Be Careful What You Wish For: The Ironic Connection Between the Civil Rights Struggle and Today's Divided America

The deep political and economic divisions that characterize the contemporary United States have been the subject of much discussion and analysis. However, most of the accounts of these divisions have tended to emphasize relatively recent events or trends, such as the Tea Party movement or the extreme partisanship that has marked the last three presidential administrations (e.g., Obama, George Bush Jr., Clinton). The origins of today's divisions, however, have much older roots. They date to the heyday of the Civil Rights struggle and ironically to the seminal achievements of the movement. More accurately, it is the story of not one, but two parallel movements, the revitalized civil rights movement of the early to mid-1960s and the powerful segregationist countermovement, that quickly developed in response to the African-American freedom struggle. The argument is that over the course of the decade of the 1960s, these two linked struggles decisively altered the partisan geography of the United States, and in the process pushed the national Democratic and Republican parties sharply to the left and right, respectively, undermining the centrist policy convergence of the postwar period and setting the parties on the divisive course they remain on today.