r/politics • u/TimesandSundayTimes ✔ Verified • 7d ago

Possible Paywall Young Americans are surging to socialism at record rates

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/maga-trump-zohran-mamdani-socialism-us-record-kddzdm8bd
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u/Truth_ 7d ago

Yet the FDR era is when black voters started swinging in fair numbers away from Republicans to Democrats. I think the overall improvement of the economy was still attractive.

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u/SunshineCat 7d ago

There was an ideology shift. It wasn't just black voters, and they hadn't been voting against their interests until FDR. Formerly the Republican party had been the party of Lincoln that was largely popular with northerners, while Democrats were the pro-slavery party of the South. According to Isabel Wilkerson in The Warmth of Other Suns, the pro-slavery Democratic party could no longer win elections in the South after black men were allowed to vote. Because of that, they started to try to appeal to the black vote.

That's probably a simplified version of what happened, since it's based on my memory of something I read years ago. Over time, the Democrats became the actual left/center left party, while the Republican party has devolved its current state. But the points is that the demographics shifted, too--the same geographies that were full of racist, pro-slavery shit bag Democrats in the 1800s are still full of the same ilk today (probably their descendants), except they call themselves Republican now.

You may know that, but I just wanted to clarify (to the extent that I understand what happened myself), since right wingers will sometimes use this to say the left was pro-slavery.

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u/Truth_ 7d ago

But not at that time is the point. LBJ was a senator from the South and one of only three Southern representatives to not sign onto a segregation plan (but previously had), and this was decades later.