Past and Current Challenges of the Democratic Party
In a previous letter, I focused on the enduring tension between racism and reform at the center of the Democratic Party from its inception in the 1830s through the 1960s. I also addressed the political dilemma that President Lyndon Johnson confronted in 1965 that in embracing the Civil Rights legislation on equal accommodations and voters rights, the Democratic Party would likely lose the South for a generation or more. This helps explain the political decimation of the Democratic Party in the South over the next 60 years; however, the broader issue as to why the Party lost the white working and lower middle classes throughout the county is a more complex matter. This calls for grasping the dynamic power of the conservative reaction against the radical political culture of the 1960s based on its key pillars of the civil rights movement, the rise of a distinctively feminist consciousness, the anti-Vietnam War protests, and the counterculture, which, in their cumulative impact, repr