Interesting take on the Southern Strategy.

[Craig234]

Changes to the makeups of the political parties have been going on a long time as described. "Southern Strategy" is a very specific thing that as I understand, Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips created in the 1968 election to attempt to use voters who didn't like the civil rights bills and changes, to take political advantage and appeal to them, as Nixon looked hard for things to run on.

It wasn't that hard to find such voters, not just because 'they were so much more racist', but because 'change is hard'; much of the country already felt civil rights was being pushed too fast too hard. Things that became nearly universal values over time were abrasive when they were changed. For a more recent analogy, no state in the US approved of gay marriage before the country had years to 'get used to it'.

In 1968, not only was the country 'raw' over the changes, but you had things like 'Nation of Islam', the 'Black Panthers', and in 1968 you had America's cities burning to the ground in race riots; in a 'culture war', 1968 was the year of the 'black power' first being raised at the Olympics. There was a lot of fuel for someone who would 'calm things down and restore law and order'. It was a sensible political strategy.

This is where the idea of Nixon's 1968 phrase "silent majority" came from also. People who felt they had been left out with all the changes. Not only all of that, but there was the political threat of George Wallace, who was running third party, siphoning off the 'racist vote' from Nixon.

The south had long been 'ripe for the picking', but the civil rights progress created more of an opportunity to make more changes to alignment. But race was quite a divisive issue not on our terms - 'KKK versus decent people' - but as a raw issue with a lot of change and seemingly 'on flames' in many ways at the time. An analogy would be like if the 1/6 riot had been a BLM protest - then multiply that many times.

 

[ataraxia]

The Southern strategy is a Democrat conspiracy theory that alleges Nixon carried Southern states in the 1968 presidential election in the wake of the bi-partisan 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, the South was carried by Democrat George Wallace.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”

Upon Nixon taking office in 1969, he put into effect America’s first affirmative action program Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions, first in Philadelphia and then elsewhere. Now, would a man seeking to build an electoral base of Deep South white supremacists actually promote the first program to legally discriminate in favor of blacks?

Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. His strategy, as outlined by Kevin Phillips in his classic work, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was to target the Sunbelt, the vast swath of territory stretching from Florida to Nixon’s native California. This included what Phillips terms the Outer or Peripheral South.

Nixon recognized the South was changing. It was becoming more industrialized, with many northerners moving to the Sunbelt. Nixon’s focus, Phillips writes, was on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon won these voters, and he lost the Deep South, which went to Democrat segregationist George Wallace.

And how many racist Dixiecrats did Nixon win for the GOP? Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democrat Party.

The progressive notion of a Dixiecrat switch is a myth. Yet it is myth that continues to be promoted, using dubious case examples. Though the late Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott all switched from the Democrat Party to the GOP, none of these men was a Dixiecrat.

The South, as a whole, became Republican during the 1980s and 1990s. This had nothing to do with Nixon; it was because of Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” The conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity had far more to do with the South’s movement into the GOP camp than anything related to race.

Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures — not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democrat Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democrat big lie.

Why would the RNC apologize for something that was a myth? Makes no sense.

 

[ataraxia]

Nixon’s focus, Phillips writes, was on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon won these voters, and he lost the Deep South, which went to Democrat segregationist George Wallace.
ie.

Phillips called and says this is wrong.

“ From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
-Kevin Phillips, 1970

 

[Warcok]

Why would the RNC apologize for something that was a myth? Makes no sense.

Because the RNC never apologized for a conspiracy theory the dimocrats conjured up.

 

[ataraxia]

Because the RNC never apologized for a conspiracy theory the dimocrats conjured up.

So what was it they were apologizing for?



“ Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions [...] by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
-Ken Mehlman, chair of RNC, 2005

Southern strategy - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[j brown's body]

For many people, the so-called Southern strategy was the original sin that led directly to the many racial and political problems we face today. Richard Nixon, it is said, implemented this nefarious strategy by appealing to Southern racists with coded phrases like “law and order” to gain the White House in 1968. In truth, the seeds of the Southern strategy were sown in the West 100 years earlier, as detailed in a new book by Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War.

While there is no question that Nixon coveted the votes of conservative Southerners, he was hardly the first Republican to do so. The eventual migration of Southern Democrats into the GOP had more to do with deep economic, demographic, and political forces that had been in operation for decades.

To belabor the obvious, the Republican Party has always been our more conservative political party, and the South has always been our most conservative region. But Southern conservatives were alienated from the GOP because of slavery and the Civil War. However much affinity they might have for Republicans on issues such as national defense or taxes, they were never going to formally join the party of Abraham Lincoln.

The Western Origins of the “Southern Strategy”

The untold story of the ideological realignment that upended the nation

newrepublic.com

Clearly, in its origins, the Republican Party was not the more conservative party. Consider that it created the first federal social programs with the Freedmans Bureau, passed an amendment protecting voting rights and an amendment extending civil rights - both empowering the federal government.

It just didn't last very long. I just finished an incredible biography of Grant. As president, he advocated for equal rights, hired many women and minorities in his administration and he advocated for non-sectarian public schools for boys and girls. But you can see by the end of his administration his party abandoning these things and becoming increasingly beholden to big business interests.

Many liberals continued to be Republicans into the progressive era. Margaret Sanger was a Republican. By then, liberal/progressives were just as racist as the conservative Democrats.The change with regard to progressives/liberals embracing race slowly began with FDR. The Dems held the solid South and took on more and more racial liberals, and by 1948 and the Dixicrats revealed the crack that would, by 1972, become a permanent, irreconcilable break.

 

[j brown's body]

The Southern strategy is a Democrat conspiracy theory that alleges Nixon carried Southern states in the 1968 presidential election in the wake of the bi-partisan 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, the South was carried by Democrat George Wallace.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”...

Nixon embraced the Southern strategy after 1969. Although his picking Governor Spiro Agnew, who blamed logical black leaders in Baltimore for the riots in the wake of the King assassination, as his running mate in 1968 can be seen as a signal of things or come. His commitment to integrating schools would not last:

"President Richard Nixon made his most important statement on “busing” in a televised presidential address in March 1972. The speech came shortly after Florida’s Democratic presidential primary, in which the “busing” issue propelled George Wallace to a landslide victory and 74 percent of Floridians signaled their opposition to “busing” in a ballot straw poll. Nixon called on Congress to enact a moratorium on new “busing” orders and pass new legislation that would “establish reasonable national standards” rather than the “unequal treatment among regions, states and local school districts” ordered by the courts. ... “Whether Congress passed the busing moratorium was not as important as that the American people understood that Richard Nixon opposed busing as much as they did.”2 Nixon’s televised speech prompted the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to publish “It’s Not the Distance, ‘It’s the Niggers,’ ” a report that fact-checked Nixon’s claims about “busing.”3 The speech also intensified tensions between the White House and the civil rights lawyers in the Justice Department who worked on school desegregation cases, seven of whom resigned in protest. In a letter published in the Wa s h i n g t o n Po s t , one of the lawyers wrote, “As I sit here watching President Nixon make his statement on school busing I am sickened. Sickened because it is the job of the President to unite and lead the nation to the future, not buckle..."

Link

 

[ataraxia]

Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. His strategy, as outlined by Kevin Phillips in his classic work, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was to target the Sunbelt, the vast swath of territory stretching from Florida to Nixon’s native California. This included what Phillips terms the Outer or Peripheral South.

Philllips says you got his actual strategy wrong and just bought the propaganda:

“ Phillips had one conspicuous campaign success—the urging of an Outer South Strategy aimed at capturing Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, as opposed to the Deep South Strategy that had carried Wallace territory for Goldwater in 1964, but at the cost of frightening away mil lions of potential voters else where.

“My argument was this: Your outer Southerners who live in the Ozark and Appalachian mountain ranges and in the Piedmont upcountry—and now in urban‐suburban Florida and Texas—have always had different interests than the Negrophobe plantation owners of the Black Belt. This is a less extreme conservative group. It adheres with other Republican constituencies across the country and can be appealed to without fragmenting the coalition. When you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives collapse.”

Nixon's Southern strategy (Published 1970)

J Boyd article on K P Phillips' theory as expressed in his book The Emerging Republican Majority that there is inevitable cycle of Repub dominance that will begin in late '60s and prosper until 21st century; it is ethnic theory premised on alleged hostility of Irish, Itals and Poles--hitherto...

www.nytimes.com

 

[ataraxia]

Phillips on why Boston was not voting as Republican as NYC in 1968:

“ in Boston, where Phillips contemplated the backwardness of the South Boston Irish compared with their New York kin in making the inevitable switch to the Republican party: “It's be cause there aren't enough Negroes and Jews in Boston to take over the local Demo cratic organizations and send the other ethnics whooping into the Republican party. But it will come...

Sterilized and scientific as are the terms by which Kevin Phillips plots the emerg ing Republican majority, its common denominator is hos tility to blacks and browns among slipping Democrats and abandonment of the Democratic party because of its identification with the colored minorities. In the Northeast, the slippage is among blue‐collar Catholics who find their jobs threatened and their neighborhoods and political clubhouses overrun by invading Negroes, while their erstwhile party seems to cluck approval. In the Outer South, the national Democrat ic party has begun to replace the G.O.P. as the symbol of alien causes—the Negro poli ticians and Federal interfer ence with local autonomy. Hence, the shift to Republi canism, a trend which for the same reasons has engulfed the milder border states and will, Phillips insists, capture the perfervid Deep South when events force the abandonment of the more extreme Wallace alternative.”

Nixon's Southern strategy (Published 1970)

J Boyd article on K P Phillips' theory as expressed in his book The Emerging Republican Majority that there is inevitable cycle of Repub dominance that will begin in late '60s and prosper until 21st century; it is ethnic theory premised on alleged hostility of Irish, Itals and Poles--hitherto...

www.nytimes.com

 

[ataraxia]

It’s absolutely incredible how prescient these folks in think tanks can be. Response to Phillips’ book by Richard J. Barnet, co‐director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C., in 1968 (it’s like he was literally seeing the future):

“ Barnet believes the coalition envisioned by Phillips is possible, but disputes its character.

“Phillips may be right. If people don't take his theory seriously enough to come up with alternatives — and the Democrats haven't yet — the forces he mentions, together with the national security military institution, may well produce the nightmare he de scribes.

“But the analogy is not with Jefferson; it is with Hitler. The elements are all there —deep‐rooted social cleavage, insoluble problems, rhetoric which attempts to legitimize and encourage hate, a phony genetic and geographical un derpinning, a despised minori ty to blame for everything. It all adds up to scapegoat politics, which is a tactic of fascism.

“The new gains of the Re publican party are based upon preserving the status quo by stopping the civil rights ad vance. But the status quo is racist. The Administration tries to legitimize this by saying it will carry out the orders of the courts against de jure segregation. But it's an old tactic to use the courts as a way of avoiding execu tive or political action. The courts, even before the Nixon Administration alters their composition, cannot go very far by themselves in bringing about equality between the races. The South, for instance, is just beginning to emerge from a society that was total ly racist. Such small gains as have been made involved huge expenditures of energy, moral authority and political risk. To say we are to stop now, to pervert the moral authority of the Presidency in order to make people feel more com fortable with their prejudices —and that's what's happening today—is to say that we ac cept racism. And to build political majority based on racism is taking a long step toward fascism.”“

Nixon's Southern strategy (Published 1970)

J Boyd article on K P Phillips' theory as expressed in his book The Emerging Republican Majority that there is inevitable cycle of Repub dominance that will begin in late '60s and prosper until 21st century; it is ethnic theory premised on alleged hostility of Irish, Itals and Poles--hitherto...

www.nytimes.com

 

[j brown's body]

It’s absolutely incredible how prescient these folks in think tanks can be. Response to Phillips’ book by Richard J. Barnet, co‐director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C., in 1968 (it’s like he was literally seeing the future):

“ Barnet believes the coalition envisioned by Phillips is possible, but disputes its character.

“Phillips may be right. If people don't take his theory seriously enough to come up with alternatives — and the Democrats haven't yet — the forces he mentions, together with the national security military institution, may well produce the nightmare he de scribes.

“But the analogy is not with Jefferson; it is with Hitler. The elements are all there —deep‐rooted social cleavage, insoluble problems, rhetoric which attempts to legitimize and encourage hate, a phony genetic and geographical un derpinning, a despised minori ty to blame for everything. It all adds up to scapegoat politics, which is a tactic of fascism.

“The new gains of the Re publican party are based upon preserving the status quo by stopping the civil rights ad vance. But the status quo is racist. The Administration tries to legitimize this by saying it will carry out the orders of the courts against de jure segregation. But it's an old tactic to use the courts as a way of avoiding execu tive or political action. The courts, even before the Nixon Administration alters their composition, cannot go very far by themselves in bringing about equality between the races. The South, for instance, is just beginning to emerge from a society that was total ly racist. Such small gains as have been made involved huge expenditures of energy, moral authority and political risk. To say we are to stop now, to pervert the moral authority of the Presidency in order to make people feel more com fortable with their prejudices —and that's what's happening today—is to say that we ac cept racism. And to build political majority based on racism is taking a long step toward fascism.”“

Nixon's Southern strategy (Published 1970)

J Boyd article on K P Phillips' theory as expressed in his book The Emerging Republican Majority that there is inevitable cycle of Repub dominance that will begin in late '60s and prosper until 21st century; it is ethnic theory premised on alleged hostility of Irish, Itals and Poles--hitherto...

www.nytimes.com

It's easy to say you are desegregating schools and even work towards it, but it's not going to happen if communities remain segregated unless you support... bussing. And that just wasn't going to hapoen.

 

[Athanasius68]

It’s absolutely incredible how prescient these folks in think tanks can be. Response to Phillips’ book by Richard J. Barnet, co‐director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C., in 1968 (it’s like he was literally seeing the future):

“ Barnet believes the coalition envisioned by Phillips is possible, but disputes its character.

“Phillips may be right. If people don't take his theory seriously enough to come up with alternatives — and the Democrats haven't yet — the forces he mentions, together with the national security military institution, may well produce the nightmare he de scribes.

“But the analogy is not with Jefferson; it is with Hitler. The elements are all there —deep‐rooted social cleavage, insoluble problems, rhetoric which attempts to legitimize and encourage hate, a phony genetic and geographical un derpinning, a despised minori ty to blame for everything. It all adds up to scapegoat politics, which is a tactic of fascism.

“The new gains of the Re publican party are based upon preserving the status quo by stopping the civil rights ad vance. But the status quo is racist. The Administration tries to legitimize this by saying it will carry out the orders of the courts against de jure segregation. But it's an old tactic to use the courts as a way of avoiding execu tive or political action. The courts, even before the Nixon Administration alters their composition, cannot go very far by themselves in bringing about equality between the races. The South, for instance, is just beginning to emerge from a society that was total ly racist. Such small gains as have been made involved huge expenditures of energy, moral authority and political risk. To say we are to stop now, to pervert the moral authority of the Presidency in order to make people feel more com fortable with their prejudices —and that's what's happening today—is to say that we ac cept racism. And to build political majority based on racism is taking a long step toward fascism.”“

Nixon's Southern strategy (Published 1970)

J Boyd article on K P Phillips' theory as expressed in his book The Emerging Republican Majority that there is inevitable cycle of Repub dominance that will begin in late '60s and prosper until 21st century; it is ethnic theory premised on alleged hostility of Irish, Itals and Poles--hitherto...

www.nytimes.com

The South has become more Republican over the past decades.
And it has become less racist.
Its not clear what the problem is.

 

[Warcok]

The South has become more Republican over the past decades.
And it has become less racist.
Its not clear what the problem is.

That's because republicans up north came south for those new industrial jobs and the dimocrats down south went north for those new entitlement programs

There you have it, folks, the big switch!

 

[SoCal]

...to pervert the moral authority of the Presidency in order to make people feel more com fortable with their prejudices —and that's what's happening today—is to say that we ac cept racism. And to build political majority based on racism is taking a long step toward fascism.”...

You couldn't come up with a more accurate description of the recent conservative push to outlaw the discussion of gays and our country's true history in our classrooms...

 

[ataraxia]

The South has become more Republican over the past decades.
And it has become less racist.
Its not clear what the problem is.

Maybe. But that still doesn’t mean the Southern Strategy was not a big reason for the successful switch in party loyalty back in the late 60s. And of course now, they have shown that at least they are willing to at least tolerate a huge amount of racism.

 

[RaleBulgarian]

I'm not sure that's fair. Is there anything Trump has said which would have been particularly shocking - or even particularly outside the mainstream - in the 70s or 80s? Pretty sure he's never publicly used the n-word, never said that black people are inferior or white people superior or that he opposes equality before the law, while he has voiced condemnation of white supremicists and white nationalism on multiple occasions. AFAIK the most shocking things he's publicly said - "murderers and rapists," "very fine people," "get that son of a bitch off the field" etc. - each in isolation have all been open to tortuous interpretation as more or less innocent comments, or at least objectionable on grounds other than race. They're obviously far less subtle dog whistles than cutting public services or arguably even states' rights, but they're still not open racism. Offhand I suspect that birtherism is the closest he's publicly come to open racism, but even there for his own part he went on to cover his bases with (in some cases even more) outrageous attacks on other political opponents.

Apparently, you’re not very familiar with Trump’s record of racism prior to his run for president.

Rather than citing a long history of comments (and actions) “outside the mainstream”, here are some links to review;

An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry

His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.

www.theatlantic.com

The 15 most offensive things that have come out of Trump’s mouth

While claiming to ‘cherish women’ and to be the ‘least racist person,’ Trump has offered up some shocking comments.

www.politico.eu

Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020

Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s "the least racist person." His history suggests otherwise.

www.vox.com

 

[ataraxia]

You couldn't come up with a more accurate description of the recent conservative push to outlaw the discussion of gays and our country's true history in our classrooms...

What’s amazing is that these guys were seeing this coming way back in 1968. Amazing! it’s like they had a crystal ball or something.

 

[Nickyjo]

And they voted for Carter and half of them voted for Clinton.

Sort of exceptions that prove the rule. In general, as LBJ predicted, civil rights laws had the South lost to democrats for a generation. More. Started in 1964. It shouldn’t be that way. As Jessie Jackson -sort of alone - pointed out working class whites generally have the same interests as working class blacks. But parts of the GOP have used race (e.g., Willie Horton ads, Trump’s appeals to bigotry), to divide and scare us.

But that’s a price we have paid in our history, as Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews and others have had their turn as groups to be feared.

 

[Athanasius68]

Maybe. But that still doesn’t mean the Southern Strategy was not a big reason for the successful switch in party loyalty back in the late 60s. And of course now, they have shown that at least they are willing to at least tolerate a huge amount of racism.

There wasn't a big change back in the 60s.
What was happening was a split vote-- southerners started voting for the Republican for president, yet continued to vote for the Democrat for everything else-- House, Senate, state legislator, sheriff, town council, justice of the peace.
And so on.
That's why Biden was able to say during the campaign that he was able to work with everyone as a senator-- including segregationists who were still in office and who were of course fellow Democrats.
The change you are talking about really kicked off during the 90s, when the GOP starting winning control of state legislatures and governorships and the like in the south.

 

[RaleBulgarian]

The Southern strategy is a Democrat conspiracy theory that alleges Nixon carried Southern states in the 1968 presidential election in the wake of the bi-partisan 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, the South was carried by Democrat George Wallace.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”

Upon Nixon taking office in 1969, he put into effect America’s first affirmative action program Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions, first in Philadelphia and then elsewhere. Now, would a man seeking to build an electoral base of Deep South white supremacists actually promote the first program to legally discriminate in favor of blacks?

Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. His strategy, as outlined by Kevin Phillips in his classic work, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was to target the Sunbelt, the vast swath of territory stretching from Florida to Nixon’s native California. This included what Phillips terms the Outer or Peripheral South.

Nixon recognized the South was changing. It was becoming more industrialized, with many northerners moving to the Sunbelt. Nixon’s focus, Phillips writes, was on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon won these voters, and he lost the Deep South, which went to Democrat segregationist George Wallace.

And how many racist Dixiecrats did Nixon win for the GOP? Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democrat Party.

The progressive notion of a Dixiecrat switch is a myth. Yet it is myth that continues to be promoted, using dubious case examples. Though the late Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott all switched from the Democrat Party to the GOP, none of these men was a Dixiecrat.

The South, as a whole, became Republican during the 1980s and 1990s. This had nothing to do with Nixon; it was because of Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” The conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity had far more to do with the South’s movement into the GOP camp than anything related to race.

Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures — not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democrat Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democrat big lie.

I don’t know, or care, what you’re trying to achieve by lying about Nixon’s view of African Americans, but there’s plenty of irrefutable proof that Nixon was a racist and an antisemite.




Also, Nixon was responsible for placing marijuana on the schedule 1 DEA drug list. His intent was to take advantage of various states voting laws that would strip voting rights from anyone caught smoking weed. Specifically, hippies and African Americans.

 

[Warcok]

I don’t know, or care, what you’re trying to achieve by lying about Nixon’s view of African Americans, but there’s plenty of irrefutable proof that Nixon was a racist and an antisemite.




Also, Nixon was responsible for placing marijuana on the schedule 1 DEA drug list. His intent was to take advantage of various states voting laws that would strip voting rights from anyone caught smoking weed. Specifically, hippies and African Americans.

LOL! Wtf was that barley audible jibber jabber supposed to prove?

 

[RaleBulgarian]

LOL! Wtf was that barley audible jibber jabber supposed to prove?

Pretending not to understand what was said, even though the text of the conversation was displayed?

Your response is even more pathetic than I’d anticipated.

 

[Mithrae]

Apparently, you’re not very familiar with Trump’s record of racism prior to his run for president.

Rather than citing a long history of comments (and actions) “outside the mainstream”, here are some links to review;

An Oral History of Trump’s Bigotry

His racism and intolerance have always been in evidence; only slowly did he begin to understand how to use them to his advantage.

www.theatlantic.com

The 15 most offensive things that have come out of Trump’s mouth

While claiming to ‘cherish women’ and to be the ‘least racist person,’ Trump has offered up some shocking comments.

www.politico.eu

Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020

Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s "the least racist person." His history suggests otherwise.

www.vox.com

In discussions about the racist tendencies in the Republican party, I'd already been through two of those links before and now have again looking for the "bullhorn" of their leader's open public racism. There's no question that he is racist and deliberately appeals to racists in his rhetoric, but that's not the claim which @ataraxia made. Your first article itself concludes:

"America’s always trying to find this gotcha moment that shows Donald Trump is racist—you know, let’s find this one big thing. Let’s look for that one time when he burned a cross in someone’s yard so we can now finally say it. People refuse to see the bread crumbs that are already in front of you, leading you to grandma’s house."​

There are plenty of bread crumbs, plenty of inflammatory rhetoric and 'ambiguous' remarks and biases against black people and sympathies towards neo-confederates and so on. But Ataraxia didn't talk about bread crumbs, he said that Trump and his supporters don't even care about deniability any more, that they'd dispensed with the dog whistles and were "using freaking bullhorns." Even your links seem to suggest that is not really the case; quiet discrimination in his and his father's housing businesses in the 1970s/80s, anecdotal reports that he once said black people are lazy, other anecdotal reports that they wanted to get the 'smell' out of the White House or somesuch before moving in and so on aren't quite the same thing as publicly broadcasting racism with a bullhorn.

Maybe I just misunderstood the comment, and he merely meant that Trump's dog whistles are much louder and less subtle than you would have seen from successful mainstream politicians in the 2000s or 1990s?

 

[RaleBulgarian]

Even your links seem to suggest that is not really the case; quiet discrimination in his and his father's housing businesses in the 1970s/80s, anecdotal reports that he once said black people are lazy, other anecdotal reports that they wanted to get the 'smell' out of the White House or somesuch before moving in and so on aren't quite the same thing as publicly broadcasting racism with a bullhorn.

Trump’s long history of discrimination, “quiet” and otherwise, is well documented.

I am not referring to anecdotal accounts.

Is there anything Trump has said which would have been particularly shocking - or even particularly outside the mainstream - in the 70s or 80s?

All, outside the mainstream.

Maybe I just misunderstood the comment, and he merely meant that Trump's dog whistles are much louder and less subtle than you would have seen from successful mainstream politicians in the 2000s or 1990s?

I don’t know what @ataraxia was referring to, but I would agree that Trump has made it easier for the worst elements of our country to spew their bigoted views.

 

[Warcok]

The leftist progs still haven't proved their southern strategy conspiracy theory.

No evidence only a couple cherry picked out of context quotes.