Revisiting the switcheroo of 1964
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, April 2, 2026 – The sense of unity that arose throughout the United States in the aftermath of the November, 1963 shootings in Dallas, was undone the next year when the Republican party inaugurated their Southern Strategy, by poaching the nation’s most powerful white nationalist from the Democrats.
For one hundred years after the Civil War, the Democratic party was home to the likes of Sen. Strom Thurmond, while Republicans were vilified throughout the south for denying them a property right in enslaved persons.
Sen. Thurmond didn’t openly own slaves, but he did sire a child with a young person of color who was a part-time maid in his father’s household. That is an example of the sort of affection for persons of color characteristic of slave owners. When Sen. Sumner of Massachusetts pointed that out on the Senate floor in 1854, he was almost clubbed to death by a congressman from South Carolina.
Racism is a perennial human failing, which thousands of years of religion and civilization have yet to eradicate. The Democratic party had no Biblical conversion experience in 1964, nor did it renounce harboring Jim Crow for a century. They had been bullied by LBJ into passing JFK’s civil rights agenda, even if it would cost them generations of southern votes.
The subsequent murder of the Rev. Dr. King reduced what had been gained in legislation by what was lost in the majesty of King’s leadership. Meanwhile, LBJ’s napalm bombing of Vietnamese rice-paddies is mirrored by race riots throughout his own newly dis-united country.
The powers that stood to profit, politically and/or financially, from the prosecution of war in Southeast Asia, put considerable effort into selling the American people on the righteousness of their campaign. That’s the way it was, as Walter Cronkite used to say.
It took only until Feb. 1968 for Cronkite to see that “we are mired in stalemate” in Vietnam. It took Congress another six years to stop funding it. It took the war’s chief architect, Defense Secretary Robert S. MacNamara another 30 years before making a virtual deathbed confession that he mislead the American people into such a terrible loss of life and treasure.
That was then; now, American blood and treasure are spent at the whim of someone who dares us to dissent rather than convince anybody but sycophants and followers of the righteousness of his conduct. All the no kings gatherings, and all the horseshit that accompanies them, are insufficient to put the people back in power again.
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