Democrats already retreating from public option before DNC even starts
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Pressure doesn't pass legislation alone. Pressure requires a ruling political party with some degree of susceptibility. The Democratic Party is retrograde, riven with conflicting interests, immensely compromised... but it relies on voterbases which proved much more sympathetic to civil rights, and thus was susceptible to that pressure.
Take the same mass movement, and transplant it into a hypothetical Goldwater presidency, and there would certainly be no Civil Rights Act in 1964.
All parties either have some susceptibility to pressure or will die being insusceptible. Goldwater, if elected, would’ve been forced down the same road or suffered the consequences. LBJ’s coopting of civil rights merely gave him the time necessary to kill enough leaders that progress was minimized.
Now let's see you prove that's what would happen to a Goldwater administration. Way harder than it sounds, isn't it?
Because Goldwater didn’t win, yeah. Hypotheticals are hard to prove since they’re purely speculative.
Hugely disagree with this. The Parties are subject to very different pressures as a result of their target audiences and core demographics: the Democratic voterbases of the sixties were far more open to the provisions of the Civil Rights Act than the Republican voterbase. The pressures are not the same.
And quite aside from this, history is utterly littered with mass movements which have been denied and eventually overpowered by entirely unsympathetic ruling powers.
Perhaps a few decades later, the pressures would have been impossible to suppress, even for the Republicans. That's decades more of segregation, lost livelihoods, un-investigated assaults, hiring discrimination, etc. In this difference, that's the difference caused by an electoral outcome, in which the lesser evil is not good by any stretch, but merely better.
The Republican Party had been just as open to Civil Rights at the time. Eisenhower certainly listened to those pressures on occasion. The Southern Strategy was still a ways off.
History is also littered with those guys becoming corpses.
Edit: in response to your edit, there have been decades more of, well, all of that and our society has gradually resegregated with bussing being mostly a thing of the past.
As was clearly shown by the electoral successes of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace in the South.
Eisenhower did. A lot of Republican representatives did. Goldwater, who would have been President in this Republican-victory alternative timeline, did not: not only voting and speaking publicly against it, but personally being instrumental in developing the Southern Strategy to exploit anti-Civil Rights sentiment.
That's the guy you'd have trusted just as much to implement the Act in '64?
Strom Thurmond, who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in '64 specifically because of his huge opposition to the Civil Rights Act? He's pretty much an illustration of what I'm talking about.
Yup. And in the north there was the civil rights-friendly Rockefeller wing of the GOP, the ancillary takeaway being their opposition to northern Democratic machine politics. But that's part of a broader, forthcoming conversation about the Northern states' pathological inability to deal with their own histories of nativism and racism. You brought up Goldwater, but don't forget the most damage he did (alongside Buckley) was to the Republican party, not the country at large.
This wasn't a strictly partisan issue, and it's not exactly a complete telling of the story to argue Democrats overall were more receptive to the pressures of the civil rights movement, when the states in question were Democratic states. Northern Democrats, and Democrats like JFK and LBJ who saw the advantage in the Southern black voter bloc? sure. But, were they the ones standing in schoolhouse doors surrounded by National Guardsmen?
Yes, in actuality. But we're comparing the situation to a hypothetical Goldwater presidency.
Of course not. The protesters and mass demonstrators are the ones who own that victory; that's not in dispute. But transplant that mass movement into a timeline in which the virulent anti-Civil Rights Goldwater holds the machine of state, and the pressure alone would not have been enough.
Something analogous to the Civil Rights Act of '64 would have happened anyway... perhaps a decade later, who knows? After years and years more of segregation, uninvestigated assaults, employment discrimination, murder. That difference in timeframe lies in electoral politics.
Right, but the reasoning you used was:
So it's still true that:
What you (Silvanus) are arguing seems to be that Goldwater would have chosen to suffer the consequences of inaction. That may be correct. Even if it is, the pressures on a Goldwater presidency would have been largely similar- or at least you've given little reason to think otherwise.
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What makes you think he just wouldn't have done what trumps doing and start making law and order arguments and sending in more and more law enforcement presence?
That's not something one can do in a vacuum, however. One has to consider what social and political pressures, and events, may have led to a Goldwater presidency in the first place. For whatever it's worth, considering the civil rights act itself was passed in '64. Perhaps a more appropriate question would be, what of the voting rights act?
Or, by how long would the civil rights movement been delayed had Kennedy not been assassinated? JFK, contrary to public belief, was no real friend to the civil rights movement; his antipathy towards the Freedom Riders was evidence enough for that.
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Considering that he was a small government republican who campaigned on states being able to control their own laws without federal intervention. I would say its damn unlikely we would have had civil rights under him.
He would have suffered the consequences of inaction, yes. Those pressures would have had a markedly different impact on Goldwater than LBJ, since a party's openness to pressure rests in how much of it derives from their own voterbase. Goldwater, both during his own presidential campaign and in developing the Southern Strategy, made quite an explicit decision: to focus on demographics and areas which oppose Civil Rights, and capitalise on racism.
Well, we're in a thread in which people are discussing whether taking part in the electoral process is necessary or even desirable for change to occur, and saying they'll stay home because neither choice is good enough. So, let's imagine that similar opposition to the American electoral process in '64 had led progressives to stay home on election day, on the basis that LBJ was a shoddy candidate.
The Southern Strategy wasn’t a big part of Goldwater’s campaign so much as a general appeal to conservatism. That he carried that South was more a consequence of efforts by the Dixiecrats than his own actual planning. He mostly just wanted to kill Russians.
Lots of black activists said exactly that because of how much LBJ shat on them so this isn’t actually a hypothetical at all.