# Is the American Religious Right rooted in racism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 24, 2016, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006 "2016-02-24T18:50:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/61 "2016-03-08T17:08:54Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > The Lee Atwater quote means the opposite of what you think it does. He is saying that since appeals to race backfire candidates have to talk about other issues. No, he is saying that the racist aspects of those “other issues” need to be cloaked by dog-whistling rhetoric. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/62 "2016-03-08T17:40:41Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > I am aware of the racist Southern Strategy and Cinderella and that they are both stories that never happened. > If you have evidence of such a thing as a racist dog whistle existing beyond some liberal claiming that they do go ahead and produce it. Wait. So not only is dog whistle politics a myth, so is the southern strategy? > **[Southern strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)** > > In American politics the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that success The phra... [["Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.[54][55][56][57] Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 . . . and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster… Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”]] I’m not saying that all Republicans are racist or even that every Republican politician panders to racists but most of the racists are Republicans and most politicians that pander to racists are also Republican. Even the people in the party will admit that the Republicans at the very least had a racist past “but they’re different now” And most others realize that hey are still racist. This is the primary reason why Asians vote Democrat in such lopsided numbers despite their otherwise Republican leaning characteristics. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/63 "2016-03-08T17:49:05Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > [No](http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/30/southern_whites_shift_to_the_gop_predates_the_60s_118172.html) [it](http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/) [isn’t](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html?_r=0). [Repeating](http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2014/07/03/nixons-southern-strategy-and-a-liberal-big-lie-n1858667/page/full) [a](http://www.redstate.com/diary/Dan_McLaughlin/2012/07/11/the-southern-strategy-myth-and-the-lost-majority/) [myth](http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2012/01/25/the-truth-about-the-southern-strategy-the-msm-doesnt-want-you-to-know/) [does](http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/risen.html) [not](http://newsninja2012.com/setting-history-straight-how-did-the-southern-strategy-myth-begin/) [make](http://stacyswimp.net/2011/10/03/another-liberal-lie-exposed-the-myth-of-the-southern-strategy/) [it](http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394137/landrieus-loss-end-epoch-kevin-d-williamson) [true](http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/did-the-southern-strategy-really-exist/question-3816929/). > The Southern Strategy myth is sour grapes, the South does not vote for Democrats anymore so they call southerners names. > You have also missed the point of Cinderella. Your cites say things like this: “Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.” You can try to rewrite history all you want but the fact that there may be a more nuanced view of how and why Republicans pandered to racists doesn’t change the fact that they pandered to racists but tried to make it look like something else. This looks suspiciously like rationalizing the attempt to appeal to racists as political necessity. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/64 "2016-03-08T17:50:31Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > The Lee Atwater quote means the opposite of what you think it does. He is saying that since appeals to race backfire candidates have to talk about other issues. Yet you are claiming that by saying that appeals to race backfire candidates should appeal race.It makes no sense the way you interpret it. That is the opposite of what the Atwater quote means. He is saying that it was no longer politically viable to say blatantly racist things so you had to use dog whistles that signaled to the racists that you were still on their side… ---
**Author:** ![astorian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ad7895/32.png) [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/65 "2016-03-08T18:50:16Z")
> [@crucible](#): > > Consider the position of the “Christian Left”, far less judgmental, far more inclusive, resting their life philosophy on “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” and “Do Unto Others…” > > The Christian Left rely on the words and actions of Jesus as their guideline. The Christian Right rely on their dogmatic rejection of Homosexuality and Abortion. There is very little tolerance there, and, thus, very little Christianity, as defined by the life of Christ. > > I think Sanders outlined this position quite adequately at that RR university – Liberty? whatever. You still haven’t proven anything of the sort. Fundamentalist Christians vote a straight Democratic ticket until quite recently. Nor were the Democrats they voted for “conservative” on any issue but race. In 1956, Jerry Falwell’s family undoubted voted for Adlai Stevenson because they liked the economic goodies the New Deal provided. Now, when did the Moral Majority rise? In 1965, right after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bill? No! It rose in the Seventies, long after segregation was a dead issue. It was the Sexual Revolution that sparked the Religious Right, not racism. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/66 "2016-03-08T22:13:34Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > Fundamentalist Christians vote a straight Democratic ticket until quite recently. Nor were the Democrats they voted for “conservative” on any issue but race. In 1956, Jerry Falwell’s family undoubted voted for Adlai Stevenson because they liked the economic goodies the New Deal provided. Ayuh. That was **before** the Southern Strategy started drawing white conservative racist Dems to the Pubs. > [@astorian](#): > > Now, when did the Moral Majority rise? In 1965, right after Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bill? No! It rose in the Seventies, long after segregation was a dead issue. It was the Sexual Revolution that sparked the Religious Right, not racism. But, see the article linked in the OP – the modern RR is a few years **older** than the MM and was indeed organized in response to civil rights legislation. > [@astorian](#): > > It was the Sexual Revolution that sparked the Religious Right, not racism. False – but neither root-cause would make the RR any more respectable than the other, would it? ---
**Author:** ![ISiddiqui](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/97f17d/32.png) [@ISiddiqui](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ISiddiqui)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/67 "2016-03-08T22:23:14Z")
> [@crucible](#): > > Consider the position of the “Christian Left”, far less judgmental, far more inclusive, resting their life philosophy on “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” and “Do Unto Others…” > > The Christian Left rely on the words and actions of Jesus as their guideline. The Christian Right rely on their dogmatic rejection of Homosexuality and Abortion. There is very little tolerance there, and, thus, very little Christianity, as defined by the life of Christ. I don’t think that’s a very Christian way to look at things, IMO. As someone who considers himself on the Christian Left, one can be very judgmental to those who consider themselves on the Christian Right. The temptation can be very real and I’ve seen it quite often (the whole “we’re the ones REALLY following Jesus while you folks are not” is definitely a mindset to avoid). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2016, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/68 "2016-03-08T22:29:53Z")
> [@ISiddiqui](#): > > I don’t think that’s a very Christian way to look at things, IMO. As someone who considers himself on the Christian Left, one can be very judgmental to those who consider themselves on the Christian Right. The temptation can be very real and I’ve seen it quite often (the whole “we’re the ones REALLY following Jesus while you folks are not” is definitely a mindset to avoid). All true, I’m sure, except – why is it a mindset to avoid? Didn’t Jesus warn against false teachers? Christians can’t follow the injunction to beware of such without drawing such judgmental distinctions, can they? ---
**Author:** ![nani](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/58956e/32.png) [@nani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nani)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/69 "2016-03-09T01:00:53Z")
I should say first I have issues with the article in the OP. The civil rights movement had a transformative effect on American society and politics. Framing the RR as a direct reaction to the civil rights movement ignores that big picture reality and so I wouldn’t characterize it that way. It’s more accurate to say that the civil rights movement made the rise of the RR possible. One thing the CRM did was change the standard for what the role of the federal government was. Many civil rights leaders were very explicit in their connection of Christian moral vocabulary to liberal traditions of individual rights in order to justify appeal for government action for racial justice. Most Americans came to see the expansion of federal power and reversal of precedents required by civil rights legislation as instinctively justified because of the work that civil rights leaders did to promote the notion that some moral principles were more important than established law, and that the government should come around to those moral principles and promote them. A more activist stance on the federal government’s role (which also traces, as far as some white evangelicals were concerned at the time, to the New Deal era) has since the 1950s extended to other areas besides race. Alongside landmark civil rights advances were court cases on separation of church and state issues that were extremely influential to the political awakening of evangelicals, including the “no school-sponsored prayer” ruling. There was also, after Sputnik, government-funded science curriculums imposed on schools that taught evolution. The Equal Rights Amendment was a big fight. More recently, gay marriage mobilized them. For white evangelicals, race has been just one area where it seemed like the federal government was intruding on their affairs and forcing their morality on them. In some cases, race was the most important area, but this was increasingly not true because of something else the CRM did that greatly affected the rise of the religious right: freeing southern evangelicalism from the taint of Jim Crow. As evangelical churches began (resignedly often, enthusiastically at times) embracing the new status quo, southern-style evangelicalism in the mold of Billy Graham spread around the country, increasing influence and potential power of mobilized white evangelicals among areas that may have had racism but were not nostalgic of Jim Crow. The success of the CRM in dismantling Jim Crow through legislation and court decisions also took away what had been the principal dividing block between small government dixiecrats and small government northern Republicans, allowing for a political realignment (that seems to now be cracking). So you have a more national and (ironically) diverse constituency that became mobilized because of a lot of issues brought to a head by the expansion of federal power that was driven by the CRM. Interestingly, they use a rhetoric that increasingly mimics the CRM on issues like abortion in terms of framing the debate in particularistic Christian language and as an obligatory fight against an intractable evil. Still, there’s a question. OK, so they didn’t like evolution in public schools, they wanted prayer in schools, suspicious of feminism etc., but why did it seem like they grew hostile to the civil rights movement, if racism wasn’t the big thing motivating them? The article accurately points out that the RR’s hands aren’t clean in terms of opposing segregation. However, there’s a point I want to make to emphasize how the CRM created conditions in the larger political arena to make the RR possible: the civil rights movement’s association with the anti-war movement. The article frames it like, ‘racism became too toxic and so the RR started talking about other things as a cover’. I think this is incorrect. Identification with the Anti-War Movement, along with other causes taken up by the CRM that reflected their broadening approach to racial justice, made it credible nationally for opposition to civil rights actions to be not really “about” racism. A related phenomenon that I can expand on is that support for other progressive causes began to allow liberal and moderate whites to claim to not be racists, a whole other problem. Remember that unlike in the civil war, when a whole range of southern theologians vociferously defended slavery in Christian terms, segregation in the 1950s was not defended by prominent religious figures on the same scale. Instead, populist religious leaders and ‘small government’ political arguments were more active. However, the moral credibility of peaceful protestors attacked by dogs and being hit with fire hoses was a huge factor in nationally discrediting these arguments as smokescreens for racism through the early 1960s. So you saw a mixed attitude from white evangelical leaders toward the early civil rights movement move to more or less an acceptance of it by the 1970s. But then, association with the anti-war movement and the general turmoil of the later 1960s and 1970s meant that opposition to civil rights leaders for being against the Vietnam War, or for their association with ‘radical’ groups, or for the supposed failure of civil rights programs, increasingly translated into opposition as a matter of course for new civil rights laws and questioning of existing ones. Combined with the adoption in discourse that made RR causes like abortion matters of good and evil, you have a hardening political alignment where opposition to civil rights legislation becomes, on the part of the RR, more reflexive even as it is less explicitly racial. For a lot of RR’s, today’s ‘civil rights leaders’ have become so discredited and criticisms of progressive programs supposedly on merit have become so common that their policies and arguments are rejected out of hand. This is how Ronald Reagan can disavow racism and at the same time argue against the government programs that had been instituted to combat racism. And this is the insidious thing. You didn’t have to be all racist to be in the RR and vote Republican, and indeed, many white evangelicals even in the South voted for Republicans even while honestly supporting civil rights. But the RR, in order to thrive as a political movement, has increasingly avoided doing anything to challenge structural racism within itself. And in my opinion racism has festered in it. ---
**Author:** ![ISiddiqui](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/97f17d/32.png) [@ISiddiqui](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ISiddiqui)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/70 "2016-03-09T16:21:48Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > All true, I’m sure, except – why is it a mindset to avoid? Didn’t Jesus warn against false teachers? Christians can’t follow the injunction to beware of such without drawing such judgmental distinctions, can they? It’d involve some humility first, I’d argue. It’s easy to point to the ‘other side’ as false teachers if you are acting prideful on your own viewpoint. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/71 "2016-03-09T16:31:46Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Wait. So not only is dog whistle politics a myth, so is the southern strategy? > > [Southern strategy - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) > > [["Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.[54][55][56][57] > Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 . . . and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster… > Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps? > Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”]] > > I’m not saying that all Republicans are racist or even that every Republican politician panders to racists but most of the racists are Republicans and most politicians that pander to racists are also Republican. Even the people in the party will admit that the Republicans at the very least had a racist past “but they’re different now” And most others realize that hey are still racist. > > This is the primary reason why Asians vote Democrat in such lopsided numbers despite their otherwise Republican leaning characteristics. What Atwater was saying was that Reagan did not need to appeal to racism to win Southern racist voters because Reagan already had those voters because of his appeals to fiscal conservatism. After the 1960s neither party could win many votes appealing to racism so they contested elections over other issues where Reagan had an advantage. By current standards the Republicans had a racist past but nowhere near as racist as the Democrats do. Yet, somehow the Democrats get a pass for a hundred years of vile racism but the Republicans are forever tarnished because Ronald Reagan gave a speech at a county fair. Of course there was a Southern Strategy but it was not racist. There were also Northen, Easter, Western, and Midwestern strategies. The difference was the Southern Strategy was new because the South was now longer exclusively democratic. Every campaign tries to win as much of the country as possible. When the Southern states stopped caring about race to the exclusion of everything else they came into play and Nixon, being a good politician, tried to get those votes. In 1976 the Democrats had a Southern strategy and it worked as Carter won the entire south except Virginia. When Hillary is nominated she will have an strategy to win Oregon, that does not make her campaign racist because of Oregon’s white supremacist history. Do you have a cite that most racists are Republicans or is that just more baseless slander? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/72 "2016-03-09T16:54:44Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > What Atwater was saying was that Reagan did not need to appeal to racism to win Southern racist voters because Reagan already had those voters because of his appeals to fiscal conservatism. :rolleyes: For Og’s sake, what color is the sky on your planet?! ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 4:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/73 "2016-03-09T16:57:54Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > By current standards the Republicans had a racist past but nowhere near as racist as the Democrats do. Yet, somehow the Democrats get a pass for a hundred years of vile racism but the Republicans are forever tarnished because Ronald Reagan gave a speech at a county fair. The reason for this is that by and large those racists Democrats became Republicans and have tarnished the party since. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/74 "2016-03-09T17:10:33Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > What Atwater was saying was that Reagan did not need to appeal to racism to win Southern racist voters because Reagan already had those voters because of his appeals to fiscal conservatism. After the 1960s neither party could win many votes appealing to racism so they contested elections over other issues where Reagan had an advantage. What Atwater was saying is that the racism needed to be more subtle because blatant, open, George-Wallace style racism was no longer considered as acceptable. I find it absurd that anyone could believe that, after the 1960s, “neither party could win many votes appealing to racism”. Do you really believe that, in states like MS and AL in which the majority of the white population thought miscegenation should be _illegal_ well into the 1980s ([and beyond!](http://www.thewire.com/national/2011/04/mississippi-republicans/36455/)), there weren’t lots of white people with racist views who were very angry about Civil Rights and the end of Jim Crow policies? What happened to all these white racists – did they suddenly lose their racist beliefs (except for wanting to ban interracial marriage!) after the 60s? > [@](#): > > By current standards the Republicans had a racist past but nowhere near as racist as the Democrats do. Yet, somehow the Democrats get a pass for a hundred years of vile racism but the Republicans are forever tarnished because Ronald Reagan gave a speech at a county fair. The Republicans’ racist past is much more recent. The Democratic party, at a national level, supported white supremacy until the mid 20th century, and then very openly and publicly rejected it and embraced racial progress and Civil Rights. The Republican party saw a political opening and deliberately tried to attract those _millions of white supremacist voters_ – yes, those people really did exist, and they really were disaffected by the Democratic party after Civil Rights, and the Republican party really did try to appeal to them at a national level. This ahistorical view boggles the mind. ---
**Author:** ![puddleglum](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puddleglum/32/137_2.png) [@puddleglum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puddleglum)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/75 "2016-03-09T20:12:13Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > The Republicans’ racist past is much more recent. The Democratic party, at a national level, supported white supremacy until the mid 20th century, and then very openly and publicly rejected it and embraced racial progress and Civil Rights. The Republican party saw a political opening and deliberately tried to attract those _millions of white supremacist voters_ – yes, those people really did exist, and they really were disaffected by the Democratic party after Civil Rights, and the Republican party really did try to appeal to them at a national level. > > This ahistorical view boggles the mind. The evidence that the Republican party is trying to appeal to racists at a national level is that they are using secret codes only certain people understand. If you said this about any other issue, everyone would immediately recognize it for being crazy. All of the good evidence is on the other side. Take the Reagan speech, he makes a speech at a county fair.He then flies to New York and makes a speech at the National Urban league. The first speech contains which contains no objectionable content at all, mostly college football jokes. The second is him bragging about how great he was for minorities as a governor, proposing creating special zones enterprise zones in heavily minority zones which would have lower taxes, and proposing to give government housing to minority families almost free of charge. Somehow these shrewd and cunning racists know to disregard the second speech where he make explicit promises he actually campaigned on because civil rights workers were murdered twelve years beforehand at neighboring town to the venue of the first speech. That is crazy. If all the racisst switched to the Republican party, how come the more racist a state was the longer it took to switch to Republican control? If racism is the only thing that sells in the South how could Carter, Clinton, and Obama have won in the south? If the Southern Strategy turned the South Republican how come most southern states had state governments controlled by Democrats until the early 90s? If Nixon’s southern strategy was designed to appeal to racists how come he got the highest percentage of the black vote of any Republican in the past 50 years? The myth is widely believed but if you examine it closely, you find out that it is just not true. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 8:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/76 "2016-03-09T20:48:11Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > The evidence that the Republican party is trying to appeal to racists at a national level is that they are using secret codes only certain people understand. If you said this about any other issue, everyone would immediately recognize it for being crazy. > All of the good evidence is on the other side. I don’t think they’re doing this. I don’t think they used secret codes in the past, either. I think they framed issues in a way that subtly appealed to the fears of those with white supremacist beliefs while not doing so in an openly white supremacist manner. Talking about black “welfare queens” subtly reinforces the fear that black people are ‘takers’ and don’t contribute to society. Same goes for Willie-Horton style fear-mongering – the fear that black people are unpredictably violent. Same goes for ‘states-rights’. There are many variations. It’s not secret codes – it’s the same kind of political communication still happening now – sending messages that are designed to mean different things to different people. In this case, some of the messages were _designed to appeal to racists_. And this makes perfect sense – when there are millions of racist voters, _of course_ one party is going to try and get those voters. Until the 1960s, at a national level, it was the Democrats. After that, it was the Republicans (nationally, at least), even as those millions of racists slowly shrunk in numbers. > [@](#): > > Take the Reagan speech, he makes a speech at a county fair.He then flies to New York and makes a speech at the National Urban league. The first speech contains which contains no objectionable content at all, mostly college football jokes. The second is him bragging about how great he was for minorities as a governor, proposing creating special zones enterprise zones in heavily minority zones which would have lower taxes, and proposing to give government housing to minority families almost free of charge. Somehow these shrewd and cunning racists know to disregard the second speech where he make explicit promises he actually campaigned on because civil rights workers were murdered twelve years beforehand at neighboring town to the venue of the first speech. That is crazy. Who says every single thing any Republican ever did is racist? Reagan did and said plenty of things with no racial animus, subtle or not. That doesn’t mean that the Southern strategy didn’t exist. Reagan also talked about ‘welfare queens’ and pushed back against advocacy for criticism and sanctions against apartheid South Africa. The Southern Strategy wasn’t the _only strategy_ Republicans used – it was just the one that happened to try to get all those Southern white supremacist voters who suddenly were without a political party. What do you think happened to those millions of white supremacists? Did they suddenly stop being white supremacist? Why did the votes of these millions of white supremacists change from Democratic to Republican so abruptly, for presidential elections? Why did so many of them support George Wallace? Why did Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond change parties? > [@](#): > > If all the racisst switched to the Republican party, how come the more racist a state was the longer it took to switch to Republican control? If racism is the only thing that sells in the South how could Carter, Clinton, and Obama have won in the south? If the Southern Strategy turned the South Republican how come most southern states had state governments controlled by Democrats until the early 90s? If Nixon’s southern strategy was designed to appeal to racists how come he got the highest percentage of the black vote of any Republican in the past 50 years? > The myth is widely believed but if you examine it closely, you find out that it is just not true. I haven’t asserted any of this – not all of the racists switched parties; racism is not/was not the only thing that “sells in the South”; the Southern Strategy applied to national and not state/local politics (at least at first), and didn’t have much to do with state and local level election results. As far as Nixon’s results, which election are you referring to? What percentage did he get, and what was the trend? Note that it’s pretty much impossible to get a reading on what the black vote was before the Civil Rights movement, since through most of the South _blacks could not vote_. Why do you think LBJ said “we’ve lost the South for a generation” after the Civil Rights Act? What happened to those millions of white supremacists who used to support the Democratic party, largely because of the party’s support for white supremacism? Why did George Wallace do so well in the South when he ran for President? Why did the Democratic party lose so much support there? If you don’t think racism and white supremacy were a massive driving force in politics through the mid and late 20th century, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how anyone could look at our history and not see this. Do you know about Jim Crow? Rosewood, FL? Sundown Towns? Poll taxes? White citizens’ councils? Lynchings? The KKK? Selma? Sheriff Jim Clark? The Civil Rights murders? Do you really think all this just ceased to be a major force in politics after the 60s? It boggles the mind. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/77 "2016-03-09T22:03:19Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > What Atwater was saying was that Reagan did not need to appeal to racism to win Southern racist voters because Reagan already had those voters because of his appeals to fiscal conservatism. After the 1960s neither party could win many votes appealing to racism so they contested elections over other issues where Reagan had an advantage. > > By current standards the Republicans had a racist past but nowhere near as racist as the Democrats do. Yet, somehow the Democrats get a pass for a hundred years of vile racism but the Republicans are forever tarnished because Ronald Reagan gave a speech at a county fair. I think the difference between the Republican racist past and the Democratic racist past is that the Democrats and their supporters haven’t really seemed very racist since JFK. In fact they tend to champion issues of racial injustice. Republicans are racist until about a second before they are accused of racism. > [@](#): > > Of course there was a Southern Strategy but it was not racist. There were also Northen, Easter, Western, and Midwestern strategies. The difference was the Southern Strategy was new because the South was now longer exclusively democratic. Every campaign tries to win as much of the country as possible. When the Southern states stopped caring about race to the exclusion of everything else they came into play and Nixon, being a good politician, tried to get those votes. Yes, and I don’t even think Nixon was racist but he cynically appealed to racists in the south to win their support and once they were inside the tent, they realized that they needed the racists to win election but they couldn’t acknowledge their appeal to racists without losing other voters so they use dog whistles. > [@](#): > > In 1976 the Democrats had a Southern strategy and it worked as Carter won the entire south except Virginia. Wait. Carter won by appealing to racists? > [@](#): > > When Hillary is nominated she will have an strategy to win Oregon, that does not make her campaign racist because of Oregon’s white supremacist history. It would if she won in Oregon by wooing racists by saying things that would appeal to racists. > [@](#): > > Do you have a cite that most racists are Republicans or is that just more baseless slander? As a minority I have experienced racism from plenty of people. The worst offenders are young black men and white people of all ages (but generally the older they are the worse they seem to get). I can point to a shitload of Republicans like Cliven Bundy and David Duke being racist. I can show you shitloads of tea partiers being racist. I have significantly more trouble finding Democrats being racist. That doesn’t mean they aren’t, but they seem to actively try not to be. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2016, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/78 "2016-03-09T22:55:05Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > Yes, and I don’t even think Nixon was racist . . . Nixon had no particular emotional investment in either side of the civil rights movement. [That does not mean he wasn’t racist.](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon) “We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family. Let people like Pat Moynihan and [special consultant] Leonard Garment and others believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work—throw 'em off the rolls. That’s the key.” “I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” “Screw State! State’s always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them!” “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” “The Jewish cabal is out to get me.” “You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.” “Many Jews in the Communist conspiracy. Chambers and Hiss were the only non-Jews. Many thought that Hiss was. He could have been a half. Every other one was a Jew—and it raised hell for us. But in this case, I hope to God he’s not a Jew.” “The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.” “As long as I’m sitting in the chair, there’s not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. [No Jew] can be right on the criminal-law issue.” ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2016, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/79 "2016-03-10T17:27:23Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Nixon had no particular emotional investment in either side of the civil rights movement. [That does not mean he wasn’t racist.](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon) > > “We’re going to [put] more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family. Let people like Pat Moynihan and [special consultant] Leonard Garment and others believe in all that crap. But I don’t believe in it. Work, work—throw 'em off the rolls. That’s the key.” > > “I have the greatest affection for them [Negroes] but I know they’re not going to make it for 500 years. They aren’t. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.” > > “Screw State! State’s always on the side of the blacks. The hell with them!” > > “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” > > “The Jewish cabal is out to get me.” > > “You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.” > > “Many Jews in the Communist conspiracy. Chambers and Hiss were the only non-Jews. Many thought that Hiss was. He could have been a half. Every other one was a Jew—and it raised hell for us. But in this case, I hope to God he’s not a Jew.” > > “The Jews are irreligious, atheistic, immoral bunch of bastards.” > > “As long as I’m sitting in the chair, there’s not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. [No Jew] can be right on the criminal-law issue.” OK, that sounds pretty racist. In guess I was just comparing him to others at the time. Kinda makes you think that everyone might have been pretty racist at the time and some of those people are still alive and voting. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 10, 2016, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006/80 "2016-03-10T17:35:27Z")
> [@Damuri\_Ajashi](#): > > OK, that sounds pretty racist. In guess I was just comparing him to others at the time. Kinda makes you think that everyone might have been pretty racist at the time and some of those people are still alive and voting. Well . . . yeah. It is difficult for GenXers (like myself) or Millennials to really appreciate how pervasive and unquestioned racism was among American whites at the time – even among those sympathetic to Civil Rights movement (I did once read a post in GD noting that whites’ general attitude in the 1950s was that blacks are “smarter than a dog, but not smart like you and me,” and that many whites supported the movement solely because it is unfair to take advantage of inferior people). But GIs and Boomers understand that very well, and many were raised with those attitudes and have not changed them. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-american-religious-right-rooted-in-racism/747006.md?page=5)