The Myth of the Southern Strategy

Yes, trying to win in the South against democrats using their own strategy did not work. The Southern Strategy was a failure yet Nixon still did a lot for fixing the race problem.

 

That's funny.

This thread, featuring yet another carefully parsed attempt to rewrite history was started and liked by a right winger.

 

That doesnt' make sense.

Evidently you are (probably deliberately) confusing the fact that Nixon took a page from George Wallace's campaign and sought to win over white southern Democrats with an assertion that Nixon was racist.

What happened after that was more significant. Starting with Reagan's decision to launch his campaign at the scene of one of the most brutal crimes in the history of the Movement, and going all the way up to Gingrich's race baiting in the 2012 South Carolina primary, Republicans have repeatedly pandered to bigots.

I know of no evidence that Nixon was racist, and, as you point out, Nixon did a lot to move the bar on civil rights.

Of course, Nixon wouldn't get past the New Hampshire primary in the modern GOP.

 

Listen to Atwater, the only way you could win in the south was if you were a democrat and running on race and party, which was the democrat strategy for, well, just about ever. The Southern Strategy failed for Nixon as the South stayed democrat. It became redundant in the 80's because economics took over. Yet the democrats still run on race and party.

 

One of the characteristics of the right wing rewrite of the history of the Civil Rights movement is the fact that it alway is strategically positioned to start with the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a weak attempt at an anti lynching law that was promoted by the Eisenhower adminstration as a way to cover the criticism the Adminstration recieved over its weeks long dithering over the school desegregation in Little Rock the year before.

The rewrite never mentions the Dixiecrat walkout, Hubert Humphrey's civil rights speech in the 1948 convention, or Brown vs the Board of Education.

Of course, acknowledging the Dixiecrats would require admitting the EVERY Dixie crat state is now a red state, and every office held by a Dixiecrat in 1948 is held by a Republican today (although there may be one or two exceptions).

 

This is clearly false.

The Southern Strategy didn't fail for Nixon, it just didn't matter. The Democrats were weak and divided and they ran a lousy candidate in 1972.

There is no basis for the claim the economics drove the rise of the GOP in the south in the 1980's.

The claim doesn't even make sense. I suspect that the claim is based on the idea that people moving to the South gave southern states thier GOP majorities. But this makes no sense, since most of them came from blue states.

The people who made the GOP red, are the same people whose parents voted the straight Democratic ticket 75 years ago, and not , as my Kentucky uncle would have put it, for a "damm (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)(*) Republican"!

 

Since race quit being an issue in the 80's and many businesses started moving their operations to the South, is it any wonder it, along with most of the country is republican?

2012 election by county, the South is still quite democrat and the only other areas are mostly the left and right coast and the socialist Minnesota area.

 

To what extent? Please document the "dominance".

The present overwhelmingly White Republican Party dominance of the South was not the result of some instantaneous transformation. Truman's 1948 order to end racial discrimination in the U.S. Army, his proposal of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, and support for the elimination of state poll taxes and the drafting of federal anti-lynching laws had contributed to the Southern Whites' alienation and defection from the national Democratic Party and consequent shift to the formerly-loathed Party of Lincoln, as did Johnson's sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The "Southern Strategy" that Nixon's advisor advocated and described did not initiate the migration, nor did it finalize it. That took time and perseverance - as Phillips' stated Nixonian scheme indicates. Thus, you have the formerly solidly Democratic, socially conservative, bible-thumping, state rights, White Southern politicians now solidly Republican, socially conservative, bible-thumping, states rights politicians.

It's the label that has changed.

 

Reagan ran on economics and defense and won the South. The democrats strategy of race and party no longer worked. You can't believe Atwater on one thing and dismiss the rest.

 

The “Dixiecrats” Remained Democrats

The so-called “Dixiecrats” remained Democrats and did not migrate to the Republican Party. The Dixiecrats were a group of Southern Democrats who, in the 1948 national election, formed a third party, the State’s Rights Democratic Party with the slogan: “Segregation Forever!” Even so, they continued to be Democrats for all local and state elections, as well as for all future national elections.

Republican Senator Everett Dirksen – The Key To Modern-era Civil Rights Legislation

Little known is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Dirksen was instrumental in the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. hailed Senator Dirksen’s “able and courageous Leadership”, and "The Chicago Defender”, the largest black-owned daily at that time, praised Senator Dirksen “for the grand manner of his generalship behind the passage of the best civil rights measures that have ever been enacted into law since Reconstruction”.

The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr. and Robert Byrd, a former official in the Ku Klux Klan. None of these racist Democrats became Republicans.

http://www.nbra.info/FrequentlyAskedQuestions

 

Well that post is full of fallacies, non sequitur, red herring, straw man, begging the question...

The only historic reality based in truth in your post is that dixiecrats were racist. They were also only in existence in 1948, and Nixon and Reagan came along years after they had disbanded and rejoined the democrat party. So to say that Nixon and Reagan turned dixiecrats into republicans when they no longer existed is just ignorant.

Who threw who under the bus? Which politicians polarizing rhetoric, the dixiecrats?

 

Reagan started his 1980 campaign with a blatant dog whistle to bigots.

 

LOL, you mean you find anything any republican does as racist after you filter it through your race obsession. Got it.

 

Claiming that someone's post is full of non sequiters, fallacies, red hearing and straw men proves nothing.

On page 2 of this thread, is a partial list of former Democrats who became Republicans. There are several Dixiecrats on that list.

 

I still didn't see anyone provide any proof like the OPer asked for. Just stating it is well known doesn't fly...

 

Most of the old southern Democrats or Dixiecrats here in Georgia remained true to the Democratic Party to their dying days. They were what were known as Yeller Dog Democrats. They just didn't switch. They retired and passed away.

Quite a lot of the Republican Party here in Georgia are made up of transplants from the north thus leaving that area of the country more Democratic and making Georgia more Republican.

 

I did. "...in federal, statewide, local offices as well as maintain control over the state houses well into the 90's" is pretty clear, or do I have to name every Southern politician and state house from the 60's to the 90's because that would be encyclopedic.

No it was the result of decades of race baiting and race pandering by the democrat party and the constant portrayal of whites and Southerners as hicks, hillbillies, rednecks and racists. Did you think that whites would want to stick around the party that basically calls all whites racist even today with their "white privilege" rhetoric?

You guys keep getting ahead of me, I said that I would address these things in my OP but here we go already:

And yet it was IKE that actually enacted the order 5 years later and desegregated the military.

A proposal which failed because it was blocked by democrats.

Imposed by Southern democrats. Which didn't happen until 1964 with the passage of the 24th Amendment and 1966 in the case of state elections with the SCOTUS case of Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections.

Supported by republicans for decades and blocked by democrats for decades:

The South was predominantly democrat into the 1990's and I doubt it had anything to do with President Truman.

Or Johnson. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was basically the same Civil Rights Act of 1957 except it included the parts that JFK and LBJ had taken out in 1957.

Attributing a decades long demographic and ideological switch in the electorate to anything, (or in this case nothing that you or anybody else has pointed to), Richard Nixon did is just the normal race baiting rhetoric that has driven people from the democratic party.

That's the rub, isn't it?

 

Today's democrats are desperate to distance themselves from their own racist history and make like the republican party is the democrat party of the past yet race is still the biggest issue in the democrat party.

 

Well if the Dixiecrat party had only 7 members then by all means I concede the point.

 

The only nonsense is the completely made up dogwhistle BS "Southern Strategy."

 

Oh, you didn't see the long liethread claiming the KKK was instrumental in moving Democrats to the GOP... with an article and bogus study that said nothing of the kind anywhere within? that this thread was obvious backlash to? Nice selective vision you have.

Southern Strategy, 0 facts, 0 documents, 0 evidence, with mountains of factual evidence against it posted already in the thread... which of course you don't deal with.

We all know the left has made a furious, futile attempt to deflect its history of violent racism onto the GOP for decades. Just because MSM doesn't debate it... well DUH. It's just another of a host of made up leftist lie narratives with no substance underlying.

 

Every politician attempts to win every demographic they can. That's not what this thread is about, nor is it reflective of the way the left uses the "Southern Strategy" as a GOP scheme to court racists and you full well know that. The Wallace voters who switched in that election switched to Humphrey, not Nixon, who had stated in the press from the start that his campaign, nor his party, were interested in segregationists in the least. That's documentary evidence AGAINST the Southern Strategy.

I already debunked Neshoba, and have done so many times here. Deal with it. There is no rational, factual, documentary evidence of any Southern Strategy in the GOP to court racists.

Complete fabrication, utterly and entirely made up, with 0 factual or documentary evidence accompanying.

 

Seems to be par for the course, dems rarely use facts or evidence.

 

LOL. Fact: the South was an economic shambles with little personal wealth between the CW and sometime in the 1960s when the Sunbelt began rapid growth. Fact: People started to rise into the middle and upper middle class all across the South during that time. Fact: People who make more income pay more taxes. Fact: People don't like to pay taxes. Fact: People perceive the GOP as the party of lower taxes. Can you do the simple math from there? It certainly makes more sense than your dogsh-t dogwhistle theory.

Not even close to being true. The same ignorant rednecks who vote on race, work for unions in ragpicking mills, live in trailers, go to the same racist churches, vote Democrat, just like their unions, racist daddies, and racist granddaddies tell them to. They have simply become culturally irrelevant in the South. These types would NEVER vote for the party of Lincoln in a million years. They probably stayed home drinking in 2008 and 2012.

But as Atwater says very clearly OVER AND OVER in the hackademic interview that you obviously haven't and won't ever listen to, "RACE CEASED TO BECOME A MARQUIS VOTING ISSUE IN THE SOUTH IN 1970."

 

This is just plain false. Quoting revisionsism from the website of a fringe right wing group is not credible.

http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/How-LBJ-Twisted-Dirksens-Arm-155727255.html