outs.
Remember that a lot of postReconstruction state constitutions were deliberately set up that way, to keep power in the hands of the state Democratic parties no matter what. North Carolina is a good example, but Texas was another and only changed very recently.