I certainly agree with you that the situation was appalling in the 1960's, and indeed, much later than that. I remember "whites only" signs in the mid-Sixties South, and even after they came down, the spirit that put them up lived on. It wasn't that long ago. People of that time haven't had time to pass from the population yet. I agree with most of what you say. I only argue that it's factually incorrect that the departure of so much of the white working class and LMC was because of the civil rights legislation. If you followed media for those decades you could see the division occur as the Left abruptly ceased to concern itself with the unions and the needs of working people and loudly declared itself to be about the "Rainbow Coalition" and social justice. Listen--I'm with HL Menken on the unloveable qualities of what we now call the Trump base. I'm not talking about the injustices, or what was fair, or anything like that. Just practicalities. For me, one of the saving graces in the pre-21's C America was that there was no such ethnicity as "white." Thank God. In a few areas like the deep South where there were two fairly uniform populations, there effectively was, but in the country as a whole, white people comprised an insanely heterogeneous collection. White included recent immigrants fleeing the FSU, Texas ranchers, Hassidic Jews in Brooklyn, vanilla blue-state white people of unknown provenance like me, Midwestern farmers, and dirt-poor Appalachians who's ancestors had been dirt-poor for centuries before they ever came to this continent three hundred years ago. It includes native French speaking populations in Maine, German-speaking people in Texas, working class Irish people, WASPS, Crackers for Georgia, and millions of people who barely speak English. My point is, those disparate peoples never thought of themselves as being at all alike, certainly not part of some group identity. It wasn't that long ago that the idea that a Catholic could be elected president of the United States seemed as far fetched as the idea that a Black person could be. That's how extremely not-a-polity "white" was. In fact, until recently, concerning oneself with one's "whiteness" was something that marked a person as extremely low class. The social equivalent of having tattoos on one's neck. Dwelling being white was associated with being a convict. As an old-school liberal, I think it's a terrible political strategy for the left to harp on race as the thing that defines us. Absolutely the last thing I want to see is the 2/3 of the US that is "white" to start thinking of themselves, and defining themselves, as a group. That's the nightmare I see us inadvertently sliding toward as we shortsightedly used race to attempt to weld the minority groups together into a voting bloc. Liberals (like me and probably you) tend to live in a few cities in a few states. It's easy to forget how completely untypical of America what we see around us is. Even in NYC, where I lived for forty years, it's easy to miss that entire boroughs are solid Red, as is almost every square mile of upstate NY. When I talk to young people I'm deeply alarmed at how far the project of training Americans that ethnic identity is all that matters has gone. I'm not afraid of Trump's four years as much as I'm afraid of thirty more years of the same coming along behind him.