A couple of years ago, the venomous Ann Coulter made waves when making the rounds promoting her book Mugged which supposedly debunked the Southern Strategy as a myth.
Now, I realize that Coulter is a poisonous shrew of a woman, however she is not the only person around that time who claimed that the Southern Strategy never happened, and the other sources are far less incendiary and have much better credentials.
Bruce Bartlett is a historian who worked with the Reagan and first Bush administrations who is known for being critical of the second Bush for getting away from Conservative principles, but who also wrote a book Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past which asserts that Democrats were just as bad at race relations as Republicans.
However, the book that seems to have the most credentials behind it is The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South. Published by Harvard university Press and written by two people with what seems to be solid academic credentials - Byron E. Shafer, the Chair of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Richard Johnston, Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, the book makes the argument that class in the south was the instigator of driving whites to the Republican Party and blacks to the Democratic Party and not any strategy.
I happen to think there is ample evidence that shows that these minority, revisionist views are wrong. There are direct quotes from Lee Atwater, Michael Steele, and in the New York Times in 1970, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips said:
And how does one explain the emergence of the Dixiecrats without acknowledging the racial divide that prompted it?
So is the Southern Strategy a myth that has somehow been accepted as fact for 40 years until some scholars (and, um, Ann Coulter) blew the lid off the whole idea? Or are these people no different than any other small groups who grasp at straws while looking through ideological glasses and come up with ideas that might appease those who are predisposed to believing such things, but whose assertions are ultimately incorrect? Or is it something else?
The historical facts of and voting patterns and the racial demographics thereof is pretty clear, so it seems to me that no one is going to make an effective argument that the Republican party didn’t gain white Southern votes and also promote pretty vile racial politics during that time period.
Is the argument that there was no Southern Strategy that the GOP was somehow blissfully unaware of the connection between the two? How dumb does Ms. Coulter think we are*?
I think you need a better definition of the term “Southern Strategy”.
If it just means that the Republicans adopted conservative positions which appealed to conservative whites down south, then it’s obviously true.
If it means that the Republicans deliberately chose to appeal to racism by adopting racist positions and/or using racist code words, then you’ve not demonstrated that this was ever a mainstream Republican party strategy.
The only one of your quotes that comes close is the Atwater one, but it’s not clear from the context who he is attributing this to. (Possibly it would be clear to someone who listened to the whole thing, which I’ve not done.)
Dumb enough to take it seriously when RWs call Dems the racist party because of their pre-1960s history; which messaging depends on Southern Strategy denial, or simply unstated dismissal.
I’ve been recommended, but haven’t yet read, Earl and Merle Black’s “The Rise of Southern Republicans”, which looks at the transformation and growth of the Republican party in the South.
The Southern Strategy myth is a way liberals get to white wash the Democrat party’s racist roots. They get to pretend that progessives and liberals were always on the side of the angels and that Republicans now are as racist as Democrats used to be before civil rights.
21 Dixiecrats voted against the Civil Rights act of 1964 in the Senate. One later became a Republican and the rest stayed Democrats until they retired or were defeated. In fact the last Democrat to try to filibuster the act, Robert Byrd personally spoke for 14 hours straight against the bill. He then served in Senate Leadership from 1967-to 1989. He then served on the most powerful committee until his death.
The south had already started moving Republican with the election of John Tower in 1960 and didn’t really turn all the way Republican until the 1990s.
One has to be very careful about the term “Dixiecrat.” While most people have a generic connotation of the word that roughly equates with “Southern Democrats of the middle decades of the 20th century,” the term has a specific definition. Playing on the confusion allows conservatives like puddleglum to make the extraordinarily disingenuous argument that he makes here.
Dixiecrats were a specific handful of southern Democratic politicians in 1948 and 1948 alone. See: Dixiecrat - Wikipedia. They were very racist and wanted to play havoc with the Democratic primary, adopting a platform against “miscegenation” and civil rights actions by the federal government. They accomplished little at the time and DID NOT EXIST after 1948.
What that small handful of Democrats did for the rest of their careers is really irrelevant to the issue of the Southern Strategy of the Republicans. First, a more meaningful question would be: Did the Republican party, starting in the 1960s, make particularly racially divisive appeals to voters? The answer is clearly yes, they did.
That’s a dramatic shift in voting in white Georgia counties over just a four year period and coincides exactly with Goldwater’s stating that Republicans should “go hunting where the ducks are” that year. From Frank Rich:
Additionally, one can look at whether or not there were many Democratic politicians who switched to the Republican party. I couldn’t find a great source of data on this point after searching for a few minutes, but one (unvetted by me) is here: Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos. I seem to recall some more comprehensive list, color coded so that it became pretty obvious just by looking at it that there was some systematic process going on.
What the “Dixiecrats” did is irrelevant. Don’t get duped by that racial revisionist bullshit.
I would add to Rich’s discussion about Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia that this was his first speech given after being nominated as the candidate of the GOP that year. That site was chosen for a reason, and the text of the speech sounds a good bit like the platform of the Dixiecrats, if you carefully avoided any explicit references to race.
This just shows how dishonest the entire accusation is. Reagan did not have a speech in Philadelphia, it was at the nearby Neshoba County Fair, the largest campground fair in the country, and one of the largest gatherings in a swing state he needed to win. Micheal Dukakis spoke there shortly after being nominated in 1988. It was not his first speech after the convention, that was in New Jersey across from the statue of Liberty. There was nothing about it that sounded like the platform of the Dixiecrats. Here is a transcript. It has lots of talk of inflation and jokes . There is one passage that people say is racially coded
The idea of welfare reform was the same one campaigned on by Bill Clinton and signed into law by him. It became one of the great domestic policy success stories of the past 50 years.
After the speech, the next week he went to NYC to speak to the urban leage and said “I am committed to the protection of the civil rights of black Americans. That commitment is interwoven into every phase of the programs I will propose.”
Carter kicked off his 1980 campaign in a small Alabama town that was the national headquarters of the KKK, if Reagan had did that, people would have called it proof of racism but since the democrat did it, no problem.
Those who did not live through it are probably unaware of the racial controversy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention cite where there was a clash about seating the all white Mississippi delegation or a mixed one.
The “official” delegation was asked to sign a pledge to support the party ticket, and that delegate selection in the future would follow party rules and not be discriminatory. However
The Atwater quote is on the nose, and so is the Phillips quote. Yes, the Republican party (from the time of Goldwater until the last few years) intentionally used coded language (welfare queens, states rights, uppity, etc., and more recently, the ‘takers’) and supported policies to attract racist white voters.
The thing is, this should not be surprising or even controversial. Before Civil Rights, the Democrats had most of the racist white vote. And at this point in history, ‘racist white people’ was a very, very large group of voters! So of course the Republican party were going to try and attract those voters after Civil Rights alienated hordes of them. Does anyone really think either political party has or had the scruples to not try and attract a very large and achievable demographic, just because it might be unsavory? Come on.
Most southern white people were racist back then (in the late 60s). Does anyone think Republican party bosses were not making efforts, up to and including coded racial language, to attract these millions of racist voters? That’s what political parties do! It would be remarkable if the Republicans had not tried it!
And racist Democrats were doing it back then too. Local politics in the south was dominated by Democrats long after Civil Rights (and still is in some rural white communities), even if Civil Rights shifted support in Presidential elections to the Republicans among southern white racists.
This is not even controversial, or at least it shouldn’t be. A political party did what political parties tend to do, and tried to attract a very large group of voters that was up for grabs. Now they are reaping the consequences of it, as minorities are a much higher share of the voting public. But there’s no doubt that it happened, and it was deliberate.
Liberals always were on the side of the angels WRT race relations, but did not always dominate the Democratic Party (and do not now, but that’s another discussion).
You spoke of an accusation of dishonesty, but then post this sort of disingenuous claim? The point was not that Reagan spoke at Philadelphia, MS, (the address of the fairgrounds is 16800 Mississippi 21, Philadelphia, MS 39350), but that he made a point of invoking States Rights–the explicit phrase used by anti-segregationists for thirty years.
In contrast, Carter was a Southerner speaking in the South, repudiating racism, with no appeals to segregationist history. (And Reagan’s claim that Carter was opening his campaign in “the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan” was simply one more typical Reagan misstatement that tends to get repeated without examination. Tuscumbia was never the “parent” city to the KKK and the KKK was founded in Pulaski, TN.)
As previous, the Atwater quote needs context, and the Phillips quote shows nothing.
Once you start talking “coded language” you have free reign to say whatever you want, which is what people are doing with this. Define the other guy’s position as secret racism and then you get to call him a racist.
Not much to argue about, in any event. Whatever.
This seems illogical. You’re saying that the Republicans had to have done a specific unsavory thing because all political parties do unsavory things?
I can’t stop you from speculating. But I think you need to produce some evidence beyond “oh, you really believe they didn’t do it?” or there’s no point in discussing it.
But even leaving that aside, I don’t think the Republicans would have to use coded racism to attract the Southern White vote. Because the Democrats had moved so far to the left by that point that remaining in middle was enough. Meaning, if you made no attempt to attract any racist vote by any sort of coded or explicit message but simply opposed forced busing and affirmative action and the like while the other party supported these things, you would get the racist vote without being racist.
Of course, the counter-argument seems to boil down to the notion that opposing busing or affirmative action etc. is itself racism or a coded appeal to racism. But that’s just a No True Scotsman tautology. Which brings us back to my first post to this thread.
We’re talking 1964, the first time the GOP took the South. It must have been because LBJ was a wild-eyed radical. :rolleyes: Just a favorite of the Yippies, right?
Exactly what did he do, beside civil rights, that would have made southern democrats bolt. You might look at my cite about the convention. The controversy was not about ultra-liberalism.
Disagree about the Phillips quote. As far as the context – just look at the context! It’s not hard to find. And it doesn’t change anything. It’s very clear he was talking about Republican political strategy.
It wasn’t so secret. And coded language really does exist. It’s a real thing, not a made-up thing. You can disagree on this instance, but coded language is not some fictional construct. “States rights”, in particular, has never really meant “states rights” in American history – it’s virtually always meant “states rights to oppress black people”.
What? I’m saying that it would be the default political move – try to attract the large group of voters that are suddenly alienated from the other party. Which you don’t even appear to disagree with. So we know the Republicans tried to attract the racist white voters (numbering in the millions) after they were alienated because of Civil Rights. The only disagreement is how they tried to attract those voters.
The Atwater quote (in context) and the Phillips quote, along with the statements of modern Republicans like Michael Steele, offers some solid evidence. So does Republican support for policies and activities like the following (and I’ll note that some Democrats were also guilty, but the party by and large, after the CRA, was much better on such issues than the Republicans):
Opposition to the MLK Holiday, opposition to sanctions for Apartheid South Africa, traditions of visiting and making speeches at openly racist institutions like Bob Jones University, support for official displays of racist imagery like the Confederate flag, etc.
And you’d be right except for all the evidence of the racist stuff that they did actually did and supported.
That alone is not racism. Opposing the MLK day holiday? Politically speaking, opposing it could only be to appease the anti-MLK crowd (e.g. racists). Opposing sanctions for Apartheid SA? At best, tolerance and acceptance of brutal and racist oppression, and at worst, outright support of brutal and racist oppression. Continuing traditions like going to racist organizations like Bob Jones U? An obvious appeal to racists. There are many more examples.