It is a bad day when you learn nothing - Goldwater and the 1964 Voting Rights Act

This morning I am reading Robert Novak's column on Hilary Clinton. Novak is his usual grumpy self. To me, Novak always looks like he cannot digest his dinner and that a little bicarbonate of soda would do much to improve his life. I will also admit that I read one of Goldwater's books and was impressed that he could write as well as he did. (I must also disclose just how amusing it was to read in 1990 a book written in the Sixties that devoted about a third to the evils of Communism.) So in the midst of doing a hatchet job on Hillary, Novak writes:

...Barry Goldwater's opposition to the 1964 voting rights bill was not incidental to his run for the White House but an integral element of conscious departure from Republican tradition that contributed to his disastrous performance.

I wondered when the Republicans began their departure from the party of Lincoln to the party of the South, and I guess Goldwater and 1964 is a place to start. It appears to be the start, actually.

An update of sorts. An e-mail from The New York Review of Books arrived after I finished the original version of this post. it contained a review of a book on Douglass and Lincoln, and it would appear that the Republicans slide to becoming a Southern party began long before Goldwater:

Douglass outlived Lincoln by thirty years. In the latter half of that period the nation receded from its Reconstruction promise of racial justice, and Southern blacks were forced into second-class citizenship. As this trajectory spiraled downward, the Civil War president looked better and better in retrospect. If Lincoln were alive today, Douglass said in 1893, "did his firm hand now hold the helm of state;...did his wisdom now shape and control the destiny of this otherwise great republic," the national government would not be making the "weak and helpless" claim that "there is no power under the United States Constitution to protect the lives and liberties" of Southern blacks "from barbarous, inhuman and lawless violence."