1960s democrats vs 2010s democrats

[Therellas]

This is probably a silly question but im going to ask it anyway.
can any one who has seen or lived through both tell me were the 60 Dem's the same as today's Dem's?
I'm a college student and i just completed accounting and economics last semester.
I was absolutely shocked to learn how conservative and republican the language in the text was.
(an example is how everything was likened to battle and war)
not to mention the underlying philosophy behind both systems of capitalism and conservatism that was blatant in both text.
I mean with today's politics both parties indistinguishable in these areas.
was it ever any different?

[SharonAnn]

1. Well, there were pretty conservatives "Dixiecrats" who called themselves Democrats,

but most of them moved to the Republican party in the 70's.

And, there were Moderate and Liberal Republicans who've mostly either moved to the Democratic Party or disappeared.

[Warren Stupidity]

2. google LBJ's Great Society

Yes there actually was a clear difference between the party of FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson and the Republican Party. On the other hand 1/3 of the Democratic Party consisted of white racist southerners until the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act pushed them over into the Republican Party.

Mondale and Dukakis were the last even remotely liberal/progressive Democratic presidential candidates in that tradition. The Carter administration represented the start of the abandonment of New Deal center left moderate democratic socialism by our party leadership. That abandonment was complete by the time of the Clinton administration.

[omega minimo]

3. What is the question? What are you fishing for?

[Therellas]

5. im not sure.lol

really.
Im just trying to understand whats going a little better.

[JustAnotherGen]

4. This just might

Get my dad to actually register and post instead of just reading! :rofl:

He's from the south.
Black.
Baptist.
Had graduated from Tuskeegee and joined the army and been to Korea by 1960.

His family owned land and were somewhat affluent - so my Grandfather and my dad's uncles were able to vote, as was his grandfather. The women in my family in Alabama? Somewhat of a 'danger' element so none of them voted until 1968.

1960 was the year they all flipped back from being Republicans to being Dems. :-) They liked Ike, and that was about it. I wasn't alive then so I'll it to the older DU members to give their analysis. But my understanding (family's pov) was that was the year the Democrats really solidified themselves as the party of landowners, farmers, and people who really worked for a living. I.E. Got their hands dirty, took in laundry, worked in factories.

My mom is no help. She reads here too! :rofl: She had it drilled into her head that she was Liberal Democrat from the day she was born (november 18, 1947) and it would have been an act of rebellion for her to be a Republican. :rofl:

[Warpy]

6. The rank and file largely are

It's the leadership that changed and it sucks.

[Blue_In_AK]

7. I was a teenager and young adult in the '60s

(born in 1946). I wasn't paying particular attention to individual Democrats back then; I was more concerned with causes like the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement ... and then the fun stuff like the music and getting high with my hippie friends. I was raised in a mixed home - my dad was a true-blue Roosevelt Democrat and my mom was kind of a middle-of-the-road Republican, but I always tended to side with my father on issues, so I self-identified as a Democrat.

I believe Lyndon Johnson would have been remembered as an outstanding president if he hadn't gotten bogged down in Vietnam. I fear Obama may meet the same fate with Afghanistan.

[MineralMan]

8. I was born in 1945, so I was a 60s democrat as a young man.

The problem with your question is that you're trying to define a group. Just like today, Democrats at that time held a wide variety of beliefs. You can't really say anything that applied to all of them. You can't do that today, either.

All groups are made up of individuals, each of whom holds a unique set of beliefs and other characteristics.

That is rule #1.

So, you can ask the question, "What do (insert name of group) want?" It is a question with no answer.

[ChicagoSuz219]

9. If you think the parties are indistinguishable...

...then you haven't been paying attention.

For me, the biggest difference between the Vietnam War & the current ones is that back then there was a Draft. Now, it's an all-volunteer army. Anyone who is over there joined willingly. Since then, of course, many have had second thoughts.

I think we were way more passionate about our causes back in the day, for the most part. We got the voting age lowered from 21 to 18 so that we could vote.

I think the kids nowadays are much more lackadaisical about it. I hope you and your friends turn out in force in 2010 to vote. It's important that you do.

[csziggy]

10. I can't help - I grew up a Democrat in the heart of Dixiecrat territory

They were a lot like what are now Tea Party Republicans on social issues and hated the "liberal" Yankee Democrats who came down South to fight for civil rights.

When I went to college in 1970, the Democrats I met were a lot like the DU Democrats - very liberal, much more so than what the elected Democrats seemed to be - the kind of radicals that talked big, had a few demonstrations, but had no major causes or marches. I never really dealt with the middle of the road mainstream group, just the other two extremes of the Democratic Party.

[Therellas]

11. thanks for the replies everybody.

very interesting.:-)

[pscot]

12. Kennedy won a close election in 1960

but the country fell in love with the Kennedys afterward. After JFK was killed, Johnson won in a landslide in 1964 and began to push through a new deal type of program called the Great Society. Medicare was a part of that. Liberals were in the saddle and extremely confidant. Most of the press was liberal. That all blew up over the war in Vietnam and Racial issues. Newspapers and TV an politicians started getting lots of really pissed off mail from pro-war Americans who thought Blacks wanted too much too soon. The media and the pols caved to the anger. Blacks and war protesters rioted, and the cops raised the level of violence and rioted right back. It was ugly beyond belief. If you really want to get some sense of what it was like, read Nixonland, by Rick Pearlstein. He really nails it. I had to keep putting the book aside so I could get some air. The memories Pearlstein evoked were that powerful.

[Therellas]

13. so people straight up fought with the police?

that blows my mind.

[pscot]

28. There were riots in Newark

but the cops were far more violent than the people. Some people burned stores or looted, the the cops killed people. Almost 30 people died, most of them shot more or less randomly by the cops. Hundreds were wounded. The press looked the other way.

[Therellas]

14. is there a police presence at these tea parties I wonder?

Ive only seen them on tv.
seems doubtful.

[DailyGrind51]

15. Gene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and George McGovern were the best!

Following the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy went out to talk with the demonstrators at the '68 Chicago Convention to show his solidarity with their anti-war/social justice stance, not caring what the other side said about it.

[mmonk]

16. There were Dixiecrats but they are Republican now (as the Blue Dogs

and DC should be). There were more liberals in the 60's party, or at least, more with backbone. The Democratic Party of today stands alone in it's support for Milton Friedman, free trade, and privatization.

[demosincebirth]

17. There were just two party's, then. Now you have so-called indies and many more.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. I was a teenager in the latter part of the 1960s

The Dems were for civil rights and government activism to combat poverty.

Contrary to what the Republicans like to sneer, poverty actually did go down in the 1960s. See if you can find the PBS documentary The War on Poverty either on line or on DVD. It will show you how the War on Poverty was sabotaged by people with vested interests in keeping an underclass down.

What it felt like during that era was the everyone's standard of living was rising and that we really could do anything we set our minds to.

The downside was the Cold War mentality that got us into the Vietnam War.

[WestSeattle2]

19. In my opinion, the most striking difference between

60s Democrats and contemporary Democrats, is that the 60s version actually represented the lower and middle-classes. The majority of today's Democrats represent the interest of corporate America. There was a reason we had a strong and vibrant middle-class in the 1960s; it was due to a manufacturing-based economy, strong, vocal, and active unions, and Democratic control in Washington DC. A point of interest is that the governor of Washington state for most of that decade was republican Dan Evans, who in today's politics would be considered a left-leaning Democrat; he would never, ever make it through the republican primaries.

To answer your question straight up, today's Democrats are absolutely nothing like their 60s counterparts; they stood head and shoulders above today's version.

[OHdem10]

20. A lot of the 60's Dems became Yuppies in 70s and80s --need I

explain further.

[Wilms]

27. That goes a long way toward splainin our predicament. n/t

[ingac70]

21. In the 60s Southern Democrats....

aka racist filth, were in the party. They have since defected to the Republican party.

[canoeist52]

22. Radio address of Ronald Reagan as a democrat in 1948

Very liberal. Why aren't democrats speaking this language today?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJDhS4oUm0M

[KonaKane]

23. A real Democrat is damn hard to find these days

I am of the 60s generation, and remember the real ones. The Robert Kennedys, the firebrands who spearheaded a major social movement with no fear, no regrets and tons of spine and moral vision.

I miss them so badly. They are almost gone from today's party. What remains of the Democrats, I fear, is a shell that is being appropriated by GOP lites.

[WestSeattle2]

25. Agreed. I grew up with Warren Magnuson as one of our

Senators.....no one compares. Tip O'Neill came close. Absolutely none of the dithering fools today does.

[pscot]

29. I always thought that dipshit Carter cost Maggie his job

Carter was on the radio and TV conceding, 3 hours before the polls closed in Seattle. A lot of people never bothered to vote and Maggie went down. Damned shame.

[Oregone]

24. Late 60s, early 70s, the Republicans were proposing this health reform, and Democrats were fighting

against it with ideas like single-payer (led by Ted Kennedy). Things have changed radically.

Nixon wasn't as much as a right winger as a few today with (d)s after their names. Mandated & subsidized private insurance was his baby.

[wyldwolf]

26. as a whole, quite similar. But the party's makeup hasn't changed much since the 1930s

The big difference is the Republican party has gotten more vicious and the Democrats have not adapted to that.

[RedCloud]

30. In the 70's all but the morons were anti-war.