The myth of the Southern Strategy

Р

Русский агент

Путин - м&#108
In “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin prove that the shift in the South from DEMOCRAT to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth. In the postwar era, they note, the South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.

This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the G.O.P. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the DEMOCRATS. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.

The two scholars support their claim with an extensive survey of election returns and voter surveys. To give just one example: in the 50s, among Southerners in the low-income tercile, 43 percent voted for Republican Presidential candidates, while in the high-income tercile, 53 percent voted Republican; by the 80s, those figures were 51 percent and 77 percent, respectively.

Wealthy Southerners shifted rightward in droves but poorer ones didn’t.

To be sure, Shafer says, many whites in the South aggressively opposed liberal DEMOCRATS. “But when folks went to the polling booths,” he says, “they didn’t shoot off their own toes. They voted by their economic preferences, not racial preferences.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.html
 
Last edited:
HPVqSlc.jpg
 
I grew up in Louisiana and remember my father, or was it my mother, telling me they couldn't even vote unless they were registered democrat. Once that little inconvenience was done away with my father became a lifelong republican.
 
Last edited:
The myth about Southern conservatism being inherently racist continues to circulate among the credulous.

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 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.

It is so pervasive in fake news reporting that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party."

It has become a staple of DEMOCRATS 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/
 
Then how do you explain Wallace's success running as an independent in 1968 carrying the Deep South? Your explanation predates the actual "Southern Strategy"



"Democrats feared Wallace's appeal to organized blue-collar workers would damage Humphrey in northern states such as Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan. Wallace ran a "law and order" campaign similar to Nixon's, further worrying Republicans."

"In Wallace's 1998 obituary, The Huntsville Times political editor John Anderson summarized the impact from the 1968 campaign: "His startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters was not lost on Richard Nixon and other Republican strategists. First Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, and finally George Herbert Walker Bush successfully adopted toned-down versions of Wallace's anti-busing, anti-federal government platform to pry low- and middle-income whites from the Democratic New Deal coalition."Dan Carter, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, added: "George Wallace laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace
 
archives said:
Then how do you explain Wallace's success running as an independent in 1968 carrying the Deep South? Your explanation predates the actual "Southern Strategy"



"Democrats feared Wallace's appeal to organized blue-collar workers would damage Humphrey in northern states such as Ohio, New Jersey, and Michigan. Wallace ran a "law and order" campaign similar to Nixon's, further worrying Republicans."

"In Wallace's 1998 obituary, The Huntsville Times political editor John Anderson summarized the impact from the 1968 campaign: "His startling appeal to millions of alienated white voters was not lost on Richard Nixon and other Republican strategists. First Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, and finally George Herbert Walker Bush successfully adopted toned-down versions of Wallace's anti-busing, anti-federal government platform to pry low- and middle-income whites from the Democratic New Deal coalition."Dan Carter, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta, added: "George Wallace laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace
Click to expand...

Try another source, as wiki can never be considered accurate on political issues.
 
archives said:
Then how do you explain Wallace's success running as an independent in 1968 carrying the Deep South? Your explanation predates the actual "Southern Strategy"
Click to expand...


Why would I need to explain an independents' purported "success", anchovies? Especially since Wallace failed to gain the presidency.

Please, prove that "my explanation" - which clearly is not mine - "predates the actual Southern Strategy", if you can, anchovies.
 
The tiniest cracks in the Democrats’ southern bloc began to appear with the backlash to FDR’s court-packing scheme and the recession of 1937.
Republicans would pick up 81 House seats in the 1938 election, with West Virginia’s all-Democrat delegation ceasing to be so with the acquisition of its first Republican.
Kentucky elected a Republican House member in 1934, as did Missouri, while Tennessee’s first Republican House member, elected in 1918, was joined by another in 1932.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Republican Party, though marginal, began to take hold in the South — but not very quickly: Dixie would not send its first Republican to the Senate until 1961, with Texas’s election of John Tower.
At the same time, Republicans went through a long dry spell on civil-rights progress.
Many of them believed, wrongly, that the issue had been more or less resolved by the constitutional amendments that had been enacted to ensure the full citizenship of black Americans after the Civil War, and that the enduring marginalization of black citizens, particularly in the Democratic states, was a problem that would be healed by time, economic development, and organic social change rather than through a second political confrontation between North and South.
As late as 1964, the Republican platform argued that “the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”
The conventional Republican wisdom of the day held that the South was backward because it was poor rather than poor because it was backward.
And their strongest piece of evidence for that belief was that Republican support in the South was not among poor whites or the old elites — the two groups that tended to hold the most retrograde beliefs on race.
Instead, it was among the emerging southern middle class.
This fact was recently documented by professors Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston in The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South (Harvard University Press, 2006).
Which is to say: The Republican rise in the South was contemporaneous with the decline of race as the most important political question and tracked the rise of middle-class voters moved mainly by economic considerations and anti-Communism.
The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom.
As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class.
This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats.
This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.
Click to expand...
http://blackrepublican.blogspot.com/p/the-party-of-civil-rights-by-kevin-d.html
 
What your point is missing, and the Narional Review article doesn't point out, is that Southern Democrats, especially post Civil War, were conservative Democrats, and the exact opposite for most Republicans, George Rommey and the Radical Republicans were not conservatives
 
Right said:
Try another source, as wiki can never be considered accurate on political issues.
Click to expand...

Don't need Wikileaks, the 1964, especially the 1968, and 1980 elections on prove my point

Before you ask 1972 and 1976 don't count since Nixon carried the country and in 1976 the Democrats ran Carter
 
anchovies said:
Don't need Wikileaks, the 1964, especially the 1968, and 1980 elections on prove my point
Before you ask 1972 and 1976 don't count since Nixon carried the country and in 1976 the Democrats ran Carter
Click to expand...

He didn't mention Wikileaks, and the rest of your "rebuttal" lacks supporting documentation that would validate your assertions about the events you cited, anchovies.
 
God bless America said:
Why would I need to explain an independents' purported "success", anchovies? Especially since Wallace failed to gain the presidency.

Please, prove that "my explanation" - which clearly is not mine - "predates the actual Southern Strategy", if you can, anchovies.
Click to expand...

Because the 1968 election doesn't fit your model, even the 1964 election makes it questionable, and every election after 1976 raises doubts

Your study is based upon election results in the 1950s up to mid 1960's, learning from the 1968 election, the election you can't explain, Nixon bought the Southern Strategdy to the Republican Party

For anymore deflections? Maybe a grammar or spelling error?
 
God bless America said:
He didn't mention Wikileaks, and the rest of your "rebuttal" lacks supporting documentation that would validate your assertions about the events you cited, anchovies.
Click to expand...

Really,"wiki can never be considered accurate on political issues," that's not mentioning Wikileaks?

The documentation is the election maps, the actual history, I got to google them for you too? I thought you knew history, posting a history oriented topic, but it appears you don't, just another copy and paste I guess

And if all you are going to do is deflect off the content of your topic post don't waste my time
 
archives said:
What your point is missing, and the Narional Review article doesn't point out, is that Southern Democrats, especially post Civil War, were conservative Democrats, and the exact opposite for most Republicans, George Rommey and the Radical Republicans were not conservatives
Click to expand...

Now you're playing around with the historical definitions of conservative- totally meaningless in this discussion.
 
archives said:
Don't need Wikileaks, the 1964, especially the 1968, and 1980 elections on prove my point

Before you ask 1972 and 1976 don't count since Nixon carried the country and in 1976 the Democrats ran Carter
Click to expand...

Wikipedia, not Wikileaks, as that was what you referenced. You do realize that the sole qualification to write or amend an article on Wikipedia is an internet connection, right?
 
anchovies said:
Because the 1968 election doesn't fit your model, even the 1964 election makes it questionable, and every election after 1976 raises doubts Your study is based upon election results in the 1950s up to mid 1960's, learning from the 1968 election, the election you can't explain, Nixon bought the Southern Strategdy to the Republican Party
Click to expand...

So you say. Prove it. If you can.

And again, it's not "my model, anchovies. Simple things seem to elude you.

anchovies said:
For anymore deflections? Maybe a grammar or spelling error?
Click to expand...

You certainly provide ample fodder to support my suspicion that you are a quasi-illiterate, anchovies.

:rofl2:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top