the myth of the racist gop

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A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism.

It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist.

Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists.

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. B

It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racial issues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party." It has become a staple of Democrat politicians who accuse Republicans of dividing Americans against each other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people through the use of so-called racist "codewords."

All this matters because people use such putative connections to form judgments, and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have.

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. From the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. A party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find "proof" in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. Neither type of evidence is persuasive.

The GOP's policy positions are not sugar-coated racist appeals. Election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got that way as the party of the more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class.



http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/
 
Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold.

To be persuasive, claims of "coding" must establish how to tell which is which. Racial "coding" is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist.

This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward.

Democrats try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist.

Critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism).

The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism.

One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.


http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/
 
Bias is also evident in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South.

Democrats suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. Generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democrat Party, which relaxed its civil rights stance accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism.

So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These folks sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964.
 
Liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error.

They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them.

There are two reasons to question this assumption.

The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic?

The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power.

The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.
 
The GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists' collapsing political alternatives.

the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth's proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

Hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance.

These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold?

We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller black populations. Race loomed less large in its politics.

In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense.

The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
 
Under FDR, Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal.

Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites but won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting.

From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native son LBJ was on the ballot—only twice, narrowly. Since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

States representing over half the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, before Goldwater, before busing, when the Republicans were the only mainstay of civil rights.

It was this which dramatically changed the GOP's presidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the least racially polarized part of the South. Its strongest supporters were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters.

When given the option in 1968, Deep South whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president by winning most of the Peripheral South instead.

From 1972 on, GOP presidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in the two sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimes not. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of the South's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery, throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidential support.
 
Those who vilify the GOP's Southern strategy might be surprised to find that all of this was evident to the strategy's early proponents.

The tension between the myth and voting data escalates if we consider change across time. Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants.

These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time.

Do we really believe immigrants (like George H.W. Bush, who moved with his family to Texas) were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?

Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures.

If the GOP's strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever.

The myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups.

The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed.

The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones.

The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'.
 
What Social Science Tells Us About Racism in the GOP

Research has shown that voters who favor Republicans are more likely to hold racial biases against people of color. For instance, nearly one in five Republicans opposes interracial dating, compared to just one in 20 Democrats, according to the Pew Research Center.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-the-republican-party/?utm_term=.1172bc76fa28
Click to expand...

Colin Powell Emails Rip 'Racist' Trump as 'National Disgrace'
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Colin-Powell-Donald-Trump-emails-leaks/2016/09/13/id/748137/
Click to expand...

Colin Powell's former chief of staff: 'My party is full of racists'
http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/colin-powells-former-chief-staff-my-par
Click to expand...

Two new studies find racial anxiety is the biggest driver of support for Trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-two-new-studies-find/?utm_term=.a5982beb621c
Click to expand...
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God bless America said:
A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism.

It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist.

Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists.

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. B

It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racial issues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party." It has become a staple of Democrat politicians who accuse Republicans of dividing Americans against each other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people through the use of so-called racist "codewords."

All this matters because people use such putative connections to form judgments, and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have.

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. From the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. A party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find "proof" in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. Neither type of evidence is persuasive.

The GOP's policy positions are not sugar-coated racist appeals. Election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got that way as the party of the more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class.



http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-myth-of-the-racist-republicans/
Click to expand...
:rofl:
 
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