My America, My Homeland Part 4

 

Yellow Dog Democrats and Carolina Dogs – The Science of the South

It was very important in my family for Mother and Daddy to go to the polls and vote.  They were highly informed about the news of the day and the candidates on the ballot.  Election Day was a huge affair, always with a large turnout.  Mother would dress in her finest Sunday clothes and Daddy would have on his usual business suit.  They would go to the polls together and then anxiously await election returns.  My grandfather, J.C. Jones, was a “yellow dog” Democrat, a term applied to southern voters who would vote for a “yellow dog before voting for any Republican.”  Once upon a time, the Democratic Party embraced what was best for the working class over the elite business class, and really still does. But their philosophy became so liberal, accepting things outside the boundaries of conservative values and placed much of the burden on the backs of middle class taxes. The Democrats created a government of hand outs, i.e. the Great Society, the War on Poverty, etc., which enabled people to take from the government without any responsibility to work for what they had.  In the 1960s, this turned some Democrats more towards the philosophy of free enterprise, that if you work hard, you deserve to own what you have and competition keeps prices lower.  Along about this time, the Democrats also developed very liberal moral values, accepting whatever someone wanted to do as their civil right. We were no longer held accountable to any standards, as that would step on someone’s rights. This is when Mother changed from Democrat to Republican, and she often said, “I didn’t leave my party; they left me.”