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Conservatives OnlyThe "Southern Strategy" Myth (self.Conservative)

chabanaisStronger than dirt.[M] が 投稿

Each side has their talking points and one we see parroted often by the budding Poly-Sci wizards of Reddit is the "Southern Strategy."

The problem with this mindless parroting is that it's simply wrong. But in repeating this lie it makes people believe it must be true because, after all, they heard it enough times!

The regurgitation of the "Southern Strategy" is grounds for immediate banning here at /r/Conservative because it is simply a lie and if you're going to discuss politics you should know the truth:

The Southern Strategy myth is too well-entrenched by now, and too essential to the Democrats’ narrative and self-image, to expect that any level of contact with the facts can dispel it. But like a number of the myths about electoral politics dispelled in Trende’s book, it’s worth your time to learn those facts.

Here is the myth:

The Republicans wanted to control the South and weaken the Democrats so - sometime in the 1960s - both camps "switched sides" with the racists becoming Republicans and everyone else becoming Democrats. The myth says that, therefore, today's Republicans are racists and today's racists are Republicans because of the "Southern Strategy."

Here is the truth:

It’s true that a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, shepherded the 1964 Civil Rights Act to passage. But who voted for it? Eighty percent of Republicans in the House voted aye as against 61 percent of Democrats. In the Senate, 82 percent of Republicans favored the law, but only 69 percent of Democrats. Among the Democrats voting nay were Albert Gore Sr., Robert Byrd and J. William Fulbright.

The Republican presidential candidate in 1964 also opposed the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater had been an enthusiastic backer of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts (both overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats). He was a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He hired many blacks in his family business and pushed to desegregate the Arizona National Guard. He had a good-faith objection to some features of the 1964 act, which he regarded as unconstitutional.

Then we hear that Barry Goldwater was a "racist" and it is he who led the charge to draw racist Democrats to his side of the electoral line:

Goldwater was no racist. The same cannot be said of Fulbright, on whom Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom. Fulbright was one of the 19 senators who signed the “Southern Manifesto” defending segregation.

The last myth is that after this mythical "switch" was complete, all the elected officials "switched sides," too:

OK, but didn’t all the old segregationist senators leave the Democratic Party and become Republicans after 1964? No, just one did: Strom Thurmond. The rest remained in the Democratic Party — including former Klansman Robert Byrd, who became president pro tempore of the Senate.

So was there a "switch" at all and, if not, how did Republicans make gains in the South?

[T]he growth of GOP support among white Southerners was steady and mostly gradual from 1928 to 2010, and was a natural outgrowth of the fact that white Southerners were ideologically much more compatible with the national Republican agenda and coalition than with the national Democratic agenda and coalition. What retarded the Southern switch from the Democrats to the GOP was a combination of party loyalties dating back to Reconstruction and the Democrats’ use of racial issues. In other words, if you take race out of the picture, it’s likely that white Southerners would have switched parties earlier and in greater numbers. The real “Southern Strategy” was the one pursued by the Democrats, especially under FDR, to keep conservative white Southerners in a liberal party.

But what about Lee Atwater and his capitalization of the "Southern Strategy" to help Ronald Reagan win in the South?:

But Reagan did not have to do a southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been, quote, southern issues since way back in the sixties. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the issues of economics and of national defense. The whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference. And I’ll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that even surprised me, is the lack of interest, really, the lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters about the Voting Rights Act.

Thus, in Lee Atwater's own words, race was not a part of Reagan's strategy to win the South.

Southerners, like most people, voted on their pocketbooks and, it turns out, that led them increasingly to vote Republican.

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[–]Stoic_Moose 8ポイント9ポイント  (1子コメント)

I just looked at the wikipedia page on this because I had no idea what the hell you were referring to and just...

wow, pathetically disgusting. It reads like it was written by rationalwiki.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

wow, pathetically disgusting. It reads like it was written by rationalwiki.

Pretty much.

[–]JohnnyDollarPaleoconservative 16ポイント17ポイント  (6子コメント)

"The Southern Strategy" argument really holds no power if you claim you're a conservative instead of a Republican. Even IF Republicans supported racist policies, they were NOT conservative. There is no room in conservative values for policies that support government powers to remove a man's freedom for no reason other than his skin color. That is not small government. That is not liberty.

[–]MrGrumpyBear 5ポイント6ポイント  (6子コメント)

The problem is that you've engaged and handily defeated a strawman argument here. You've magically jumped from 1964 (Goldwater) to 1980 (Reagan) without ever dealing with the key elections: 1968 and 1972. It was Richard Nixon who pivoted the party to the South, appealing to backlash against the successes of the Civil Rights movement by criticizing "laws aimed the South", by nominating Spiro Agnew as his running mate, and by constantly campaigning on the issue of "law and order" in a particularly racially charged way. It was Richard Nixon who mobilized white anger over forced busing.

Finally, your friendly synopsis of Reagan's 1980 campaign ignores what I (and many others) consider to be a crucial fact. Where a candidate chooses to kick off his presidential campaign matters. It says something about where that candidate comes from and what he believes in. Ronald Reagan chose to kick off his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi, site of some of the most notorious civil rights murders in our nation's history (which had happened only 16 years earlier), and he chose to focus on . . . states rights. On unconstitutional federal overreach. That's not even a coded appeal to Southern racists, it's an incredibly blatant one.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -2ポイント-1ポイント  (5子コメント)

On Nixon:

Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, which the democrats say is the reason black people had to support them during the 1960′s–is a lie.

Why is that?

Richard Nixon wrote about the 1968 campaign in his book RN: the Memoirs of Richard Nixon originally published in 1978.

In his book, Nixon wrote this about campaigning in the south, “The deep south had to be virtually conceded to George Wallace. I could not match him there without compromising on civil rights, which I would not do.”

The media coverage of the 1968 presidential race also showed that Nixon was in favor of the Civil Rights and would not compromise on that issue. For example, in an article published in theWashington Post on September 15, 1968 headlined “Nixon Sped Integration, Wallace says” Wallace declared that Nixon agreed with Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren and played a role in ”the destruction of public school system.” Wallace pledged to restore the school system, in the same article, by giving it back to the states ”lock, stock, and barrel.”

So what states did George Wallace win?

Among the southern states, George Wallace won Arkansas , Mississippi , Alabama , Georgia and Louisiana . Nixon won North Carolina , South Carolina , Florida , Virginia , and Tennessee.

“I would not concede the Carolina ‘s, Florida , or Virginia or the states around the rim of the south,”Nixon wrote. ”These states were a part of my plan.”

Nixon won those states strictly on economic issues. He focused on increasing tariffs on foreign imports to protect the manufacturing and agriculture industries of those states. Some southern elected officials agreed to support him for the sake of their economies, including South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.

But Strom Thurmond was a racist! That proves your point?

In fact, Nixon made it clear to the southern elected officials that he would not compromise on the civil rights issue.

“On civil rights, Thurmond knew my position was very different from his,” Nixon wrote. “I was for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and he was against it. Although he disagreed with me, he respected my sincerity and candor.”

So why would he support Nixon who was pro-Civil Rights?

As stated in my original piece... economic reasons:

“I had been consulting privately with Thurmond for several months and I was convinced that he’d join my campaign if he were satisfied on the two issues of paramount concern to him: national defense and tariffs against textile imports to protect South Carolina ‘s position in the industry.”Nixon wrote in his memoirs.

You might want to learn your history before you presume to lecture others on it.

[–]MrGrumpyBear 1ポイント2ポイント  (4子コメント)

Seriously? That's your reply: "Richard Nixon said that he wasn't racist, so Richard Nixon must not have ben racist"?

I know my history quite well, thank you very much, and I study what people actually did, not just what they said about it (or how they justified it) later.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -3ポイント-2ポイント  (3子コメント)

My "reply" not only quoted from a primary source (the person running the campaign) but also referenced a Washington Post article and showed that it was racist George Wallace who won the "deep South" not Richard Nixon. Everything was referenced.

Your original post, which contained no links or other references and your reply, may best be summarized by this little graphic:

Discussion pyramid

Looking at this I'd say you're somewhere around row 2 or 3 from the bottom.

Your central point is 100% dead wrong, your "conclusions" are not backed up by the electoral evidence, you have been refuted using primary sources, and you have offered no sourced references.

Goodbye.

[–]MrGrumpyBear 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Sorry, I didn't realize we were comparing bibliographies. Alright then, support for my specific assertions (none of which you've actually denied, by the way), can be found in the following:

  • Mayer, Jeremy D. Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960-2000. Random House, 2002.
  • Patterson, James T. Grand Expectation: The United States, 1945-1974. Oxford University Press, 1996.

As both of these books are written by actual scholars with Ph.D.'s as opposed to having been written by politicians trying to justify themselves to history, I give them substantially more credence.

If you can disprove any specific assertion that I made, I'd love to hear it. If you're going to continue quoting politicians who claim that the facts don't mean what I thnk they mean, then I'm not interested.

Goodbye.

[–]NosuchRedditor 11ポイント12ポイント  (11子コメント)

The number of democrat narratives that rewrite history, or attempt to, it somewhat astounding. Take for example the "No WMD" mantra. It is pretty widely held in the collective psyche of America that the Iraq war was a scheme to line some rich people's pockets with no real justification. This could not be farther from reality. One only needs look at the number of democrats that voted to support the invasion, and read some of the key findings section of the 1500 page Duelfer report to see what the real story is, how the sanctions were effective until Saddam corrupted the Oil-for-Food program, and how they were waiting for the sanctions to be lifted to restart their chem/bio and nuke programs. Duelfer was in fear for his life during these inspections as the Iraqi's wanted to kill him if they could. Under such circumstances, how thorough would you be in your investigation. Many sites were not inspected and stockpiles were found, but Saddam had not reconstituted his programs and so the media seized this opportunity to lie to the nation and make the claim "No WMD's". It's simply not true.

Another good example is "Romenycare". The idea that Obamacare was modeled on a republican plan from the late days of the Clinton administration has no basis in fact. The real kicker is that when the law was passed by the democrat majority Mass legislature, Romney vetoed almost all of it, and the legislature overrode his veto and made it law. It would have been law whether Romney wanted it or not, and he didn't. But to this day the dems will try to refute critizism of Obamacare by making these pathetic claims about the Mass healthcare law and calling it "Romneycare". Might as well have called it MickeyMouseCare since Mickey had about as much to do with the law as Romney.

It is important to point out democrat lies to help reverse years of brainwashing that have affected our country.

A similar thing is taking place now with the Iran negotiations, with dems bleating about how the R's are going to cause a war and such, which could not be farther from the truth, and builds on the brainwashing that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake. Those wars kept ISIS/Al Queda/Boko Haram at bay and kept us and the rest of the world safe.

Edit: The financial collapse is another example of the rewriting of history, or at least the gerrymandering of it. We now know that the Financial crisis investigation was a complete sham, based on a book authored by one of the participants, with little or no input from experts and the republicans were effectively shut out of the process. The conclusions drawn were for political reasons and were devoid of facts. We also now have documents released within the past couple of years from the Clinton Library that tell the story of how please the administration was with the effectiveness of the CRA in granting loans to people who didn't qualify, and using the law to block bank mergers and other business until they would agree to cooperate and make bad loans. It had nothing to do with the "Evil Bankers" and everything to do with democrats forcing banks to make bad loans in the name of 'fairness'.

[–]snake_aisReagan Conservative 7ポイント8ポイント  (1子コメント)

A coworker today brought up the letter to Iran, and when someone asked why, he said, "'cause Republicans."

It's so disingenuous that it's lazy. They seriously think Republicans have a monopoly on anything they find disagreeable.

[–]RWheels 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ah shit, my milk turned. Thanks Oba- fuckin Republicans.

[–]say_or_do 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

If we didn't leave Iraq like we did and aren't going to leave Iraq like we are we wouldn't even have to worry about ISIS in the slightest. All we really would of had to do is try and stabilize Syria where ISIS really got together after breaking off from Al Queda and climbing out of their pockets. But of course we couldn't do any of that and you all know why.

[–]snake_aisReagan Conservative 6ポイント7ポイント  (8子コメント)

Good post, but why the insta-ban? Why not just link to this post or something?

[–]ChiliManiacConservative Jew 6ポイント7ポイント  (1子コメント)

Have you not seen the number of new alts coming to brigade us? You think it's bad now, just wait till elections heat up lol.

[–]snake_aisReagan Conservative 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Haha, oh man. I've never been here during a presidential election. That must be nuts.

[–]baldyloxSocial Libertarian[M] 0ポイント1ポイント  (4子コメント)

Because those are the rules. Southern Strategy TrÜthers are banned as fast as 9/11 TrÜthers, racists, and anyone that smugly proclaims 'Reality has a Liberal Bias™'. They're stupid talking points that carry about as much weight politically as 'Where's The Beef?'.

This isn't a sub where we cater to 10th grade Social Studies students trolls and the usual /r/politics ad hominem attack crowd. We deal in realities here, not myths parroted by MSNBC & Mother Jones.

If folks would like to believe in the myth of the Southern Strategy, they're certainly free to everywhere else on Reddit. Not here.

That's why.

[–]scungillipig 5ポイント6ポイント  (2子コメント)

That's a bingo.

[–]baldyloxSocial Libertarian 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

If you're playing /r/politics BINGO, 'Reality has a liberal bias™' should be the free space. ;-)

[–]scungillipig 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

It should be the space where we snort beer through our noses in laughter.

[–]snake_aisReagan Conservative 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Makes sense. I didn't realize how easily the Southern Strategy thing was disproven - I thought it was a topic that was still open to interpretation and debate. But, after reading some literature on both sides, it's pretty clear to me that this shouldn't even be a point of contention.

It's one of those myths that's so pervasive, I didn't even think it was something to be questioned at first.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S,M] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

The person in question can message us and we can engage in a dialogue to see if changing their status is appropriate or not.

[–]Pyrotek87 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Are the people trying to "retain traditional social institutions" (per the sidebar definition of conservatism) that are inherently racist not by by definition both racist and conservative, regardless of party?

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Respect for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are traditional Conservative values...not slavery.

You might want to look into it.

[–]liatris 9ポイント10ポイント  (12子コメント)

The people in the South who supported segregation were not conservatives, they were the same Democrats who supported The New Deal. They were the same Democrats who supported Strom Thurman, Jimmy Carter and Barry Goldwater (a person who while not being racist was still not a conservative and would be seen as a moderate Democrat today since he disavowed organized religion in the public sector, supported abortion rights and gay rights.)

LBJ repeatedly undermined any Republican attempts at Civil Rights reforms.

Democrats in general were against all forms of civil rights. In the presidential campaign of 1956, the Republican platform had expressly endorsed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Democratic platform did not. There were 99 members of Congress who signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing the Brown ruling. Two were Republicans. Ninety-seven were Democrats. Robert M. MacMillan reported that when LBJ was flying on Air Force One with two governors once, he boasted, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years.” (source Ronald Kessler, Inside the White House) So, in other words he only signed the thing because of political pressure the Democrats finally had to give into.

It bears repeating there were 99 members of Congress who signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing the Brown vs the Board of Education ruling. Two were Republicans. Ninety-seven were Democrats. It was Republican Eisenhower, not Democrat Truman, who fully desegregated the military. It was Orval Faubus, Bill Clinton's mentor and the Democratic governor of Arkansas who refused to admit black students to Little Rock high-schools. It was the Republican Eisenhower who sent troops in under the vocal screams of liberal Democrats of the time. It was Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson who undermined Republican Eisenhower's 1957 Civil Right Bill by removing all of the enforcement provisions.

Democrats did not pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That bill, along with every civil rights bill for the preceding century was supported by substantially more Republicans than Democrats. What distinguishes the '64 bill was it was the first one Democrats actually supported in large numbers. Way to catch up there Democrats. The South kept voting Democrat for decades after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The very year Johnson supposedly made the remark about losing the South for Democrats, Republican Goldwater couldn't even win the South even though Goldwater was one of only 6 Republicans who voted against the bill. Republican Everett Dirksen publicly criticized Goldwater for his vote against the bill.

Goldwater went on to win just five Southern States in 1964 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina why is this the case if there were so many conservatives who didn't support the Civil Rights Bill? Wouldn't you think they would flock to Goldwater since he voted against it? Yet he lost 8 Southern states - North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Florida. That's not a sweep whatsoever. Republicans did not flip the states Goldwater won, those states went right back to voting for DEMOCRATS for many decades to come. Republicans and conservatives always did best in the states Goldwater lost, the same states Republicans and conservatives had been winning since 1928.

In 1968 Democrat Hubert Humphrey picked up about 1/2 of George Wallace's supporters and conservative Nixon got none of the segregationist votes. At the beginning of the campaign polls showed Nixon at 42%, Humphrey at 29% and George Wallace at 22%. On election day Nixon percentage remained the same at 43.4 percent whereas Wallace lost nearly half his support and ended up with 13.5. Humphrey picked up 12%. Four years after Goldwater's run the segregationist vote went right back to Democrats. (Source "The Neocons and Nixon's Southern Strategy- American Conservative Dec 30, 2002.)

Liberal luminary Arthur Schlesinger Jr openly acknowledged in 1972 in the NYT that the segregationist vote wold be voting for McGovern and George Wallace not conservative Nixon. McGovern gave an obligatory tribute to the segregationist Wallace in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention in 1972. 1972 - the exact midpoint between Goldwater and Reagan when the imaginary southern strategy should have been complete according to the left's propaganda.

If the South was so conservative and Republican why did Jimmy Carter sweep the entire South, all 11 of the Old Confederacy states (except VA) while in 1980 Reagan lost or barely won the Goldwater states? Reagan only very narrowly won AL, MS, SC, and lost GA outright. The only Goldwater state Reagan won in was LA, just like Eisenhower did in 56. Reagan won among young Southern voters. Reagan lost among their seniors ie the ones who had voted for Democrat Strom Thurmond in 1948 and 64 for Goldwater. No matter how you look at it neither Nixon or Reagan ever captured the Goldwater voters. Conservative Republicans clearly weren't appealing to Dixiecrats. Even 20 years after Strom Thurman's 1948 campaign conservative Nixon carried only one of Thurmond's states.

So, to reiterate, in 1964 Goldwater who would be considered a moderate Democrat today (supported abortion, gay rights, disliked religion etc) handily won (by large margins) GA 54.1%, SC 58.9%, MS 87.1, AL 69.5% and LA 56.8%. Yet in 1980, conservative Reagan lost GA and barely beat Carter in MS- 49.4% for Reagan to 48.1% for Carter, AL - 48.8% R to 47.4% C, South Carolina 49.4% R to 48.1% C. Source The Election of 1980 http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1980

The margin of victory for Reagan in those states was so close you can hardly call them conservative states.

Reagan won the states Republicans had been winning on and off since 1928, VA, TN, FL, TX AND KY (Republicans had won at least four of those states in 5 previous elections. But he barely won the Goldwater states. The Southern states Goldwater won were the ones that Nixon and Reagan, actual conservatives would lose. The same states Goldwater won were the same ones Strom Thurmond won when he ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948 - AL, LA, MS, SC, Goldwater added GA to that list.

Consider how absurd it is to think a party who runs against Big Government would support segregation which requires Big Government intrusion to function. The types who support the government dictating that businesses can only serve whites are the same type of people who support government interfering with businesses through affirmative action legislation. (The policies of Segregation and Affirmative Action might seem to be opposite but my point is that the same kind of personality supports such laws. It's not the conservative personality that desires the government to use it's power to control what businesses can do.)

Some desperate progressives try to make the flawed argument that Goldwater was a conservative because the John Birch Society's endorsed him but that endorsement doesn't automatically makes someone conservative. The JBS endorses people for all sorts of reasons. The reason they supported Goldwater was because he didn't support the civil rights movement in the way actual conservative Republicans did. Nixon and MLK had a relationship of sorts for example, something the JBS membership disliked.

http://i.imgur.com/GcZpDvZ.jpg

When Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon Were Friends Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon had one of the most unlikely political friendships, but it came apart over an arrest with serious consequences for Nixon’s legacy and civil rights.

The Myth of Republican Racism

[–]Goldwater64 7ポイント8ポイント  (5子コメント)

Barry Goldwater (a person who while not being racist was still not a conservative and would be seen as a moderate Democrat today

TIL Barry Goldwater was a moderate and Nixon was a conservative.

[–]liatris 5ポイント6ポイント  (4子コメント)

Goldwater was a gay rights advocate, he supported abortion on demand, backed a Democrat (Karen English) for Congress over a Republican in 1992, he condemned the religious right while defending Bill Clinton over Whitewater. Bill Clinton even labelled him a "saint." The list goes on an on. He was more of a libertarian than a conservative imo.

[–]Goldwater64 10ポイント11ポイント  (3子コメント)

I agree with this and almost all of your original post, but conservative and libertarian are not mutually exclusive. You lauded Republicans for limited government usage, but Nixon created policies like the EPA while Goldwater supported the policies you consider un-conservative because other options would involve government intervention.

[–]liatris 5ポイント6ポイント  (1子コメント)

I am not intending to make a direct comparison between Nixon and Goldwater. Rather to use their wins/losses in particular areas, in comparison to the people they ran against, to show how the theory of the Southern Strategy doesn't hold much water when you look at which voters actually favored which candidate.

[–]Goldwater64 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ok, I can be on board with that.

[–]DranoshSoCon, FinCon, antistatist, anti"equality" -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

The epa first created was a good thing, making sure businesses didn't pollute into streams etc. But today they're just another government jack booted thug with an agenda

[–]Seamus_OReilly 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

Great post, mate.

[–]ultimisConstitutionalist 4ポイント5ポイント  (3子コメント)

Awesome post. I've written up some long ones on this subject a few times but I think yours is pretty well rounded and covers it.

One thing a lot of people don't understand is the migration started long before Civil Rights and took decades to actually have impacts on elections. The South was deeply against Organized Labor which was a major platform for FDR.

Democrats have been the party of Identity politics. They focus on specific things to get people upset about and divided. The Racism and segregation issue was one they cashed in on for decades throughout the 20th century. The myth that the Dixiecrats were the only ones allowing this is absolutely ridiculous as they didn't have anywhere near enough votes to stop anything. The Democratic party at large empowered the racist identity politics because it benefited them. The moment they saw public opinion turn against them they decided the flip side of that identify politics was their best path forward (hence where we are today).

The South went republican slowly because of new generations of people where the racism wasn't a priority for them. Even those who were racist in the South might have moved to the Republican party over time because the party matched them on other issues such as State's Rights, Fiscal Responsibility, Religious Principles, etc. When neither main party supports your racist beliefs you tend to focus on other issues you care about.

Why do most blacks and minorities vote Democrat? Because they are catered to. Identity politics is why this happens. Not some grand southern conspiracy to implement racist laws.

[–]liatris 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

Feel free to copy and paste it to your heart's content.

One thing people really don't understand is that black/white relations were looking up before any government action. If anything government action hampered the shift by politicizing it. The government has a tendency to latch on to a public sentiment, enshrine it in law for political points then take credit for an intellectual shift that was already happening. It the same way we ended up with the National Endowment for the Arts NEA - people were appreciating more of the arts, so government decided to jump on the bandwagon.

[–]ultimisConstitutionalist 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

Pretty much. Women's right to vote was supported throughout the country and was actually implemented in nearly all the states before congress tried to jump on board. Woodrow Wilson the progressive hero was one of the last people to grudgingly accept it.

[–]liatris 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

That is another great example. Government needs to show that it's relevant, I guess to justify the money we spend propagating it. It's bandwagon mentality.

[–]ogg33 3ポイント4ポイント  (1子コメント)

If the sourthern strategy is a myth, why did the GOP Chairman apologize for it in 2005?

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

We can only speculate because he never says "Southern Strategy" nor does he even discuss the South. He doesn't even say there was a coordinated effort to do anything... he says "some Republicans." Maybe he's talking about the ad Lee Atwater ran against Dukakis that featured Willie Horton? Was that some part of a coordinated effort to "secure the South" or simply one ad during a heated campaign? Both sides have used race to put down the other guy and win supporters. The NAACP’s National Voter Fund compared G.W. Bush's opposition to a state civil rights bill by comparing him to the people who dragged James Byrd - who was black - to death. Had Mehlman said something along the lines of how it was wrong for the Republican leadership to pit one race against another in order to win over parts of the nation or something along those lines, then you would likely have a point. The only person who knows what Mehlman meant is probably Mehlman. But, as previously stated, "some Republicans" and no mention of the South or any region of the country is far from a smoking gun.

[–]coppawallap3 3ポイント4ポイント  (5子コメント)

I get that you guys don't care about facts or data. But I think your letting your beliefs turn into something quasi religious. If you refuse to acknowledge hard facts about the people you worship and instead reply on belief, that makes it kind of religious.

[–]combatmedic82 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

He says as he offers no substance in his retort.

[–]Plopplopthrown 2ポイント3ポイント  (13子コメント)

You can cherry pick any single source to make a point. You're gonna need to use more than a single biased websites with no historical or academic rigor. Where are the sources by real historians? But it's not all about racism. The greater economic and social policies of the two parties are the big picture. Republicans have generally been pro business, but they haven't always been social conservatives. Lincoln certainly wasn't. And Teddy Roosevelt was a straight up progressive who ran on the republican ticket.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (11子コメント)

Your response is fallacious because you are taking issue with who said it not what they said. You have also not showed, specifically, what is incorrect.

This shows you are unserious. It would be as if I told you 2+2=4 and you told me I'm wrong because I do not have a PhD in math.

Yet another source:

Before you conclude that the GOP is strong in today’s South because of the events of 1948 and 1960, consider these points:

  • What Krugman conveniently ignores in his anti-Republican screed is the South’s long embrace of the Democrat Party, for blatantly racial reasons. Democrats Woodrow Wilson and FDR — who held the presidency for 20 of the first 45 years of the twentieth century — enjoyed strong support in the South and were, therefore, segregationist in their policies. Southern Democrats disproportionately voted for FDR and his New Deal, about which Krugman’s only complaint could be that it wasn’t socialistic (or fascistic) enough.

  • The South’s defection to the GOP peaked in 1964, the year of Barry Goldwater’s inglorious defeat — another “lost cause” for the South. Goldwater, who was anything but a segregationist, simply had strong views about the proper role of the federal government in relation to the States, namely, that it should butt out of the affairs of individuals and businesses. Such views were then more widely embraced in the South than in the North, and had as much to do with the South’sJeffersonian tradition as with racial segregation.

  • The GOP’s grip on the South has, if anything, weakened since 1964. Whatever Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan might have done to woo Southern voters did not cause those voters to flock to the Republican Party. Barry Goldwater’s conservatism caused that.

  • What about the sharp drop in Southern support for the GOP in 1968? That drop coincides withGeorge Wallace‘s segregationist, third-party candidacy in 1968. Krugman would say: “Aha! That defection, and the GOP’s recovery from it in 1972 (when Wallace was out of the picture), demonstrates that the GOP depends (or depended) heavily on the Southern racist vote.” Not so fast, Paul: Southern Democrats defected to George Wallace in 1968 at the same rate as Southern Republicans.

  • Why was it legitimate for a super-majority of white Southerners to support the New Deal out of desperation, but illegitimate for many of them (and their children) to turn, years later, to a party more in tune with their conservative inclinations? The South merely has become the North in reverse: strongly Republican (as the North is strongly Democrat) for reasons of ideology, not of race. On that point, here is a harder-to-read but more accurate depiction of the South’s attachment (or lack thereof) to the Republican Party.

In sum, it is plain that the South’s attachment to the GOP since 1964, whatever its racial content, is much weaker than was the South’s attachment to the Democrat Party until 1948, when there was no question that that attachment had a strong (perhaps dominant) racial component.

Krugman’s condemnation of racial politics in a major political party comes 60 years too late, and it’s aimed at the wrong party.

Case closed.

Krugman’s real complaint, of course, is that Republicans have been winning elections far too often to suit him. His case of Republican Derangement Syndrome is so severe that he can only pin the GOP’s success on racism. I will refrain from references to Freud and Pinocchio and note only that Krugman’s anti-GOP bias seems to have grown as his grasp of economics has shrunk.

Republican Propensities in Southern States

[–]mrdice87 5ポイント6ポイント  (10子コメント)

Party platforms are much more complicated than just "who is a racist". Plenty of republicans from the last century were trust-busting social liberals (Taft & Theodore Roosevelt for example), which would never fly with today's conservatives. And further back, Lincoln certainly wasn't a social conservative. Abolitionism was absolutely as liberal a policy as you could get. So to act like one party has always been conservative and the other liberal with no switch ever is fallacious.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (8子コメント)

So to act like one party has always been conservative and the other liberal with no switch ever is fallacious.

Nobody is saying that nor is it the point.

[–]mrdice87 2ポイント3ポイント  (7子コメント)

Apparently implying that any of the platforms have ever switched is grounds for banning

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (6子コメント)

That is not the same as the " Southern Strategy."

[–]mrdice87 1ポイント2ポイント  (5子コメント)

Then I don't understand what's off limits about Southern Strategy. It seems like any mention of switching platforms gets a person banned regardless if they're talking about racism or not.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S,M] -3ポイント-2ポイント  (3子コメント)

Oft repeated, fallacious arguments have no place here.

[–]TimothyN 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

Isn't that all you really have here? At least the /r/bad subreddits are showing how poor this reasoning is.

[–]FleetSevensNational Conservative 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Lincoln certainly wasn't a social conservative

Right. Because most social liberals today quote the Bible in their speeches. I'll have to check out Bernie Sanders' usage of the Gospel in his next tirade against America.

[–]___ok 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Ahh good old LBJ - "to have them n___ers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years"

[–]KingJak117 2ポイント3ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thank you for this. Very informative. I'll have to link people to this.

[–]tallcady 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

This could be my favorite post on reddit. I started to think I was alone. We should start a true series each week.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thank you.

[–]TeaPartyOverlordSupporter -2ポイント-1ポイント  (2子コメント)

I'm still waiting for "liberal" dipshits perpetuating this myth to explain why they think the parties "switched" when all of the Republicans who voted for civil rights remained in the Republican party. That's no switch.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

Details, details...

[–]DranoshSoCon, FinCon, antistatist, anti"equality" 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

Southerners moved to the Republican party when they realized it's better to vote for economic freedom rather than racism.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Correct. There is a reason, for example, why most of the right to work states are in the South.

[–]ivsciguy 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think part of it also had to do with the South being deeply religious and the rise of the Religious Right. Around this time many of the most well known conservative televangelists became extremely popular.

[–]Lews-Therin-Telamon 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Don't forget that George Wallace ran as a Democrat! His whole thing was racism.

[–]xerxes431 0ポイント1ポイント  (3子コメント)

Except this: http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (2子コメント)

Already covered in the piece.

[–]xerxes431 0ポイント1ポイント  (1子コメント)

Yeah in a revisionist light. It's like using the Jager Report in a holocaust denial piece. It's dishonest

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

How so?

[–]winknod 0ポイント1ポイント  (8子コメント)

I just want to add a few points to your post, regardless of what political party you're toting, the American people are responsible for their actions. Yes, a Republican president forced schools in Alabama to integrate, however, the southern people were lynching and abusing African Americans. I'm not saying all southerners but a majority did NOT support desegregation. This goes beyond politics. Politics a mask for cultural heritage of racism.

And yes, Reagan didn't use racism to win the south, he used jerry fallwell and his popularity to fan the flames of the culture war. Fallwell was an outspoken anti civil rights, anti women's rights, brimstone and fire minister. Reagan knew this, and knew he could use fallwells reputation to win over the south. Not saying Reagan was a racist, but he sure was OK having someone like that campaign for him.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -3ポイント-2ポイント  (7子コメント)

he used jerry fallwell and his popularity to fan the flames of the culture war.

Source?

[–]winknod -1ポイント0ポイント  (6子コメント)

http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/people/jerry-falwell.html

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -2ポイント-1ポイント  (5子コメント)

So where's the bit that proved this:

he used jerry fallwell and his popularity to fan the flames of the culture war.

[–]winknod 0ポイント1ポイント  (4子コメント)

Reagan embraced fallwell to campaign with him knowing what he stood for. The Moral majority was founded by fallwell in 1979. Reagan knew this,and knew it was a popular movement which was enticing to a predominantly religious (Bible belt) area. Fallwell made it a cultural war by appealing to white southerners by preaching that minorities were eroding the nation, and that the only way to restore America to its glory days was to wipe out sin with laws. Granted Reagan fooled them all. He knew that he would never Implement the reforms that Fallwell promised. In fact Reagan didn't do much to advance the social agenda of the Christian right. He didn't outlaw abortion, he gave amnesty to immigrants and raised taxes on corporations. He even appointed a woman for the Supreme Court. But you can't deny that he embraced a fanatic racist to win votes. At least history won't deny it.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] 0ポイント1ポイント  (3子コメント)

But you can't deny that he embraced a fanatic racist to win votes. At least history won't deny it.

I'm not confirming or denying anything...I'm asking for you to support, with evidence, something you stated as a fact.

It's a very simple request.

[–]ivsciguy 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

Just look up a history of the Moral Majority from any source of your choosing. It is very common knowledge that Fallwell campaigned for Reagan. Winknod isn't trying to trick you or anything.

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (1子コメント)

So there is no evidence.

Got it.

[–]YosoffNatural Rights Conservative 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

The Party of Civil Rights

[–]boomchakaboom -2ポイント-1ポイント  (1子コメント)

So what's your take on the Sailer Strategy?

[–]chabanaisStronger than dirt.[S] -2ポイント-1ポイント  (0子コメント)

Don't know.