# Is American liberalism "dead as a governing philosophy"?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-american-liberalism-dead-as-a-governing-philosophy/251405>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [June 21, 2004, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-american-liberalism-dead-as-a-governing-philosophy/251405 "2004-06-21T03:52:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\
**Post date:** [June 23, 2004, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-american-liberalism-dead-as-a-governing-philosophy/251405/21 "2004-06-23T14:18:37Z")

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> [@Evil Captor](#):
>
> You have to be kidding. The whole point of the Republican strategy was to pull white racists in the South away from the Democrats and into the Republican big tent. it worked beautifully, and today racists in the South have made it a bulwark of Republican strength. The extreme racists may be involved with the Klan and the Aryan Nation, but the garden variety racists who vastly outnumber them are almost all Republicans. Republicans are the party of racism.

Well, yes and no . . . The Republican Party is, today, the party which is a more congenial home to racists and which is more hostile to policies, such as affirmative action, designed to redress the social effects of racism. Also, the party more hostile to welfare, which white racists perceive, rightly or wrongly, as principally a program to feed nonworking blacks. And I’m sure more Reps than Dems embraced or defended Bell and Hernstein’s pseudoscientific “Bell Curve” theory. But you can make rational, defensible, non-racist arguments against both affirmative action and welfare, and those are the arguments to which Republicans mostly limit themselves when running for office or speaking in public. And there are plenty of black Republicans, thought their numbers are insignificant compared to the number of black Democrats. The Republican Party is not **overtly** racist the way the Klan is openly racist, or the Aryan Nations, or Strom Thurmond’s short-lived Dixiecrat Party from 1948. Most Republicans, even the racist white Southerners who have migrated into the party since the '60s, have accepted that times have changed and Jim Crow can never be revived.

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