It was Democrats, and at times it was with the complicity of some northern Democrats. And they were progressives, just like Wilson.
What these Americans, be they black or white, have in common is they are killed by agents of government, and usually progressive Democrat government.
The Democrats of the Jim Crow era were the conservatives. They wanted to conserve their supremacy.
No, they weren’t. They were progressives. The best examples are Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger.
www.nationalreview.com
The definitions:
This is a highly irrelevant, revisionist colloquy. Time to get back to the subject. You’ve made your claim about the last 150 years.
You know darn well that is not the set of definitions used for progressive, conservative or liberal. The political meanings behind the terms are well understood.
Desperate? I’m not desperate. Intentional might be a better word. Intentional in pushing back against the revisionist position that the parts switched places, mainly as a result of the So-called southern Strategy.
It is a push back against revisionism.JonNC:
This is a highly irrelevant, revisionist colloquy. Time to get back to the subject. You’ve made your claim about the last 150 years.
In my adult life, I’ve survived Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barrack Obama. I’ll survive Joe Biden if he’s elected.
They are political terms, and I got the definitions straight from the dictionary. As one involved in education, I would think you taught your students how to use one.
No, they wanted to change and extend the understanding of individual rights to include blacks. You can “preserve” what you never had.
JonNC is good natured and didn’t let it bother him as you can see in his response; nor is he a frequent flagger…so if you are offended at a comment that in no way was addressed by you, take it to the moderators. If they delete it fine, but it will be quite clear who the originator of the flag was.
What I didn’t teach them was to take the meanings of words out of context.
The very basic foundational principle of American governance is that individual rights are primary, and that the role of limited government is to protect individual rights. Our country has often failed significantly to live up to those principles the past. It is still a problem, particularly in big cities, as the George Floyd incident shows.
Not all rights and not for all. Not in the beginning. Women and slaves did not originally have the right to vote. None of the founding Fathers thought otherwise. That came later. That was a later reform. It was progress toward a better ideal. It was progressive, not conservative. Of course today conservatism embraces a wider understanding of individual rights, because that has become a traditional value, and supporting a traditional value is a mark of conservatism.
And the process and foundation was put into place to expand those rights.
Twisting meanings again. the progressive movement that started in the late 1800’s Has never stood for individual rights as having primacy Certainly not their leaders like Wilson. It was conservatives, Republicans like Coolidge, who fought against Wilson’s racism.
The process and foundation was put into place to provide a means for future generations to decide what changes were needed. The founders had no idea what changes would result. Not a single founder ever expressed the idea that eventually women should be allowed to vote. The idea was just not on anyone’s radar at all at the time.
I didn’t say that it did. I just said that it promoted these specific rights at that time. I said nothing about primacy either.
They already knew that slavery was untenable for the republic. In fact, that would be the only basis for criticism of Jefferson for owning slaves. If he didn’t know it was wrong, you can’t hold him accountable. They certainly knew that had to change. I am less certain about their view of women, but again, we cannot hold them accountable for something they did not understand, only thank them for putting into place a way to change things without compromising the basic founding principle that individual rights are antecedent to government and government power is second to those rights.
To stand for rights, one must recognize that individual rights exist without government. They are not created, or provided for by government. What government did in the 13th amendment, for example, was extend protection for an already existing right - “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights”.
I don’t blame them. I don’t “hold them accountable.” I just don’t think we use the word “conservative” when we talk about people who want to change things, as that is the opposite of what “conservative” means.
That still does not flip the meanings of “conservative” and “progressive.”