“The fault may not be in ourselves but in our parties.... I personally regret the passing of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and feel that we’re poorer for it.” David Shribman
Well, we got what everybody was wishing for. And I think the result, when you have a party that’s a conservative party, which the Republican Party now quite obviously is, and a liberal party, which the Democratic Party is unquestionably, that you are going to have a less civil discourse. And I think the fault may not be in ourselves but in our parties and in the way they are structured, and I personally regret the passing of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats and feel that we’re poorer for it, and that is one of the reasons for the lack civility in our civic discourse.
Ms. Sondra Myers:
Would you elaborate on that a little bit?
Mr. David Shribman:
Well, in the old day, which is to say, when we were young—you know, I have this theory that it doesn’t matter how old you are, what really matters is when you were young. Think about that.
But the Democratic Party is a very good example in which there was a southern rump of the Democratic Party that was deeply conservative, that still retained states’ rights identity and fumes of the Civil War. It was racist or nearly racist, but it was a very powerful part of the Democratic Party until, really, the Johnson years. And it was very difficult for liberal legislation to be passed by Democratic presidents because they were opposed by the members of their own party. But they had as allies liberal Republicans. And I don’t think, for example, that there was any more vicious a fight than there was between President Roosevelt, in, I think, the ’38 election, and the conservatives that he tried to purge from his own party.
President Johnson knew that he could not pass the Civil Rights Bill of 1965 without Republican votes. In fact, I believe the percentage of votes that supported the Civil Rights Bills in the Senate was higher in the Republican Party than it was in the Democratic Party. That promoted a sense of civility. And even though we were talking about the most uncivil acts in American history, it promoted a sense of civility and bipartisanship that we don’t have today. The most conservative member of the Democratic Party is more liberal than the most liberal member of the Republican Party today. That was not true as recently as twenty-five years ago. 8