Big events tend to cause changes in party coalitions. For the Republican Party, it was WWI and Woodrow Wilson’s wartime controls on the economy and his general assault on civil liberties. The Republicans split, with the majority of the party becoming pretty much what it is today, and a small part of it retaining TR’s progressive values, most notably in the person of Robert LaFollette. The Republicans campaigned on a “return to normalcy” after the tumultuous war years, and they delivered on that promise, which brought them political success like they’d never seen before, which in turn reinforced their tendency towards not rocking the boat, which in turn tended to lead towards a pro-business, small government ideology. They won three straight Presidential elections and if not for the Depression, probably would have continued winning. But then we go back to how big events change parties. The Depression caused more big changes in both parties. The Democrats were ideologically a mishmash before the Depression but became more like the party we know today under the leadership of FDR. The Republicans kept mostly to their small government ideology, but had to concede a lot of ground over the next few decades.
That migration is a two-edged sword, however, since many of the people moving to the south are less conservative than the original population. This has resulted in states like Virginia and North Carolina recently turning into swing states when they had before been solidly Republican.
Another notable shift has been northern New England (Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) moving into the Democratic column from previously being rock-ribbed Republican.
1964 was 50+ years ago, or two generations. People do have a tendency to smoosh the past into one giant gooball of history to make generalizations. This can work to a vapid first level approximation but doesn’t explain reality very deeply.
I said way back in my first post that this is a process. And one that is still ongoing. It’s impossible to do process justice in one paragraph posts on a message board.
Tip O’Neill used to say that all politics is local. Still true, though to a much lesser extent in this age of social media and the disappearance of wings in national parties. The South is not a single entity. Neither is the North or Midwest or West.
There’s no way around this simplification, so just keep bunches of qualifiers in your heads and sprinkle them liberally into every post you read.
I stand by my belief that the SS was a result of the changes I described, not a cause of it.
The GOP would never have been able to get the bigot vote without the Democrats first losing it. You don’t just break 100 years of a political lock on political power by just saying “hey, vote for me this time instead!” There was a fundamental shift happening, and it started happening far earlier than Nixon’s run, and he just took advantage of it.
The SS was an opportunity taken after the switch was already happening due to the civil rights movement, nothing more. Its importance is way overestimated.
Haven’t read it. Seems to be written by some fringe-crank RW. This is the source, and Nichols is a lefty who writes for The Nation.
Why yes lance strongarm, the party of Lincoln just by happenstance welcomed the descendants of segregation into their big tent. [Sarcasm]
Oh, pardon me, of course the Party of Lincoln was easily able to just peel off millions of white racists by simply saying “hey, come vote for us” after 100 years of domination by the Democrats and the Democratic primary being tantamount to election. Sure. [sarcasm]
Seriously, I didn’t say it was happenstance. I said it happened AFTER Civil Rights drove racists away from the Democrats, rather than being the cause of it. The Southern Strategy took advantage of forces that were already happening. It was just the final nail in the coffin.
Not sure who you Brainglutton in mind but candidates include Charles Dana (Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War: “Everyone now is more or less a Socialist”), Gustav Koerner and Friedrich Hecker. This was a time when the New York Times denounced “Red Republicans” and Joseph Weydemeyer (aide to General Fremont and later colonel in the Civil War) built a network of so-called Kommunisten Klubs in the US. Brigadier General Johann August Willich was a member of the left faction of the German Communist Party before he fought in the Civil War.
Everyone knows this right? (Of course not: I skimmed the beginning of Chapter 3 of the Nichols book at Amazon. Then went to wikipedia. Kudos to Brainglutton for the cited claim.)
Counterfactual: without the Southern Strategy, Nixon would have pursued more votes from somewhere else. Namely from centrists and liberals. The result would have been less polarization. So yeah, I’d say it was important.
Liberal Republicans were drummed out of the Republican Party during the 1970s. Later moderate Republicans were drummed out. Then slow-change conservatives. And here we are: everyone to the left of Ted Cruz is labeled a RINO by too many.
It was indeed important, I was just parroting Exapno’s language. But it’s important is overstated. It did not cause the party switch, it took advantage of it. You don’t just have some nice “strategy” that says “hey, let’s appeal to some voters that usually vote for the other side” and cause a massive party switch by millions of voters from a party that completely dominate their politics for 100 years. It takes much more than that.
The process I speak of started in the 1930s when African-Americans started joining the Democratic Party in large numbers. By the late 1940s the strain caused a break and the short-lived Dixiecrat Party. Take a look at its platform.
Change a few words to guns and gays and Supreme Court decisions, add in Hispanics and Muslims, and you have the modern Republican platform.
In short, the Republicans had no moral qualms about becoming Dixiecrats, possibly the worst party in American history. Some pundits are talking about the possibility that the divisions in the party might lead to a break-up or a third party movement in the future. But there is no chance that the Democrats will exploit that by embracing the hate and making over their party not to merely accommodate it but boost it as a positive virtue.
That’s why the Southern Strategy is so important. There’s never been anything like it in American politics. No major party had adopted the worst elements of a group of despised radicals as its core values before and it would be surprising if any party did in the future. Only the Republicans. How can anyone not emphasize that?
As recently as 1992, the Democrats held ALL major state offices in Texas. And we’re not talking about conservative Democrats like Lloyd Bentsen. Ann Richards was governor, Jim Mattox was Attorney General, Jim Hightower was agriculture commissioner, Bob Bullock was lieutenant governor- liberals all.
That was LONG after the Civil Rights act of 1964, and LONG after Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
Democrats might want to ask, “How did we blow it?” But they prefer to smirk, “Texas is just a racist state, so what do you expect?”
Exactly - long before Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
I don’t disagree that it was important. I’m just saying it didn’t suddenly start the grand reorientation of the two parties. It was part of it, but not the starting point.
Just because the segregations fled to the GOP doesn’t mean the Democrats lost all power. Those black voters who drove them off were still voters. And civil rights made the South less conservative in some ways. So some states in the South switched from solid Democrat to competitive.
Fact remains, anyone who pretends that racism doomed the Democrats is full of crap. Liberal Democrats continued to win elections in MANY Southern states, LONG after the Civil Rights Act.
Texas elected nothing but liberal Democrats in 1990. Arkansas elected Dale Bumpers to the Senate and Bill Clinton to the state house. Louisiana never elected a Republican Senator until 2005. Georgia elected Wyche Fowler and Max Cleland to the Senate in recent memory
Democrats who want to tell themselves, “The South is just a bunch of stupid racists, and there’s nothing we could have done to hold on to them” are kidding themselves, and letting themselves off the hook way too easily.
Kevin Phillips didn’t “steal” your voters. You pushed them out. Admit it and do something about it, rather than bellyaching.
The South isn’t “a bunch of stupid racists”, but there were a whole lot of Southerners who were racists and would never support a party (nationally) that was for Civil Rights in the decades after the CRA – but for decades, that didn’t translate as strongly to state and local politics. Southern Democratic politicians separated themselves, to some degree, from the national Democratic party.
But it’s entirely true to say that white supremacy dominated Southern politics from Reconstruction to Civil Rights, and was a massive (but slowly and steadily dwindling) factor ever since. I’m a Southerner and I love the South, and that doesn’t change the facts of the dominance of white supremacy in the South until recently (and even into modern times for some issues). White supremacy was also a significant factor in politics in the rest of the country as well, but to a lesser degree, especially in recent decades.
A more realistic answer though is that with Jim Crow now off the table, elections in the South became more about issues of national security, religion, crime, and gun rights than race. Race still undergirded a lot of those issues to be sure, but it’s not as if Republicans changed their views on those issues to appeal to white supremacists. It’s more that white supremacists, no longer having candidates who represented them on race issues, turned to candidates who represented them on guns, God, and defense. And lest liberals get on their high horse(a common Obama phrase there, yuk yuk), the Democratic Party has never stopped trying to appeal to those voters by treading the exact same ground as Republicans and has sometimes been successful.
The Democrats have definitely tried, but they didn’t use coded racist language for decades, in general. And they didn’t tolerate racism among their membership in office, in general. The Republican party, for the most part, more than tolerated Jesse Helms until he died.
The denial of the Southern Strategy has exact parallels in the conservative efforts in recent years to deny that slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War. Embarrassing incidents in the past must be denied and reformulated so that no trace is left on their fingers. Which is even more remarkable when one remembers how willing they are to load the Democrats’ shoulders with the burden of Jim Crow.
I guarantee that if the Dope exists 40 years from now, conservatives will be denying they ever opposed gay rights, let alone made it a campaign platform.
The Southern Strategy was an attempt to appeal to southern white voters on issues like bussing, crime, guns, and welfare. No one denies the Southern Strategy, we just object to the sore losers who characterize it as racist.
And I’d note that on every single one of those issues, liberals were wrong and moved to the right after several spankings by the electorate, and not just in the South.
Your last statement is just absurd on many levels. First, Republicans WERE the civil rights party. To argue that after 100 years they suddenly became racist is a belief that can only be held by liberals enraged at the loss of the Democratic lock on the South. As for gay rights, yes, Republicans were against gay rights. Democrats were also against gay rights. The fact that history will show that Democrats were oh, 5 years ahead of Republicans on gay issues is sure going to make them look like the good guys, won’t it?
No they weren’t. As I said earlier, the Democrats started taking away the issue in 1927. By a few months into Roosevelt’s first term, the Democrats **WERE **the civil rights party. I don’t fault the liberal Northeast Republicans who continued to back civil rights long after, but you are rewriting plain history in such a blatant way that one would think I were paying you to make my point.
Your misreading of what I wrote is consistent, at least. The Democrats in the future will admit that they were slow and often wrong on this issue. By contrast, the Republicans will loudly insist they were the good guys all along, issuing whines in high dudgeon that the Democrats are somehow at fault for not acknowledging this.
This is about the safest prediction anybody has ever made. It’s like predicting that the Broncos will win Super Bowl 50.