The only reason why the Civil Rights movement succeeded was because of decolonization and the Cold War, which forced the United States to compete with the Soviet Union for the loyalty of independent black countries. In these circumstances, the cost of Jim Crow could be the communization of the whole of sub-saharan Africa, leading ultimately to a US defeat in the Cold War.

As for the U.S. crackdown on anti-black violence and systematic discrimination, I lived thru it and can tell you that tho some people in the State Department may have been concerned about sub-Saharan Africa, that concern played essentially NO PART in the DOMESTIC drive to extend justice to our fellow citizens. Northerners were moved by PICTURES of blacks being attacked by police, by water hoses, by dogs. Black 'agitators' forced the issue, and the Nation reacted in disgust and indignation.
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We now have several decades of compelled integration, thousands of black officeholders across the South, integrated media with some social segregation evident, and the South is slowly improving education, under federal prodding. Southerners raised post-1964 are significantly different in racial attitudes from Southerners raised in segregation, and if liberals ever TRY to show poor and lower-middle class Southern whites that they are being USED, they may wake up to the fact that race and gay rights are just distractions to keep them from thinking of how BADLY they are being used.
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So I'm hopeful of change.

Good point about the role of television in destroying Jim Crow — another factor which I had missed was the invention of the mechanical cotton picker, which meant the South had much less of a need for cheap agricultural labor.

How can the Democratic party be changed to achieve this end? A glance at the county-by-county election results shows the problem immediately — the "Democrats" are currently the "Metrocrats", completely out of touch with rural people.

HOW indeed do you move a major party? That's why I started a 'third party' to begin with, because the major parties are almost immovable except by the hugely rich and powerful. The role of third parties in the U.S. historically is to get ideas before the public where they have a chance of becoming grassroots issues. It does not, I admit, work very well, but nothing does. In the U.S., and most other countries, we endlessly address or "manage" the same issues decade after decade. Almost none of our problems are ever solved, in part because the people in charge don't know HOW to solve them, in part because if they WERE to solve them, the need for their services would diminish. Solve too many problems and you're out of a job. Or so they may feel.
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Technology seems to be the driving force in social change in the United States, from the automobile emptying the cities of the middle class, to television impelling changes in racial policies; to labor-saving devices and the Pill freeing women far more than any feminist rhetoric could; to the Internet creating new communities but also promoting conspiracy theories, scams, hacker-caused injury to millions, and identity theft; to cable, VCRs, DVD players and video game machines spewing forth a deadening torrent of violent, toxic media, much that changes in this country is the result of new technologies. The delay between the technological change and the social change(s) it produces can make unclear what has caused the change; and government usually doesn't know what to do about it.
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With some things, the benefits so plainly outweigh the disadvantages (e.g., the proliferation of private cars) that we try to accommodate the change. With others, we should recognize that the disadvantages so drastically outweigh any possible advantage -- e.g., toxic video games, increasing numbers of methods of abortion, nuclear proliferation -- that we should take drastic action to destroy or at least stringently control them. But for every evil there is an apologist. And any defense of an obvious evil, no matter how specious, can be used as an excuse for inaction by people who don't want to act.
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Returning to the immovability of the major parties, even when the course is crystal clear, as for instance in this past election, when I tried to alert the Democrats to the obvious fact that they were going to lose the election badly unless they landed hard on their best issue, personal debt, they wouldn't listen but, incomprehensibly, said essentially NOTHING about their strongest issue, so went down in flames.
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I started a blog entry about a report that came out, that the Kerry campaign had $15 million left unspent in its general account on election day, and another $8 million or more in a reserve account for legal challenges, had such proved necessary. But I can't find the draft. It vanished. Either my machine (at home or work; I'm not sure where I wrote it) crashed before I could store it, or I exited and mysteriously didn't save, or something else I don't understand. But it vanished. The point I wanted to make is that this is one more proof that the Democrats really didn't want to win the election. They didn't use their strongest issue and didn't use all of their campaign funds, but held back a FORTUNE even tho it might have done the trick in some closely-contested states.
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I am forced to believe that the Democratic leadership was convinced that Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea — but mostly Iraq — are so horrible and intractable a mess that WHOEVER is in office for the next four years will founder in a sea of violence and death from which the American people will recoil in disgust, tarring the ruling party for a generation. But what if, magically, the Republicans do win a military 'victory' in Iraq? meaning not that true peace and reconciliation are achieved, a successful transition is made to a multi-party democracy and mutually tolerant civil society, but that Iraq's levels of violence come down to those of Israel, low enuf to pretend that we've "succeeded"? The U.S. public seems content to have 3-10 Americans die in Iraq each week, perhaps in perpetuity: it's just "the price we have to pay" for "peace". Then the Democrats will have voluntarily given up the White House and both houses of Congress for nothing.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:52 PM