History Common leftist arguments and their veracity?

LordDemiurge

Well-known member
This thread is partly for questions I have, but also I think a good place to discuss certain topics in detail and break them down. Specifically in regards to judging the veracity of common arguments used by the modern left in a variety of topics.

First off a common argument by marxists.
Even as a fairly devout wokeist I never particularly felt comfortable with the way socialism and communism have been lionized in leftwing circles. The Soviet Union has killed millions and as far as I can tell the closest to a successful application of their dream is mostly found in capitalist countries like the Nordic states that get fetishized so much by them.

Capitalism started off small, yet outcompeted every attempt at stopping it even when powers at the time tried to put a stop to the clock. Communism meanwhile failed at every turn. I'm somewhat better educated on why this is the case and why free markets beat out centralized control.

I'm not however comprehensively educated on the subject of the cold war and I am still reading up more on this.

Generally speaking the last bunker many of them tend to hide behind is that communism/socialism failed because the CIA and America kept killing them in the cradle.

Or that the Soviet Union would have succeeded if it didn't have a capitalist superpower/hegemony arranged against.
But what smoking gun argument or question cracks this argument for good?

The Party switch of the 1960s

This one unlike the previous is actually something I'm a lot more curious/uncertain about. I know people on this forum have previously sneered at this idea as a way for democrats to launder their reputation being the party that controlled formerly confederate territories. But I'm curious as to why this is the case?

To what extent are the democrats of the post civil war era the same as the democrats of the current era?

As far as I can tell every democrat voter in the south didn't move to the north. There wasn't any great cultural or demographic swap. Political parties furthermore do change, adapt or decay as time passes by. The party switch happening doesn't necessarily absolve them of their current failings either

So I'm wondering what the reasoning for this one is?
 
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Well, the USA did try to undermine the success of communist nations. Then again, communists tried to undermine capitalist nations as well. I’m fact, when it comes to dirty fighting, communism probably had the advantage, though capitalist nations were so vastly more productive and more pleasant to live in that capitalism was able to overcome that.

As for the party switch, it didn’t really happen. Well, the parties both have changed over time, but it isn’t anything like a flip. The Democrat Party changed far more, especially in social issues, but they were for greater economic intervention in the economy and more socialism going back way before the 1960’s.

The Democrat Party’s racism switched, where historically they were more anti-black racists and the modern Democrats are anti-white racists. The Republican Party, being comparatively less racist now and in the past, changed less in that regard.

Though it’s silly to criticize modern Democrats for the KKK or anything like that. There are so many terrible policies and people that they support now, why bring up what the party used to be like?
 
The Party switch of the 1960s

This one unlike the previous is actually something I'm a lot more curious/uncertain about. I know people on this forum have previously sneered at this idea as a way for democrats to launder their reputation being the party that controlled formerly confederate territories. But I'm curious as to why this is the case?

To what extent are the democrats of the post civil war era the same as the democrats of the current era?

As far as I can tell every democrat voter in the south didn't move to the north. There wasn't any great cultural or demographic swap. Political parties furthermore do change, adapt or decay as time passes by. The party switch happening doesn't necessarily absolve them of their current failings either

So I'm wondering what the reasoning for this one is?
The Party Switch is a thing, but not nearly as big of a deal as some people make it out to be.

I think its kinda obvious if you look at election maps from post-Civil War to the modern day:


I mean, from 1952 to 1988, California and Oregon voted Republican each time by once.

The Former Confederate states were solidly Democrat from 1880 to 1948, where slowly they started flipping Republican.

The Bible Belt remained Democrat 1964, when Barry Goldwater won Louisiana to South Carolina, despite losing everywhere else except Arizona.

But its a bit of a mess because states flipped way more easily in general back then - people weren't as attached to their party. Reagan and Nixon both only lost a single state in their reelection campaign.
 
This thread is partly for questions I have, but also I think a good place to discuss certain topics in detail and break them down. Specifically in regards to judging the veracity of common arguments used by the modern left in a variety of topics.

First off a common argument by marxists.
Even as a fairly devout wokeist I never particularly felt comfortable with the way socialism and communism have been lionized in leftwing circles. The Soviet Union has killed millions and as far as I can tell the closest to a successful application of their dream is mostly found in capitalist countries like the Nordic states that get fetishized so much by them.

Capitalism started off small, yet outcompeted every attempt at stopping it even when powers at the time tried to put a stop to the clock. Communism meanwhile failed at every turn. I'm somewhat better educated on why this is the case and why free markets beat out centralized control.

I'm not however comprehensively educated on the subject of the cold war and I am still reading up more on this.

Generally speaking the last bunker many of them tend to hide behind is that communism/socialism failed because the CIA and America kept killing them in the cradle.

Or that the Soviet Union would have succeeded if it didn't have a capitalist superpower/hegemony arranged against.
But what smoking gun argument or question cracks this argument for good?

The Party switch of the 1960s

This one unlike the previous is actually something I'm a lot more curious/uncertain about. I know people on this forum have previously sneered at this idea as a way for democrats to launder their reputation being the party that controlled formerly confederate territories. But I'm curious as to why this is the case?

To what extent are the democrats of the post civil war era the same as the democrats of the current era?

As far as I can tell every democrat voter in the south didn't move to the north. There wasn't any great cultural or demographic swap. Political parties furthermore do change, adapt or decay as time passes by. The party switch happening doesn't necessarily absolve them of their current failings either

So I'm wondering what the reasoning for this one is?
1.Commies in both Russia and China win thanks to USA
2.Yes,Democrats always were slavers.Only now,they pretend to be nice to their property.
 
The Party Switch is a thing, but not nearly as big of a deal as some people make it out to be.

I think its kinda obvious if you look at election maps from post-Civil War to the modern day:


I mean, from 1952 to 1988, California and Oregon voted Republican each time by once.

The Former Confederate states were solidly Democrat from 1880 to 1948, where slowly they started flipping Republican.

The Bible Belt remained Democrat 1964, when Barry Goldwater won Louisiana to South Carolina, despite losing everywhere else except Arizona.

But its a bit of a mess because states flipped way more easily in general back then - people weren't as attached to their party. Reagan and Nixon both only lost a single state in their reelection campaign.
The party switch isn't a thing. What happened was a VOTER switch in the US South.

You can cross compare the Republican Party platform going back to its founding in the 1850s to the modern party. One of the big things that stick out is that much of the party's core interests continuously through time are what might be termed "Middle Class" interests, both economic and social, as opposed to "Elite Interests". One of the core things one has to understand is that even back n the 19th century the Democrats were an party made up of an alliance between a wealthy elite class and lower class, whereas the Republicans were primarily an alliance between a different elite class and the middle class.

The US South due to slavery and then the damage caused by the Civil War lagged considerably behind economically the rest of the country especially in the development of a true middle class. What middle class it did have was supported by an elite class that was heavily invested in slavery and thus was not interested in rocking the boat.

However, once slavery was removed and the south economically began to recover from the Civil War you saw a rapid EXPLOSION of it's middle class, and as it's economic middle class grew, those people reevaluated which party better represented their interests, and just like in the 19th century, the Republican party was (and to this day still is) mainly a party of Middle Class interests. As noted, you began seeing the South shift to the R column STARTING with the border states and upper south, which began economically recovering sooner than the deep south. Thus their voters began reevaluating sooner and began shifting right well before the deep south.

By the 1970s the middle class in the south was large enough, and the Dems had decided to change which lower class they were backed by (which itself was a longer process dating back to the 1940s where they purposefully began courting the Black vote specifically to shore up their beginning to lose the middle class in the south), that all those states were effectively in play. Since that time the South, despite claims to the contrary, has effectively been "in play", as when you discount Nixon in '72 and Reagan in '84 (Remember, these both were 49 state sweep elections) there has only been two elections where "the south" voted as a bloc for the Republican: 2000 and 2004. All other elections between 1968 and present have seen major southern states breaking the trend of the rest.
 
The party switch isn't a thing. What happened was a VOTER switch in the US South.

You can cross compare the Republican Party platform going back to its founding in the 1850s to the modern party. One of the big things that stick out is that much of the party's core interests continuously through time are what might be termed "Middle Class" interests, both economic and social, as opposed to "Elite Interests". One of the core things one has to understand is that even back n the 19th century the Democrats were an party made up of an alliance between a wealthy elite class and lower class, whereas the Republicans were primarily an alliance between a different elite class and the middle class.

The US South due to slavery and then the damage caused by the Civil War lagged considerably behind economically the rest of the country especially in the development of a true middle class. What middle class it did have was supported by an elite class that was heavily invested in slavery and thus was not interested in rocking the boat.

However, once slavery was removed and the south economically began to recover from the Civil War you saw a rapid EXPLOSION of it's middle class, and as it's economic middle class grew, those people reevaluated which party better represented their interests, and just like in the 19th century, the Republican party was (and to this day still is) mainly a party of Middle Class interests. As noted, you began seeing the South shift to the R column STARTING with the border states and upper south, which began economically recovering sooner than the deep south. Thus their voters began reevaluating sooner and began shifting right well before the deep south.

By the 1970s the middle class in the south was large enough, and the Dems had decided to change which lower class they were backed by (which itself was a longer process dating back to the 1940s where they purposefully began courting the Black vote specifically to shore up their beginning to lose the middle class in the south), that all those states were effectively in play. Since that time the South, despite claims to the contrary, has effectively been "in play", as when you discount Nixon in '72 and Reagan in '84 (Remember, these both were 49 state sweep elections) there has only been two elections where "the south" voted as a bloc for the Republican: 2000 and 2004. All other elections between 1968 and present have seen major southern states breaking the trend of the rest.

How very communist of you, to interpret history through class struggle and ignore other important societal and cultural factors.

I'm not even going to bother with a full rebuttal of this, as its essentially just a fanciful 'just so' story.

You're completely ignoring the issue of race, which was an immense driver of the pivot - back in the day, a black man was more or less certain to be a Republican in the immediate post Civil War era, for obvious reasons.

This began to shift as the opinion of Democrats nationally begin to drift significantly from Southern Democrats.


As this article points out, pre-Harry Truman's civil rights push, blacks voted for both parties about the same - they were partisanly split like whites. Harry Truman pushed it to 60/40, and Lyndon B Johnson made it 80/20 with the Civil Rights Act.

Lyndon B Johnson even acknowledged how this would shift the South to be Republican.


Its not like the Southern Strategy isn't well documented. Thurmond, one of the most influential Dixiecrats, turned Republican in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act. He had led an attempt to split the Democratic vote in an earlier election in order to protest the Democrats courting the African American vote.

This is before we even get into the fact that Nixon and Reagan both attracted Bible Belt Dixiecrats to their cause. Discounted their elections because they were sweeps is silly. Especially when Nixon was great evidence that the Solid South really was dead for the Democrats.

That's not to say that class shifts didn't have any impact whatsoever on the change, but the primary driver was a change in the way the parties viewed civil rights.
 
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How very communist of you, to interpret history through class struggle and ignore other important societal and cultural factors.

I'm not even going to bother with a full rebuttal of this, as its essentially just a fanciful 'just so' story.

You're completely ignoring the issue of race, which was an immense driver of the pivot - back in the day, a black man was more or less certain to be a Republican in the immediate post Civil War era, for obvious reasons.

This began to shift as the opinion of Democrats nationally begin to drift significantly from Southern Democrats.


As this article points out, pre-Harry Truman's civil rights push, blacks voted for both parties about the same - they were partisanly split like whites. Harry Truman pushed it to 60/40, and Lyndon B Johnson made it 80/20 with the Civil Rights Act.

Lyndon B Johnson even acknowledged how this would shift the South to be Republican.


Its not like the Southern Strategy isn't well documented. Thurmond, one of the most influential Dixiecrats, turned Republican in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act. He had led an attempt to split the Democratic vote in an earlier election in order to protest the Democrats courting the African American vote.

This is before we even get into the fact that Nixon and Reagan both attracted Bible Belt Dixiecrats to their cause. Discounted their elections because they were sweeps is silly. Especially when Nixon was great evidence that the Solid South really was dead for the Democrats.

That's not to say that class shifts didn't have any impact whatsoever on the change, but the primary driver was a change in the way the parties viewed civil rights.
Strom Thurmond was the only Dixiecrat to turn Republican, the rest all were welcomed in by the Democratic party. That's not a trend, it's a single data point outlier that gets bandied about constantly.

Strom Thurmond was also quite moderate on race compared with most Dixiecrats, he was vociferous in his condemnation of the Willie Earle lynching, f'rex.

Meanwhile, when the supposed racist Southern Strategy was going on, Democrats were running this guy in 1972, who probably would have won their nomination if an assassin hadn't shot him.
 
How very communist of you, to interpret history through class struggle and ignore other important societal and cultural factors.

I'm not even going to bother with a full rebuttal of this, as its essentially just a fanciful 'just so' story.

You're completely ignoring the issue of race, which was an immense driver of the pivot - back in the day, a black man was more or less certain to be a Republican in the immediate post Civil War era, for obvious reasons.

This began to shift as the opinion of Democrats nationally begin to drift significantly from Southern Democrats.


As this article points out, pre-Harry Truman's civil rights push, blacks voted for both parties about the same - they were partisanly split like whites. Harry Truman pushed it to 60/40, and Lyndon B Johnson made it 80/20 with the Civil Rights Act.

Lyndon B Johnson even acknowledged how this would shift the South to be Republican.


Its not like the Southern Strategy isn't well documented. Thurmond, one of the most influential Dixiecrats, turned Republican in 1964, after the Civil Rights Act. He had led an attempt to split the Democratic vote in an earlier election in order to protest the Democrats courting the African American vote.

This is before we even get into the fact that Nixon and Reagan both attracted Bible Belt Dixiecrats to their cause. Discounted their elections because they were sweeps is silly. Especially when Nixon was great evidence that the Solid South really was dead for the Democrats.

That's not to say that class shifts didn't have any impact whatsoever on the change, but the primary driver was a change in the way the parties viewed civil rights.
This does not fit the historical voting patterns of the South that began shifting towards Republicans before the Truman's executive orders. Further the "Southern Strategy" as it is so called is not actually "well recorded", unless by Southern Strategy you mean "actively campaigning in the south" which Republicans basically didn't do for many years post-Radical Reconstruction.

Truman's civil rights executive order in 1948 is an interesting point to choose as dividing the history, considering it was literally just undoing the segregation that another Democrat (Wilson) had imposed on the Federal government. Regardless, even before then you'd begun to see the Southern states begin shifting towards the Republicans. The first state to have such a shift was 28 years BEFORE Truman's EOs, when Tennessee went for Harding in the 1920 Presidential election. By 1928 Hoover managed to sweep the entire of the "outer" south: claiming Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas AND Florida. Pretty good southern showing for a Republican nearly 20 years prior to your claimed reflex point AND 40 years earlier than Nixon's supposed "southern strategy". Those inroads likely would have held and grown back then if not for the Great Depression and FDR's massive popularity that saw the Dem's have the largest electoral college victories in their history.

But once FDR was out of the frame and the Recession was over and you saw the resurgence of the American Middle class, we're right back to seeing the Republicans making inroads into the South. In the 1952 Presidential election Eisenhower grabbed up almost all the same Southern states that Hoover had, minus North Carolina, and expanded on that to include N. Carolina and Louisiana in his 1956 reelection. We're post-Truman's EOs at this point, but still before the supposed party switch point of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, still with Republicans making inroads into the south despite this being before the "Southern Strategy" was enacted.

The 1960 Presidential election is very interesting here too, as some southern States Nixon won despite losing the overall election to JFK. Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and Oklahoma all went for Nixon. Again we're prior to the Civil Rights act and seeing continued Republican ability to compete in the south. And no, Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee were all VERY southern states in these decades, complete with Jim Crow laws and everything else.

Now we come to the 1964 election which is where the Deep South goes Republican for the first time, when they ran Goldwater, who otherwise was trounced by Johnson. This is the one time you can make the case where you likely had southern segregationist explicitly supporting the Republican, due to Goldwater voting to oppose the Civil Rights act of 1964. Now, anyone who has actually studied history and Goldwater knows that his opposition to that was not due to any racial animus, but rather in his position as a strict constitutionalist who did not believe the Federal government had the right or power to pass such a law (we have extensive writing about him, from him, and from those around him confirming this). This vote against was one of the large reasons he lost, as he alienated many REPUBLICANS who supported the bill.

But then we have a major counterpoint in the 1968 election, Nixon's first victory. When you look at his victory map, the only NEW southern States he won that had not been somewhat regularly voting Republican since 1928 was... South Carolina. He lost Texas, but continued to manage to hold on to the rest of the outer South. The list should be familiar by now: Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, N. Carolina, Oklahoma, and Florida. The deep south? Plucked away from EVERYONE by Wallace. When you look at the state level returns for those States, Nixon was usually in third place, sometime closely, sometimes wildly so. So was this when the "Southern Strategy" is supposed to have been deployed, because if so it appears to not have worked, as Nixon merely won the usual southern states that had been competitive for Republicans for 40 years.

The next election, 1972, cannot be used to really gain good data on voting trends at State level, as this is one of the two 49 state sweeps that Republicans had in the 20th century, blowing away FDR's massive electoral college victories of the 1940s. Further it wasn't just a massive electoral college victory, but a massive popular vote victory as well, with Nixon pulling TWICE the number of voters as McGovern. If this is when the "southern strategy" is supposed to have been enacted, it's a really great place to claim it was. After all, with how massive a victory this election was it's next to impossible to falsify the claim that this was when things were done to win southern racist... but then, Nixon apparently won EVERYBODY because 2/3rds of the electorate voted for him.

Oh, and apparently the Southern strategy didn't really succeed in getting all those racist southern states to stay Republican, as the very next election, the 1976 saw the Democrats win almost the ENTIRE south minus Virginia and Oklahoma.

And then we get to Reagan. Reagan who's electoral victories are legendary. His first election saw him win all but FOUR states and his second seeing win all but ONE. Did he win the south? Yes, but that means nothing because Reagan basically won EVERYTHING except Minnesota... but it was DAMN close, in 1980 only losing due to a spoiler, and in 1984 he lost the state by about 4000 votes.

In other words, Reagan was a once in a century politician whom was in the right place at the right time in a way that completely upended all conventional voting patterns.

The 1988 election is the first map that begins to resemble the modern one, with the midwest and south unified behind the Republican with western and northeastern Dem holdouts. However, the 1992 and 1996 elections cut the south up with large chunks of it supporting the Democrats. Since then the South has turned solidly Republican for presidential elections, with the Democrats picking off Outer South states like Virginia and Florida to build their victories.

What all this demonstrates, from a high level view, is that the southern shift to the Republicans was not some sudden thing that happened in the mid-20th century because the party's switched positions on civil rights. The Republicans remained consisted on their principles of desegregation, voting overwhelmingly for the Civil Rights act in the 1960s and having prior history supporting desegregation, they just did not go beyond that. Republicans had consistently held that the Federal government should remain out of many affairs, this LACK of Federal action motivated by small government principles was a large part of why Hoover lost in 1932 because the people wanted someone to save them, and FDR promised them that. However, the southern shift to the Republicans began in the EARLY 20th century as the Civil War passed from living memory and the southern states began to see their economies recover. It was the outer south that saw earlier recovery from the Civil War economically than the Deep South, and it was those states that first started to shift Republican, well before any of the modern civil rights struggles were ongoing.
 
That's not to say that class shifts didn't have any impact whatsoever on the change, but the primary driver was a change in the way the parties viewed civil rights.
I'm curious, you say that both parties changed how they viewed civil rights.

I know that the Democrats changed.

But how did the Republicans change?
 
I'm curious, you say that both parties changed how they viewed civil rights.

I know that the Democrats changed.

But how did the Republicans change?

Oh that's easy, the republicans fought a civil war to end slavery, spend decades trying to fight for the rights of freeman after that. Were the first ones to invite black people to the white house, helped pass the civil rights act dispite the democrats being against it and under reagan were the ones who got equal pay for equal work in the white house.

And the democrats after being the ones who started said war for slavery, founded the KKK, created Jim crow segergated the military took credit for civil rights and dumped all of the blame for their sins upon the republican party.
 
First off a common argument by marxists.
I just go with supporting what demonstrably worked. Pure communism didn't, every time it was tried it failed in essentially the same way leading to the same famine-ridden totalitarian dystopia. The idea that it might not fail for once if the CIA weren't doing everything in their power to sabotage it is some spherical-cows-in-a-vacuum level reasoning, since they always will be, so their interference has to be factored in. Of course by the same logic, pure capitalism also always fails, degrading into company town neofeudalism. Nordic-style mixed economies on the other hand work. They've been tested and demonstrably function.
The Party switch of the 1960s
Irreverent. Neither side cares about anything but getting elected and campaign donations. They have no principles, therefore catching them in violations of the principles they falsely claim is futile. Regardless of what the parties were once, now, they're only judged by what they'll do if elected.
 

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