If you’re going to post this piece of nonsense in every thread, I will correct it in every thread.
The Southern Strategy was developed as a response to the 1968 election. Therefore, nothing about the 1968 election can be used to show that it doesn’t exist.
It exists. It was deliberate. It was amoral, if not downright immoral. And it has been core Republican strategy for 40 years because it worked.
Except it didn’t work; the ONLY times the Republican candidate won a non-landslide election by the margin of the South were in 2000 and 2004 (and obviously there is some dispute as to whether he really won in 2000!)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html?_r=0
It’s a convenient bit of simplification for political science professors, but it ignores historical reality. Race-baiting was a GLOBAL strategy designed to work EVERYWHERE, and Republicans gained nothing in the South in Presidential races after realignment–governorships and Senate seats yes, but mostly from people voting for the same, party-switched Democrats who five years previous were saying “segregation forever” and openly preaching white supremacy. No coded strategies needed!
I don’t know what you’re trying to say here – whether or not it worked is immaterial. That there was something called the Southern Strategy, and that it was deliberately conceived and put into practice, is factual. Calling it a “myth” is tantamount to historical revisionism.
This is a Monty Python routine. What has the Southern Strategy ever done for us? Yes, it got us almost all the electoral votes in the South, and the overwhelming majority of Senate and House seats, and the governorships, and all the state legislatures, but other than that, what? It was global and it worked globally.
The book you linked to is from 2006, conveniently pre-Obama. For the last 40 years, people have been trying to prove that the switch was class-based and not race-based. I wanted to believe this myself at one time, but I was wrong. The way that animosity toward Obama has been expressed definitely proves that it was race all along.
One of the authors of that book is quoted as saying “If Southern politics is about class and not race,” he says, “then they can get it back.” We’ve seen the result.
In 2012 Obama received 93% from blacks, 73% from Asians, and 71% from Hispanics, cumulatively about 80% of minorities. Those percentages increased from 2008. The Southern strategy was equally readable from both sides of the ledger.
I’ll give you this out, though. You get the 93% of blacks who voted for Obama to tell me that the election was about class rather than race and I’ll concede the point.
This. Nothing more complicated. Obviously slave holders held racist views and even non slave holders mostly viewed blacks as an inferior race. Most abolitionists felt the same way.
Even Lincoln, the great emancipator, said in his debates with Douglas that he didn’t agree with blacks being allowed to vote or sit on juries. Douglas accused him of wanting to repeal anti-miscegenation laws. Lincoln replied that nobody he knew would marry a negro if the laws were repealed but if Douglas was worried that some of his friends would rush out and marry negroes were the law repealed, then Lincoln would gladly support keeping the law in place (to much laughter from the crowd).
Lincoln today couldn’t be elected dog catcher by making such statements.
Blacks were pretty much universally considered to be inferior to whites in America, if not elsewhere. The difference with much of the North was that inferiority != bondage. Abolitionists abhorred the notion of slavery, while at the same time agreeing to the notions you’ve described. It could also be deduced that Lincoln’s comments in the debates were populist in nature, aimed to get him elected to an office where he could pursue his agenda. It’s no different than the pandering that goes on in today’s politics.
I don’t think the positive fact *that *black people vote Democratic implies much about the normative question of *why *white people vote Republican, especially when your example is an election where fewer white people voted Republican than usual. Obama won Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, mostly due to the influx of white Democrats into those states.
And George Wallace won five more, on an openly segregationist platform.
The Southern Strategy was a way to draw the racist, er, “states’ rights” voters into supporting Republicans, by welcoming them into a party that had real national power, after they had been repudiated by the Democrats with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. LBJ correctly commented after signing it "“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”
Glad to help.
Truncated the quote for brevity’s sake. But that’s f*cking horseshit. States rights is one issue, slavery is another.
[Random State] is [subject race] and therefore will be enslaved.
Og, stop reading sci-fi.
In the run-up to the war, slavery was very closely tied to state’s rights, however. One of the big issues of the day was the right of each state, existing or new, to determine if slavery was to be allowed. Many in the north also wanted the law to read that escaped slaves should not be returned to their owners, which slave owners (and many northern conservatives) interpreted as a violation of their property rights. Abolitionists, of course, didn’t see it that way.
I’m not sure what’s going on in a good portion of this post, but to take the point up, the empirical reality is that in American politics, the only “state right” ever asserted is the right to maintain slavery or Jim Crow. That we can conceive of the metaphysical possibility of other state rights doesn’t change the fact that, in actuality, it only refers to racial discrimination of varying degrees.
This isn’t quite true if you read history. There are two great matters of states rights prior to the slavery issue becoming of paramount national importance that I can think of:
In the end, they just adjourned with a recommendation of several different constitutional amendments designed to curb the powers of the President and the Federal Government. Unfortunately for the Federalists, all this happened around the same time news arrived of Jackson’s great victory at the Battle of New Orleans. It basically allowed the Democrat-Republicans to milk some sort of PR victory out of the whole War of 1812 (which was foolish started and badly conducted) and allowed them to cast the Federalists as anti-Americans with secessionist tendencies. Basically the Federalist party died and the Democratic-Republicans ruled the United States as a one party state until the Whig Party emerged.
Many of the Southern states were bitterly opposed to the tariffs, which were seen as primarily benefiting Northern industrialists. With Jackson’s election it was thought one of “their guys” was in office so the tariffs would be lowered. The tariffs were lowered in 1832, but not nearly as much as many of the Southern states had desired.
Jackson and Calhoun bitterly hated one another, and this combined with Calhoun’s desire to get really involved in this nullification business lead to Calhoun resigning as Vice President. He then formed the “Nullifier Party” in South Carolina and shortly afterward the South Carolina legislature passed the Nullification Ordinance. This declared the Federal tariff unconstitutional and unenforceable within the borders of South Carolina. South Carolina then began military preparations to resist any Federal efforts to interfere with the Nullification Ordinance.
In response to the Nullification Ordinance Jackson issued a proclamation that, in better prose, essentially said “I don’t think so and I’m coming down to South Carolina and Hell is Coming with me if you even try this shit with me.” He then tried to get a Force Bill through Congress to specifically authorize various military actions involving both militia and regular army against South Carolina if necessary. It was stalled at first, which gave Henry Clay time to work out a compromise with John Calhoun. In the end, Jackson’s force bill passed but so did another tariff reduction. South Carolina, recognizing Jackson was serious about the invasion thing, and seeing that the new reduction was the best they could hope for, stood down. In a final act of defiance they issued another nullification ordinance directed at the Force Bill, but this was mostly ignored by all involved.
Both of these historical cases clearly touched on States rights, and weren’t directly involved with slavery.
In a sense I think it is the unfortunate anticlimax of the Nullification Crisis that allowed secession. I sometimes think if South Carolina had been recalcitrant, and Jackson burned that State from the mountains to the sea, it is possible the confederate states would not have tried secession 28 years later and maybe the slavery issue could have been ended through the political process (but on that part I’m not so confident.)
Individual people vote for individual reasons. But in groups we can say that whites vote disproportionally for the party that has branded itself the party of intolerance and that minorities vote disproportionally against the party that brands itself the party of intolerance.
Republicans and conservatives must, of necessity, deny that the reason for this is perceived support of racism. But the empirical reality in that in American politics, race trumps class.
I will say that I heartily support your post from which I stole that line. By the time of the Civil War, states rights meant slavery and only slavery, whatever the tangled earlier history.
“States rights” as a purely theoretical concept might be nearly anything you care to state, but states rights as a component of actual American politics since the 19th century has always been a pretext to dress up some racial issue. To say otherwise is either delusional or dishonest, or, usually, both.
I wouldn’t say not since the 19th century, more accurately since probably the 1840s I don’t believe States Rights ever involved anything other than slavery.
Cite, since this is GQ, that the Republican party has “branded itself the party of intolerance.”
Well, since the 1840s were smack-dab in the middle of the 19th century, I think we agree.
During the Civil Rights Movement, there wasn’t government-sanctioned slavery, but “states rights” did refer to Jim Crow, legal segregation, civil rights and voting rights, and related issues.
Of course it can, you just have to use the values of the day instead of ours today. Nobody would be a liberal or a conservative (well, maybe conservative) if we judge people from 150 years ago with today’s ethics. That doesn’t mean there was no such thing as people who are socially and economically liberal and socially and economically conservative. Unless you think our current divide is a new thing, and that people back then had no differences :dubious:
nm
Of course they did. You still hear about it today, don’t you? There’s an active “Federalist Society” poisoning the judiciary today, isn’t there?
From the Articles of Confederation to the Civil War, it meant slavery. Then it meant Jim Crow and all of its related crap. Then it meant segregation. More recently it has had the more subtle meaning of cutting government support for the “poor” and “the cities”.
Lee Atwater, GHWB’s campaign director (he literally recanted on his deathbed, btw), explained the Southern Strategy: