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Like all other politicians, I think his personal ambitions dovetailed with his ideology and the direction of his era. I think his detractors often confuse his attitudes towards class with those towards race, and his character. He grew up brutally poor and struggled in his professional class closely with issues of class, especially given his position as the ‘dumb’ southerner in Kennedy’s pedigreed cabinet. He was a voracious advocate of the poor Mexican children he taught, pushed them to succeed relentlessly, and tutored the school janitor in English for free because he was convinced his inability to speak English was hindering him. I think his entire career often struggled with issues of class and inequality, and his personal instinct to the lesser was typically compassionate and generous. He was known to have a temper and a flare for knowing how to touch people’s insecurities and nerves, and also for his ability to find and build emotional coherence in those positions he found politically advantageous. He also loved jokes, and didn’t care much about who they were at the expense of.

But ultimately he could have found a more natural path to power in racial demagoguery that was so rampant in the south, and the political cohesion behind the southern democrats at that time gave him a natural base of power to launch a presidential bid. But he chose the more arduous work of breaking down the south’s racial hierarchy at great cost to his professional relationships.

I think Caro said it best, that power ultimately doesn’t corrupt, but rather reveal someone’s true nature - and LBJ used his shot at power to write compassion and mercy into the federal statutes. He fought ferociously to give the civil rights and voting acts real power, and handed minorities the greatest legislative weapon they had since Thaddeus Russell outlawed slavery.

They've changed their colors but not their tune. Historically the Republicans said that everyone should be treated equally under the law and the Democrats claimed equal treatment was bad. Today it's the same thing but they're targeting a different demographic, so they still oppose equality under the law but it's a different set of exceptions.

Democrats need black votes much more than Republicans need racist votes, because there are a lot more black people than racists in the swing states. Which means Democrats need the narrative that Republicans are all racists to stick, so they spend a lot of time telling everybody that and publicizing every little instance they can find.

The Democrats would be in serious trouble if black people started believing that entrepreneurship is the best way for their communities to get out of poverty and voting for politicians who made it easier for them to start a business.

But if entrepreneurship really is the best way for a community to get out of poverty...

> Come on. Republican bang the drum for the culturally scared white vote, and they've done it consistently for over half a century regardless of the fidelity with which one explains civil rights legislation.

Don't conflate race and culture. The difference is really important. Because the difference is that a black man willing to work two jobs to go to college so he can get a middle class paycheck and live in a middle class neighborhood with middle class schools, can actually do that. That wasn't the case a century ago. And it's important to notice that nobody of consequence is asking for that to go back to the way it was.

The problem is that Democrats are now trying to pin their mess on Republicans and pay lip service to solving it. Even when they've had a legislative majority (e.g. Obama's first term), they still don't actually fix the criminal justice system, or gang violence, or a dozen other things that are actively making life hard for poor communities.

And when they claim to have done something like the ACA, it ends up being a huge taxpayer subsidy to corporations that donate to their campaigns and an arduous bureaucracy to the people it's supposed to help.

What he literally said was this:

> You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

But think about what that is. It's a strategy for destroying racism by abstracting it into non-existence.

You have these racists who hate black people because they think they're inferior subhumans, and then a bunch of regular middle class people who don't care about race at all and just want their tax dollars to pay for their own kid's school instead of some stranger's kid, but they end up together in a majority coalition.

If you strip off the second group of people and give them what they want directly without any racial component then the first group loses all their political power. They go from 60% of people you can't ignore to 0.2% of people you can ignore.

And you can't pretend the outcome is the same either. A person can't change their skin color the same ways they can change their finances.