Uh-uh. The reason why the military used to vote Democratic before but not now is because before Nixon, both parties had strong contingents of liberals and conservatives - indeed, the 1964 Civil Rights Act could not have passed without Republican liberals. Before Nixon, the
always-conservative Deep South (which is always overrepresented in our military) was called the Democratic "Solid South". Then when Nixon used his "
Southern Strategy" to attract the "negrophobes", the Deep South began to shift from the Democratic party to the GOP. The Deep South - like the military - shifted from the Democratic party to the GOP because the nature of the parties themselves changed.
The military - which by its very nature is always more conservative than the general population (I believe this goes for all military through all history) - tends to vote for whichever party is the most conservative.
Oh, and one more thing - this retired Navy man wants you to read the following lines from a speech made by what y'all would today call a raving left-wing liberal: "
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Who was the stark-raving mad left-wing liberal who said that?
Dwight D. Eisenhower.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the commander of SHAEF in WWII. He knew something of war, of what our military needs...and he realized that a strong military is fragile indeed if supporting that military comes at the cost of unnecessarily depriving the basic infrastructure of the nation it serves.
