The November 3 Time magazine featured historian Richard Norton Smith's predictable take on the modern Republican Party. The author of a new biography on Nelson Rockefeller sneered that, as a result of the nomination of Barry Goldwater, "The party of Lincoln morphed into the party of Strom Thurmond."
Connecting the GOP of 2014 to the party 50 years ago, Smith assailed, "From Birchers to birthers, it’s not hard to find parallels between fantasists who imagined Eisenhower 'a dedicated and conscious agent of the communist conspiracy' and their latter-day heirs disputing Barack Obama’s origins and loyalty."
Opining of the Republican transformation in the '60s, the author wrote in Time:
What occurred in San Francisco was the excommunication of moderate and liberal elements presaging today’s GOP–more unswervingly conservative than even Goldwater envisioned. External events played their part in the transformation. As the 1950s Cold War consensus began to fray, racial divisions accelerated the breakup of the old New Deal coalition. The party of Lincoln morphed into the party of Strom Thurmond. Rockefeller-style pragmatism generated diminished support among Republicans for whom government had become an object of suspicion.
Of course, while it's true that Strom Thurmond did become a Republican, it was the Democratic Party in 1952 that nominated a segregationist vice presidential candidate. It was Democrat George Wallace that famously and aggressively opposed civil rights.
A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act. As CNN explained:
More Republicans voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act than Democrats
In the 1960s, Congress was divided on civil rights issues -- but not necessarily along party lines.
The civil rights movement in photos The civil rights movement in photos
"Most people don't realize that today at all -- in proportional terms, a far higher percentage of Republicans voted for this bill than did Democrats, because of the way the Southerners were divided," said Purdum.
This isn't the first time Time featured Smith to knock the GOP. In the November 17, 2008 edition of the magazine, he declared the "end of the Reagan era." He complained of Reagan:
Reagan preferred laughing at his adversaries to demonizing them. He disarmed critics of his relaxed administrative style by acknowledging that the right hand of his Administration didn't always know what its far-right hand was up to. As the laughter crested, so did the tax-cutting, the regulatory rollback and the military buildup that foreshadowed, paradoxically, the most sweeping arms reductions of the nuclear era. The ensuing political realignment was measured less in voter-registration rolls than in a pervasive skepticism about the state. Because there were many things government did badly, it came to be assumed, there was virtually nothing it did well....
