Charles E. Schumer Quotes

In the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, right wing talk show hosts had extensive conservative audiences who were very susceptible to hyperbole, exaggerations, vitriol, ideology, and conspiracy theories. They in turn pressured the conservative politicians along the lines of the media shows version of conservatism. The result was that the most powerful conservatives in America were media personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. They had more influence on the Republican party than any of the Republican elected officials. Moyers, used to working with Republicans in many bi-partisan efforts attributed the extreme hyperpartisanship, and nasty, gridlocked political scene that developed in these media personalities.

He was referring to the Evangelical Protestants who had skillfully dominated on cultural and religious matters the Republican Party.

The stranglehold that the Southern Democrats had held on civil rights legislation had been broken in 1968 by Lyndon Johnson and the other Democrats with key support from some liberal Republicans like Lindsay. However, the South felt politically betrayed. The Republican leadership, in what was one of the most brilliant political strategies in American history, played to the disaffected racist Southerners and welcomed into their party. Within the next 30 years virtually the entire South had gone Republican, and the Republican captured both houses of Congress and the Presidency with the South solidly Republican. At the time, Lindsay and some Republican leaders criticized bitterly about the party pandering to the worst racist elements of the nation. The “Party of Lincoln” had become the party of the segregationists, the racists, the hate groups of the country.

Both President Nixon and Vice President Agnew attacked Democratic candidates' "creeping permissiveness" and labeled anti-war protesters as "thugs and hoodlums."

The press secretary found the President very morose the day after his great triumph of passing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Moyers asked why he looked so sad.

This was the result of Gerrymandering over the last decade where the Republicans outmaneuvered the Democrats in enough states so that they could control the House even of the Democrats had a large majority of the votes for congress members. See {632784} for an explanation of Gerrymandering technique.

Ironically, for 100 years after the Civil War, it was the Democrats who tried to keep the Blacks from voting as until Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt began to attract Negro votes, Blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican. In 1964 President Johnson, with bipartisan support overcame the Southern Democratic Filibuster and passed the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act. The Republican leadership, sensing the Southern Democratic Anger at the Democratic Party Leadership, implemented their Southern Strategy and embraced the most racist Southern Democrats if they would switch parties. Most did quickly. Soon, almost all the conservatives had abandoned the Democratic Party. This made the Republican Party more conservative and soon liberal Republicans were extinct and by the end or the 20th century, most of the moderates were gone. With almost all of the worst racists in the nation becoming Republicans and being warmly welcomed by the Republican leadership, almost all Blacks became Democratic voters. Then the racist conservatives went back to their time-tested mechanisms for suppressing the Black vote—only this time it was for the benefit of the Republican party. Soon the non-racist Republicans, realizing that minority voter suppression could be an effective mechanism to offset the greater minority fertility rate, the increased voting rate of the young, and the alienation of many unmarried women to the more conservative Republican ideology, got behind voter fraud prevention—a more acceptable purpose for activities that coincidently could make it more difficult for minorities to register and vote. Those activities were what Judge Debevoise was referring to in this quotation.