If you want to say that the Southern Strategy was the first big step in the GOP actively seeking to win southern Democrats who were repelled by civil rights and losing control of their party to blacks and white liberals, you could say that. But the forces that made that possible started much earlier.
Nor should you; see post #153.
When did he make that clear? :dubious:
Reagan was one of the below. Please tell us which:
- Blithely ignorant of the world around him, to the extent that he didn’t even know what the words and location meant to the broader culture he had grown up in.
- Crudely racist, but smart enough not to let on directly and smart enough to know how to blow the dogwhistle.
- Amoral and/or simply callous, willing to say anything his handlers told him to if it meant getting votes, no matter who else it hurt.
Got any other options to “make clear” for us?
I’d say he was a combination of 1 and 3.
It hardly *started *then. The reversal goes back to Lincoln’s death, and the overpowering of his “let 'em up easy” policies by the Radical Republicans. It continued with The Party of Lincoln’s grand sellout of the blacks in the 1876 election deal. The great migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities and their (relative) acceptance by the Democratic machines there was a factor. The New Deal and all of the programs that helped the poor, disproportionately black, was too. So was FDR’s order banning racial preferences in war-plant hiring. There were numerous smaller advances along the way too.
What specifically created the opportunity was the Democrats’ repudiation of the racism that had been part of its coalition since the beginning, by passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Housing Act, among others.
People who are being *accurate *claim it was the *culmination *of the transformation.
See the totality of his remarks, quoted in post #10.
Yes, the usual set of lies about welfare, even without the words “queen” and “Cadillac”.
We’ve covered that already.
You can call it the “usual set of lies” if you like, but that’s what he said at the time.
So your “when did he make that clear?” shtick was just you being disingenuous.
I mean, not completely surprising, to be sure, but worth noting, perhaps.
That speech does not “make clear” that he is using “states’ rights” as anything other than a racial dog whistle; the whole speech is one.
That’s if you accept upfront that merely talking about people being trapped in welfare is itself a dog whistle. I think it’s a legitimate issue if not done in a deliberately incendiary manner, and Reagan himself undoubtedly shared this view.
We’re going round and round on this …
This vilification of the term “states rights” is a non sequitur. It was used to argue that states have the right to allow slavery, Jim Crow, set their own speed limits and drinking ages, gun control or marijuana laws. Just because one believes in the concept of states rights doesn’t mean that he supports all of those things or even any of them. And when a person uses the term in reference to one, it can’t simply be inferred that he’s making a wink and a nod to the other.
Many posters here support Colorado and Washington legalizing marijuana even though it violates federal law. Does it logically follow that those same posters support Jim Crow or slavery? Of course not. So why is that meaning attributed to Reagan? Because he was conservative and you “just know”?
The important thing is that it’s a lie, but, yes, in this context it’s a racial dog whistle.
OK, I guess that settles it and we’re done.
Because, historically, for the several decades being discussed, the vast majority of the usage of the phrase “states rights” referred to the ‘rights’ to oppress black people. It wasn’t even close.
Perhaps they were just thinking ahead, and getting ready for the day when they would need that rationale to prevent gays from getting married to each other?
In that case, I don’t think they planned very well at all.
The analogy in your second paragraph fails.
Support for violating one law is not the same as support to violate all laws. Even on a slippery slope, that is too far removed to make a case.
Your first paragraph is also very weak sauce. It is probably true that one may hold a belief in States Rights without being racist. However, it was never truly used to argue speed limits for the very fact that it had a very specific history over the preceding decades in which it was used to defend segregation, argue the legitimacy of the Southern Secession to support slavery, and similar topics.
Reagan’s use of that term probably did not indicate any desire on his part to return the South to Jim Crow. However, it could have no other meaning than to place himself and his party in the camp that argued that the Federal Government should back off and let the states handle the issues of Civil Rights. (Reagan was not in favor of States Rights when it came to drug laws, for example.) Preaching “States Rights” at that time and place is the rhetorical equivalent of claiming that schools need to “teach the controversy” in regard to the Theory of Evolution: there might be some person, somewhere, who means by that phrase that we should make sure that students are given a good historical grounding in the various claims and hypotheses that have been long since discredited by the evidence for Natural Selection, but you will not find that phrase being used, publicly, in that way.
We can look at it like branding: someone might say they’re “pro-life”, and mean that they believe people should choose to not have an abortion, but they don’t actually want to outlaw it. But that’s not what the political brand of “pro-life” means – it means supporting banning abortions.
In the same sense, someone might have said they were for “states rights” and meant that they wanted states to have more control over things like drugs, alcohol, traffic laws, etc. But the political brand that is (or was) “states rights” was all about the rights of states to oppress black people.
Good comparison.
As a result of concluding it’s good public policy, not as a result of a belief in the moral superiority of governments in Olympia and Denver over that of Washington. It isn’t a states’ rights argument at all.
Those arguments could not publicly or honestly be based on their being good public policy. The alleged principle of states’ rights, one which the Constitution does not support, incidentally, was used as a rationalization, not a basis.
No, because anyone of his generation with the slightest awareness knew what it meant, and knew what Philadelphia, MS meant, too. Not to attribute that meaning to Reagan is to accuse him of cluelessness.