Southern Strategy Still Being Denied
Conservatives really do think we’re all stupid with their flimsy argument!
The basis of the denial
In the debate on racism, where modern right-wing (and thus Republican) political views and policies get linked to the discrimination of generations ago, conservatives at some point began focusing on the party alignments, pointing out that the Democrats (particularly the Southern ones) were the party favoring slavery, then Jim Crow (and in both cases, the KKK being aligned with the party), while the Republicans were the ones trying to end those things.
So Blacks back then naturally leaned Republican, but by our day had completely switched to the Democrats. The point is to prove that they should come back to the Republican party, and are aligning with the Democrats for totally bad reasons, and to their own detriment!
This slick (though not really “clever”, since it betrays ignorance as we shall see) tactic is the effect of a process of “isolating” and “splitting”. Isolating is identifying a common “them” to place all blame onto = “all of our problems are from the Left”. Splitting is the process of saying that blamed entity is “not us”; = “the old racists weren’t US [i.e. the Right]; it was the Left”. They do this by identifying “The Democratic Party” as the for all time common “Left” force, and thus the cause of all our problems throughout the nation’s history. (Ignoring the Southern Strategy, where the old Democratic party had actually represented their far Right agenda. They also, likewise ignore the far Right orientation of Naziism).
So it’s two birds with one stone. “We aren’t the problem; we’re the solution (we know what’s best for you); don’t vote for our enemies, it’s all their fault; and you’re still deceived by them” (for the purpose of getting ‘free stuff’; so that the old stereotypes are maintained and reiterated — in the same breath as calling the other side the true “racists”; and our whole cause is illegitimate, on top of everything else!)
So this narrative created by the Right, is that the Democrats have always been the “bad” party for everyone, trying to “destroy America”, by being “socialist” today, and also, having oppressed blacks in the past.
So what happened, is that in the Civil Rights era, they basically got “slick”, and decided to “enslave the blacks a new way”, while gaining their votes at the same time. So they decided to “give the blacks free stuff”, to “keep them dependent on the government”. They did this by taxing the rest of the nation (both rich and middle class; the “productive” people), which then caused all of our economic problems, as business took their money elsewhere. (And not because they are simply hoarding wealth. No, they “deserve” it all, and it would “trickle down” to the rest of us if we stopped “punishing” them for the sake of the lazy minorities!)
This caused white flight, urban blight, and all the crime, as these “dependent” blacks were unable to improve themselves, their families disintegrated through sexual looseness (and so the fathers weren’t present), and they just sat around expecting “handouts”; and so then just ended up with this “pathological culture” where they just robbed and killed each other. (This sentiment is embodied in the retooling of the “Ant And the Grasshopper” fable, by Limbaugh ally Jim Quinn).
Seeming to support this, some blacks (such as the Nation of Islam, including Malcolm X) questioned the “liberals” (i.e. Democrats) of the Civil Rights era, as being “paternalistic”, using us, and taking advantage of us for the sake of “votes”, and just aiming to ease their “white guilt”.
This now has been seized upon in conservative rhetoric, as the ultimate proof that their [i.e. Republican] policies are what’s right for everyone. Black Democrats are scorned as “still being trapped on the ‘plantation’”!
So the Republicans are the “good” party, who helped the black cause in Civil Rights, and now are trying to do what’s best for these poor blacks today, by getting us off of the “dependency” that is ruining us (as well as the rest of the nation, and singlehandedly causing the racial backlash and resentment that has been resurfacing in recent years).
Dr. Martin Luther King is often held up as a good Republican whose “dream” of “people being judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin” (his whole life’s work is reduced down to this one single statement) is being ruined today by these liberals (and the blacks themselves) perpetually “playing the race card”, to gain what else, but “free stuff” for the blacks, and “votes” for the white partisans! (Ignored is how the conservatives of his day saw him as an evil “Communist”. Christian colleges were reported as cheering when he was assassinated!)
Of course, one should right away recognize the classic racist stereotype of blacks wanting “free stuff”, and being too “simple” and greedy, that they would fall for such a scheme (in addition to being destructive and crime-prone anyway). The conservatives haven’t even bothered to refine their speech enough to catch that. It’s like what their real point is, behind everything else. It’s like we shouldn’t vote for whoever we see as representing our interests (like the conservatives certainly do!) We’re totally misled, and blinded by our own ulterior desire for others’ stuff, to be able to vote rightly, and should just listen to the conservatives who know better!
This rhetoric goes all the way back to slavery, and was used to oppose freedom and integration the whole century between Emancipation and Civil Rights.
If this weren’t enough, you have conservatives (including political candidates) even, go as far as to claim “blacks were BETTER OFF under Jim Crow!” It should be absolutely CLEAR what agenda this is representing! It’s for all purposes saying the old racists were right, all along. But done in a way where they can deny and say it’s a “concern” for blacks, against what the “liberals”, as the “real racists” did to them. (This is called “concern-trolling”).
So the whole battle then is against a party (and the whites running it), and not minorities. And they are able to get blacks themselves (such as Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, etc.) to spout these talking points, “proving” it is “objective fact”!
So we see, today’s Republicans operating off of the same beliefs as those old Democrats. The old Democrats also claimed to be standing up for America’s “values”, and, during the Cold War, against “Communism”, which they linked the whole cause of Civil Rights to. (As they do today, with “wokeness”, BLM, CRT, etc.) So across the board, today’s Republicans sound a lot like yesterday’s Democrats.
This rhetoric FINALLY challenged!
So today’s more savvy liberals began highlighting the deliberate strategy, beginning in the 60’s, where it was the Republicans, who actually did to white voters the very thing they’re accusing the Democrats of doing to black voters. Gaining their votes with “promises” made to appeal to the concerns of the race.
Clearly, the tides were turning in race relations, and there was already a “progressive” faction of the Democratic party, that began to lead the way in Civil Rights legislation.
So you need to look back to all of these “racist Southern Democrats” the Right likes to appeal to. The Bull Connors and the rest of the politicians, lawmen, and the whole voting bloc. The people spitting at Civil Rights marchers, throwing rocks, hosing them down, siccing dogs, and burning crosses and churches. All complaining of their nation (or “states’ rights”) being “taken” from them!
Do we really think all of these people all of a sudden dropped all that stuff they were doing and decided to give away their nation, freedoms and money to these people, just to do this thing called “enslaving them a new way”?
Or, instead, did they naturally feel a massive BETRAYAL by the party, and begin to LEAVE it? Some had already joined an intermediate group called the “Dixiecrat Party”, still showing the connection to the party they left.
So liberals have begun outlining the whole process, beginning with the likes of George Wallace and put into effect by Richard Nixon, to lure away these disenfranchised voters, to the Republican Party. The pinnacle of all this is a 1981 quote by Republican strategist Lee Atwater (who didn’t realize it was being recorded) outlining the rhetorical aspect of this strategy; that by the Civil Rights era, you could no longer appeal directly to the [concrete] issue of race, so you had to get “abstract” and talk of other concerns indirectly pointing to race, such as “taxes” and “busing”. This is the origin of “code language”, or what’s more recently been dubbed “dog whistling“.
The conservatives have begun to respond to this, with a broad dismissal of the notion that “the parties switched”. They usually do not even try to refute the whole strategy outlined beginning in the 60’s, and they don’t even seem to ever address Atwater.
Some have attempted to prove from elected officials that there was no “switch”.
It should be mentioned that in reality, the whole notion of “the parties switching” is not even totally accurate. Yet the way they throw that phrase out there makes it sound ridiculous and far-fetched (i.e. basically a kind of “straw-man”). But this stems from their own (the typical conservative) view of groups as monolithic entities (you know, like “the blacks” and all their “problems”, etc. where the whole race gets colored by crime or welfare statistics they read of in the news). But the parties all consist of individual people, who of course can “switch” beliefs and/or affiliations. So if a bunch of people modify the platform of the larger group they’re in (i.e. the “party”), and other people react to this and leave that party, and bring their beliefs with them to another party, then you will see the platforms of both parties change. But it’s really driven by the people themselves, not these entities called “parties” just “switching”, like they were themselves sapient individuals.
What the current Democratic and Republican parties have in common with the old Democratic and Republican parties is, of course the names, which conveyed the belief that the ideal government of the nation is either a “democracy” or a “republic”. The Democrats always tended to be bigger social “spenders” (on “programs”), while the Republicans were more “austere”.
What’s been completely ignored in this, is that those “programs” the old Democrats “spent” on, were for whites only. It was when Civil Rights, aligned with a liberal movement within the party, began ending discrimination, and opening those programs up to blacks, that the whole notion of a “big government”, taking and spending our “tax dollars” on “social programs”, became the great evil it has been portrayed as ever since (and matched with the Soviet system that was so high on our radar at the time, and became a great “guilt by association” tactic. “Big government” did start to take on a negative connotation in the Civil War, when it was the Northern “federal”-ists against the Southern “states’ rights”. They still didn’t mind it as much [as now] in the interim, when that government was “spending” only on them, meaning whites! They still ignore the fact that there are actually more whites on the programs today, than blacks!)
So the Strategy consolidated the “liberal” vs “conservative” divide by getting the socially conservative racists to move from the Democratic party to the fiscally conservative Republican party. This aided the whole cause by allowing the racists to hide their cause behind economics (hence, what Atwater articulated), and so the great issue in the nation became “conservative” vs “liberal”, which also paralleled “America” and “capitalism” vs the “Soviet empire” and “Communism”, and the moral “conservativism” of the past “Christian nation”, vs the “liberalism” of the modern generations and their “secular humanism”, and the sexual revolution.
Blacks and their causes then became encased on the “liberal” side, and thus, most of the race switched to the Democratic Party, which, while still appearing suspicious to many, regardless, was the “lesser of two evils”, in at least pretending to care about us, or being less racist than the Republicans. (Just like many conservatives today have been unhappy with the Republican party, but see it as “the lesser of two evils”!)
And so, among the conservative Republicans, blacks remained completely the “them over there”, on the side of the common “enemy” of the nation. They were too stupid and blinded by their moral and/or genetic inferiority to see how the Democrats were really just “using” them. So that would become a great talking point, used to further hide their racism, behind the pretense of an actual concern for the people!
So now, “intelligent” sounding conservative hacks such as Dinesh D’Souza, Owens and Prager U (whom Owens and other “black conservative” speakers have connections to), in addition to conservatives in social media comments, will continue to conclude their discussions with “The Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation”, as if this was some irrefutable “fact” that was never answered. The parties can’t possibly have “switched”; what they are now must be what they have always been.
Politicians who supposedly “remained” in the party
So they continued to grasp at straws trying to deny the Southern Strategy. Prager U, armed with its “party switch” term then tries to address the three “myths” of “how the South became Republican”, like in a video by yet another black female, Carol Swain, Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
The “Myths”:
#1:
In order to be competitive in the South, Republicans started to pander to white racists in the 1960s.
Fact: Republicans actually became competitive in the South as early as 1928, when Republican Herbert Hoover won over 47 percent of the South’s popular vote against Democrat Al Smith.
Republicans winning earlier doesn’t prove there wasn’t a concerted effort to win the racists in the 60’s
#2:
Southern Democrats, angry with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, switched parties.
Fact: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act, just one became a Republican. The other 20 continued to be elected as Democrats, or were replaced by other Democrats.
So what they’re saying is that “only Strom Thurmond switched”. (What about Reagan, who switched in 1962?) But now, they’ve begun to try to back this up with a more detailed account of how all the “racist Democrats” remained in the party.
This is so disingenuous, as it expects this “switch” to be sudden (as soon as the Voting Rights act occurred), but most of these leaders’ careers faltered by the mid 70’s, and some of them died around that time. A few died right after the Civil Rights Act, like in 1965 or within 10 years after! So they may have technically stayed in the Democratic Party, but they were no longer key players or shapers in it.
Yet they insinuate that they “remained” as Democrats, as if they are still there as the Democrats of today! How desperate can you get?
So let’s just look, one by one, at these senators they cite!
Sen. Herbert S. Walters D-TN senate career ended 1964; d.1973
Sen. Olin D. Johnston D-SC d.1965
Sen. Harry F. Byrd D-VA d.1966
Sen. A. Willis Robertson D-VA retired 1966; d.1971
Sen. George Smathers D-FL Retired from politics in 1969
Sen. J. Lister Hill D-AL retired 1969 d.1984
Sen. Richard Russell, Jr. D-GA d.1971
Sen. Spessard Holland D-FL d.1971
Sen. Allen J. Ellender D-LA d.1972
Sen. B. Everett Jordan D-NC retired 1973, d1974
Sen. Sam Ervin D-NC retired 1974; d.1985
Sen. John “Little” McClellan D-AR d.1977
Sen. James Eastland D-MS ret. 1978 d.1986 (remained solidly conservative)
Sen. John Sparkman D-AL d.1979
Sen. John C. Stennis D-MS One holdout in the party who voted for one civil rights act in the 80’s, but opposed the MLKing holiday
Sen. Russell B. Long D-LA another one who lasted until the 80’s. President Ronald Reagan called him a “legend … one of the most skillful legislators, compromisers and legislative strategists in history.” (so he was apparently still conservative, not liberal, for Reagan to praise him).
Sen. Herman Talmadge D-GA Career ended with years of financial scandal, and then losing to a Republican in 1980, “marking the end of his family’s political dynasty and the start of the rise of the Republican Party in Georgia.”, which began with a 1968 opponent who “was a sign of the shifting white electorate in the South, where white conservatives moved into the Republican Party.” (Wikipedia)
Sen. Al Gore, Sr. D-TN Of course, the father of Bill Clinton’s Vice President, Al Jr.
In 1956, he also opposed the segregationist Southern Manifesto, but he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Gore reversed course a year later and supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965. During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, Gore backed most of Johnson’s Great Society programs.
Sen. Robert Carlyle Byrd D-WV Also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In 2005, Byrd told The Washington Post that his membership in the Baptist church led to a change in his views. In the opinion of one reviewer, Byrd, like other Southern and border-state Democrats, came to realize that he would have to temper “his blatantly segregationist views” and move to the Democratic Party mainstream if he wanted to play a role nationally.
That’s 19; not sure who they were counting as the 20th.
Here are some governors often cited, as well:
Gov. Orval Faubus D-AR
In 1962, Faubus broke with the White Citizens’ Councils and other groups, who preferred, but did not officially endorse, U.S. Representative Dale Alford in that year’s gubernatorial primary. Faubus cast himself as a moderate, he completely ignored the race issue during the 1962 election campaign, and barely secured a majority over Alford, McMath, and three other candidates. He then handily defeated the Republican Willis Ricketts, a then 37-year-old pharmacist from Fayetteville in the general election.
While Faubus was still an outcast from black leaders, he nevertheless won a large percent of the black vote. In 1964, when he defeated the Republican Winthrop Rockefeller by a 57–43 percent margin, Faubus secured 81 percent of the black vote. He even collected a share of the base Republican vote from the conservative party members who had sided with former Republican state chairman William L. Spicer of Fort Smith, an intraparty rival of Rockefeller.
Career then faltered afterward
Gov. George Wallace D-AL
1968 joined American Independent Party, “a far-right political party of the United States that was best known for its nomination of former Governor George Wallace of Alabama”
In supporting Carter after dropping out of the ’76 race, “Wallace later claimed that he had facilitated a fellow southerner’s nomination; in point of fact, no position advocated by Wallace was included in the 1976 Democratic platform.”
In the late 1970s, Wallace announced that he was a born-again Christian and apologized to black civil rights leaders for his past actions as a segregationist. He said that while he had once sought power and glory, he realized he needed to seek love and forgiveness. In 1979, Wallace said of his stand in the schoolhouse door: “I was wrong. Those days are over, and they ought to be over.”
Gov. Lester Maddox D-GA
When Carter ran for President in 1976, Maddox ran against him as the nominee of Wallace’s former American Independent Party
Gov. Frank M. Dixon D-AL d.1965
I’ve even seen two names thrown in one of these lists; Gov. William H. Murray D-OK and Gov. Fielding Wright D-MS who both died in 1956; well before the Civil rights bill and the claimed “switch”! They just scratched up whatever names they could find, and didn’t even check any dates!
Today’s Republicans sound a lot like yesterday’s Democrats, expressing the same values.
What we don’t see in any of them is adopting any thinking like “You know, we can oppress these blacks better if we stop denying their civil rights directly, and instead give them stuff and make them ‘dependent’ on government”, as people who deny the Strategy insinuate. That didn’t exist! The whole premise is not even thought out, at all! It’s imaginary, spur of the moment thinking, to explain their way out of the sentiments their current party expresses!
They rely on a single alleged quote of President Johnson (“we’ll have the n_____s voting Democratic for the next 200 years”) that is highly doubted as it is, and even if it was true, it would only show a single leader in the party counting on the Civil Rights legislation (and nothing about “free stuff”) as helping the party. If the old Democrats were so dead set against giving blacks basic rights, how in the ‘Sam Hill’ do you think they would suddenly do such a 180° turnaround as to want to give the blacks their tax money? They didn’t think in terms of “enslaving them to the government”; they wanted them suppressed from American life, as much as possible!
The Strategy got the socially conservative Democratic racists to move to the fiscally conservative Republican party, also allowing them to hide their racist cause behind economics. And so the great issue in the nation became a consolidated “conservative” vs “liberal”
So while some did moderate as the times and the party changed; none of them became the “liberals” that today’s conservatives so much decry. Especially with the senators, it was possible to remain in the party and not recant their earlier views for a time. They just became more silent about them, but could still vote for or against different bills in ways that would maintain their positions. Going against the direction of the party overall, these votes would increasingly lose, but they were still there! (It seems the “patriots” making these claims don’t even know how the US government works).
By the late 80’s, when the party was basically as solidly liberal as we know of it today, all of these people were gone (with the exception of Byrd, who changed his views). Their supporters had also gone, to the other party (as we see acknowledged in the Talmadge entry), which now more closely followed their old values, or at least spoke like it did.
Even aside from these politicians, these were just leaders, and the whole point of the Strategy was to lure away the voters (again, as stated above). The article admits a small minority of Republicans in the South, so where did the this current “majority” come from?
(What would be an interesting question to ask many of these modern Southern Republicans who maintain the Democrats were always the party of evil, is which party their ancestors were in!)
“Alternative facts” on how the South became Republican
“Myth” #3
Since the implementation of the Southern Strategy, the Republicans have dominated the South.
Fact: Richard Nixon, the man who is often credited with creating the Southern Strategy, lost the Deep South in 1968.
So, what really happened? Why does the South now vote overwhelmingly Republican? Because the South itself has changed. Its values have changed. The racism that once defined it, doesn’t anymore. Its values today are conservative ones: pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-small government. And here’s the proof: Southern whites are far more likely to vote for a black conservative, like Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, than a white liberal. In short, history has moved on. Like other regions of the country, the South votes values, not skin color. The myth of the Southern Strategy is just the Democrats excuse for losing the South.
(So the Republicans [a PARTY] are ALWAYS the good guys, and the South turned from the bad guys to the good guys [making them the majority in the South by the 90’s], because of their great “values”!)
Sorry, but the old southern Democrats expressed the same “values” as today’s Republicans: starting with the three she mentioned: “pro-life”, “pro-guns”, “small government”, along with the rest of the focus on morality, the Constitution, states rights, the focus on Communism, and the love of the Confederacy that is making such news today. It’s all about HOLDING ON to the past, going BACK; “taking the country BACK”. “Make America great AGAIN”. It’s not the liberals out there defending those statues and the Confederate flag today! And being more likely to vote for a black conservative than a white liberal doesn’t prove anything either. Sure there are “good ones” they like. Anyone who holds their ideology. They don’t necessarily hate individual blacks; it’s the whole “community” they always look down on.
As one commenter on the video pointed out:
Any non-partisan politics professor would know that analysis is simplistic and she deliberately makes it appear that all Democrats claim that it started in the 1960’s and was a complete flip in that decade. If she were being honest, she would point out that there were conservative and liberal segments of the Democratic Party in the North, as well as socially conservative factions in the Democratic Party in the South. It was these factions that changed places, not the parties, and it started shortly after the Civil War ended with the pace picking up with FDR’s New Deal.
The entire process didn’t finish until the mid-1990’s. If people are saying anything different, they are wrong. A politics professor without an agenda would have said at least that much and have acknowledged that Democrats have been saying that for decades.
Do we really think all of these people complaining of their nation being “taken” from them all of a sudden dropped all that and did a 180° turnaround to GIVE AWAY their nation, freedoms and money to these other people?
So the conservatives need to just drop this one. It’s amazing how they are still pushing this to the max, as the ultimate answer! It’s really their weakest argument ever, and does not cover up all of the problematic views today, justly seen as scaled down continuations of the past views.
Originally published in Eripedia