Did Lyndon Johnson Support Civil Rights Before He Was President?

Dwarkesh Patel says no. Drawing on Robert Caro's biographies, he argues that Lyndon Johnson showed little coherent political ideology for most of his career and fitted himself to the conservative Southern Democrats who held power in the Senate.

When Johnson entered the Senate, the most powerful men there were the Southern Dixiecrats, and the new senator molded himself to them. While writing Master of the Senate, volume three of the Johnson biographies, Caro asked former Georgia senator Herman Talmadge what impression freshman senator Lyndon Johnson gave of the proper relationship between white people and black people. Talmadge answered, master and servant. Caro asked whether Johnson had any sympathy for blacks, or any desire to improve their lot. Once Johnson was president he spearheaded the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the most important civil rights laws since Reconstruction. Johnson had been an opportunist from the start. Only after he held real power did he use it for ideals few people knew he had. Robert Moses, in the same telling, had moved the other way, from a naive idealist to someone seeking power for its own sake.