Kennedy did not sign the Civil Rights Act, Kennedy was dead. He wanted it, but it never got any support until after his assassination. It was LBJ who got bipartisan support for the bill. After it passed and LBJ used federal powers to force southern states to stop being so racist, many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
The democrats did not leave their labor base. The Democrats have never stopped pushing labor rights and unions and similar.
The voters who were pissed with being forced to desegregate left the democrat party. Turns out there were a lot of people who thought it was more important to be able to be racist than unionized.
I don't know why you believe billionaire Ross Perot, Texas businessman and prominent supporter of the war on drugs, who told Larry King that we should "cut medicare and social security for those who """don't need it""" " is "pro labor" ffs. He's the same kind of "we should run the country like a business" populist as Reagan and Trump, and just as wrong. He was literally a big supporter of Reagan as Reagan dismantled Unions and union rights!
NAFTA did not send your job to China, business executives did. Business executives like Ross Perot, who made his money selling computing services to the US government, and didn't really do much else before or since.
Even if NAFTA had been completely blocked, average Americans would still have been screwed from Reagan's changes to the country. Underpaid workers in other countries are not getting all the money, surely you recognize that right? The money never even leaves the country.
> many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
In this case, "many" is at most 2.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators... Thurmond was the only US senator who switched parties in the 60s. Harry Byrd (from Virginia, not Robert from West Virginia) stopped caucusing with Dems in 1970.
No other US senators switched parties until 94.
Before Thurmond, the previous switch was by Morse (Oregon) who went from Republican to Democrat in 53-55.
The same seems to be true of the House of Representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_represen... .
Pretty much every prominent Dem segregationist only left office when he retired.
That's why the "first Republican elected since Reconstruction" events didn't start until the mid 70s and didn't really get going until the mid 80s.
You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.
Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.
NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.
Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.
Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.