Linking to the past is risky

RE: DEMOCRATIC PARTY WASN’T ALL GOOD (JAN. 23)

The letter writer correctly observes that the Democratic Party was historically associated with protecting slavery and enacting racial segregation, while Republicans ended slavery and pursued policies to fight the KKK in the decades which followed. The writer also notes that the notorious Governor Wallace of Alabama was a Democrat.

Yet she conveniently fails to note that it was a pair of Democrats (President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy) who successfully confronted Wallace and forced him to accept racial integration at the University of Alabama. So segregation was not necessarily a Democratic policy.

It was also a Democrat (Lyndon Johnson) who achieved the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, which finally undercut segregation. By contrast, it was a Republican (Richard Nixon) who exploited Kennedy and Johnson’s policies, to gain Republican support from conservative (white) southerners — laying the foundation for the Republican base in the South which endures today.

The lesson, clearly, is that political parties change their policies over time, and attempts to draw links with the past are very risky.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the republic to the south. In the Canadian election of 1911 the Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier promoted reciprocity (free trade) with the United States, while the Conservative Party campaigned (successfully) against it. In 1988 the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney successfully promoted free trade — a policy which the Liberal party (unsuccessfully) opposed. Patrick Carter, Ancaster