LA Times Op-Ed: In '72, GOP didn't become fundy; Dems lost their religion

Defending Barack Obama's controverial speech on religion and the Democrats, Columnist Gregory Rodriguez, in the LA Times on Sunday, argued that 1972 was a watershed year in US politics, not because the GOP began to implement the Southern strategy and appeal to yahoos in the Bible Belt who had previously voted strictly Democratic but because the Dems went all radical and McGovernik-y. Seems like a revisionist reading of history to me.



http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rodriguez16jul16,0,1292531.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Some scholars point to the Democratic National Convention of 1972 as not only the moment Democrats edged toward secularism but the event that created the religious rift in American politics. Before 1972, both major parties were essentially indistinguishable in their approach to religion. The activist cores of both were dominated by members of mainstream religious groups: the GOP by mainline Protestants and the Democratic Party by Catholics and Jews.

But the Democratic delegation that nominated South Dakota Sen. George McGovern for president at the '72 convention represented a profound shift from what had been the cultural consensus in American politics. Whereas only 5% of Americans could be considered secular in 1972, fully 24% of first-time Democratic delegates that year were self-identified agnostics, atheists or people who rarely, if ever, set foot in a house of worship. This new activist base encouraged a growing number of Democratic politicians to tone down their appeal to religious voters and to seek a higher wall separating church and state. With little regard for the traditionalist sensitivities of religious people within or outside of the party, the Democrats also embraced progressive stances on feminism and homosexuality that the public had never openly debated.

Meanwhile, the Republican delegation — and by extension the party platform — remained unchanged, and the GOP essentially became the party of tradition and religion by default. "The partisan differences that emerged in 1972," writes University of Maryland political scientist Geoffrey Layman, "were not caused by any sudden increase in the religious and cultural traditionalism of the Republican activists but by the pervasive secularism and cultural liberalism of the Democratic supporters of George McGovern."

Over the next generation, the shift in the Democratic Party pushed many religious voters, including the traditionally Democratic bloc of Southern evangelicals, into the arms of the Republican Party. In the 1980s, a shrewd GOP leadership discovered that the newly politicized evangelical population could be the engine of a remarkable late-century political comeback. By 2004, pollsters found that voters considered the Republican Party "more friendly" toward religion than the Democratic Party.

http://jsomnibus.blogspot.com/2006/07/strange-history.html

"While I certainly hate to underestimate the power of 24% of Democratic party delegates, the major shift away from the Democrats occurred for reasons largely outside of Democratic party's religious policies. White southerners left the party less because of religion than because of race. Over the same period, blacks, both northern and southern, religious and not, switched overwhelmingly to the Democratic party. In the end, the demographic shift sank Democrats in the South, though it put them on the right side of history. Also, the 1972 Roe v. Wade deicison energized millions of fundamentalists and evangelicals nationwide and drove them into Republican politics, generating enthusiastic support for Reagan against Ford in 1976 and gradually driving moderate Republicans further and further northeast. The Republican delegation did not go "unchanged". It grew far more aggressively conservative through the 1970s and 1980s--so much so that George Bush Sr., known as "Rubbers" in the 1960s for his support of contraception and family planning, had to insist over and over again that he was anti-abortion enough for the GOP right to survive the 1988 primaries. Finally, in 1972, McGovern would never have been the face of the party had not Nixon's men ratfucked McGovern's primary opponents, especially Ed Muskie, the early frontrunner in the '72 primaries who was running ahead of Nixon before the forged Canuck letter sank him."

That history makes sense to me. Rodriguez's version makes it sound as though flaming atheists took control of the Democratic Party. It's pure fantasy.

with the NCAA and call for the abolition of the BCS, and for the introduction of playoffs for Division I football:eyes:

More biased bullshit about how "atheistic" the Democratic party has become. I vote Democrat because I'm a Christian. The GOP is being many things these days, but Christian isn't one of them.



HAIL TO THE "CHIEF" and his GOP supporters
Ringo

because it's not ABOUT religion, although Reagan did hand his party off to the fundamentalist nutcases on CBN because they promised to deliver the party a solid voting bloc if the party adopted an antichoice plank in their platform.

No, it's about the ECONOMY, and what the Democrats lost in 1972 was the will to continue the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and other citizen centered programs that had alarmed the rich in the GOP so much. They lost their will because of the publicity about "welfare queens," which predated Reagan, and which was a code word for BLACK WOMEN. They lost their will because they didn't see any great future in supporting the working class, the rich paid so much better. They lost their will because they had a nominal majority and thought they could rest on their laurels.

Clinton was right, it IS the economy and always has been. Stupid wouldn't have won anything without his promise of tax cuts, a bait and switch now as it was during Reagan's reign, but at least it was SOMETHING offered a middle class and working class who had been hammered by inflation and had never recovered their pre OPEC earning power.

Dean struck exactly the right note in his CBN interview. It's about ECONOMIC JUSTICE and that was one of the things Jesus Christ was about.

It all comes down to the economy. Religion is a matter of personal choice and should remain so. Pandering to the religious on social issues won't do anything but rid the party of much of its remaining base. \

The party can't win without its working class base. It sure as hell can't win without its women.

This country looks pretty funny for one that has, according to the columnist, had atheists in charge of one of its two main political parties for the last thirty-five years. If the Democrats were run by atheists, don't you think at least one atheist would have been elected to high office? Instead, most Democrats try to out-Christian the Republicans.

Which major democratic leader, in the past 34 years, has been openly areligious? Not anti-religious, merely areligious. Like you said, the answer is none! Geez, the Democrats have TWICE had ordained ministers (Sharpton & Jackson) run for the presidential nomination!
The Professor

the Republican lurch into rightwing looneyland makes reactionaries look like centrists, and conservatives (Ike, Goldwater, and Nixon) look like liberals, now that they're snake-handling at the podium, everyone else looks like arch secularists. And the bozo pundits are digging for historical "explanations" for what's staring them in the face -- Republicans have lost their minds.

to treat extreme right-wing Christianity as "mainstream"--or who wants to pretend Republican religionism is "normal," but secularism is "radical" and "dangerous" to the party. :eyes:

BTW, this guy has another article onsite where he figures that because Dubya came down on a side of an issue he agrees with (immigration), Chimpy's returned to his true "centrist" nature. He can tell this because Dubya's more jocular, relaxed, comfortable in his own skin. The rightwing maniac thing was an act. Really.

The next election when the "rift" came into play. And a Southern Baptist Evangelical to boot!

than saying the Republicans have run on thinly veiled racism since the Civil Rights Bill was passed.

Those aren't racists, they're godly people! Who knew!

http://jsomnibus.blogspot.com/2006/07/strange-history.html

"The column's equation of secular left with religious right also ignores a vast difference in power. Religious right politicians hold the White House, the Congressional majority and its leadership, and four Supreme Court seats. Atheists and agnostics control...well...the Skeptics Society, the Socialist Worker party, Bernie Sanders, and, for at least a few years, the Minnesota Vikings's offensive backfield. We don't have the power to push politicians to do anything at all, though I'm perfectly willing to admit that our mere presence in the Democratic party suffices to help the Pat Robertson/Bill O'Reilly types spin conspiracy theories (as do a variety of lawsuits involving coinage and the Pledge of Allegiance that have nothing to do with the Democratic party)."


<Thanks to Cassandra for bringing this blog and post to my attention. :toast: >

Is someone on the Vikings an outspoken secularist? That's cool.

whose name has escaped me.

He played safety for the Cardinals, but he's probably who they were getting at.

:toast:

i wonder whose ass he pulled those numbers from.

"Whereas only 5% of Americans could be considered secular in 1972..."

This, nearly 10 years after Time and Life had covers asking "is god dead?"?

All of america was far more secular then than it is today. Church attendance was well below 50%, synagogues were closing because they couldn't get a (damn, what's the word? like a quorum?) to hold their services. No one worried that the politician might have the wrong brand of religion -- it was rude to ask about it. People who were blatantly, overtly religious were figures of ridicule -- remember Pat Boone trying to be hip?

Southern dems abandoned the party because of the voting rights act, not because the party suddenly went secular. The fact that the racist pinhead population was a near exact correlation with the religiously insane population, carrying their bibles as they burned their crosses, was not lost on Nixon, and he went for it. And they're still there.

I don't recall the Dems EVER making specific appeals to religious voters, and I first voted in the 1972 election.

At the time, I saw McGovern's defeat as part of a backlash against the counterculture, which seemingly came out of nowhere and shocked Middle American moms and dads out of their minds.

If you didn't live through those years, you have NO IDEA how fast the cultural changes occurred. In 1964, Mario Savio and other Berkeley students demonstrated for free speech while wearing what would now be considered business clothes. The men wore coats and ties, while the women wore dresses and heels. (Check out the pictures in old Life magazines if you don't believe me.) The Beatles were considered shocking, because their hair was, oh, about two inches long and they wore funny jackets.

A mere three years later came the Summer of Love in San Francisco, and two years later was Woodstock. By that time, hippie-style garb and the sex, drugs, and rock&roll lifestyle were found everywhere in the country.

I know what kinds of arguments went on in Middle American families during those years. In just five years, all the standards that Mom and Dad had grown up with were challenged and defied. Even more than parents of other generations, they wondered, "What is this world coming to?"

To top it off, there were race riots during those same years, as well as the beginnings of the American Indian Movement.

To the conventional-minded, it looked as if the country was coming apart.

The 1972 election saw McGovern consistently portrayed in the media as the hero of left-wing college students, while Nixon appealed directly to voters disturbed by the cultural changes of the past eight years. This is in spite of the fact that McGovern himself was a decorated World War II hero and anything but countercultural in his personal life.

There were a lot more upset moms and dads than there were left-wing college students, and so Nixon won by a landslide on a platform that many of today's Democratic establishment types would consider "left wing."

It's about a political party, the Republicans, learning how to market themselves to a cross-section of the population; learning what drives them, what scares them - what pushes their buttons. They targeted evangelicals and then have proceeded to manipulate them. Democrats DID NOT push evangelicals into the arms of the Republican Party. Please.

IIRC, people who considered themselves religious voted Dem through the 60's & 70's. The civil rights movement gained a lot of support of churches, Catholic priests and nuns were often marching for an end to the Vietnam War, and in general religious people embraced other issues that were centered more in Democratic politics. This wasn't because the Democratic Party courted religious issues. It was because the issues were moral issues that religious/spiritual people naturally gravited to.

The gop saw this as a strength of the Democratic Party, that we had the moral high ground. This is when they began developing their faux christian groups, such as the christian coalition to infiltrate and churches and politize religion.



The OP-ED is nothing more than bird cage liner.

"Whereas only 5% of Americans could be considered secular in 1972, fully 24% of first-time Democratic delegates that year were self-identified agnostics, atheists or people who rarely, if ever, set foot in a house of worship."

I'd be curious to see if his definition of "secular" which amounted to 5% of the population counted people who rarely went to a house of worship.

This is insane.

It doesn't - there are lots of believers who support secularism like the separation of church and state. Most sane adults do, believer or not.