Heather Cox-Richardson has suggested that the triumph of Republicans in the last few decades of the 20th century was based on uniting those who wished to roll back the new deal with those who opposed the elimination of Jim Crow and expanding civil rights for Blacks. If she is right this means that the racists are not just your crazy unc…
Heather Cox-Richardson has suggested that the triumph of Republicans in the last few decades of the 20th century was based on uniting those who wished to roll back the new deal with those who opposed the elimination of Jim Crow and expanding civil rights for Blacks. If she is right this means that the racists are not just your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving but folks the GOP depended on to win elections (while still distracting them from their crazy notions). Eventually the crazies just took over the GOP.
Yeah I think this is right. The southern strategy was explicitly racist, that would appear to be recognizing the appearance of a wolf.
If then decades later subsequent generations of Republican politicians had definitively broken with this, renounced and apologized for it, undertaken steps of racial reconciliation at political cost to themselves, and were still being called “racist,” that would be crying wolf.
JVL made a similar point a while back (want to say it was early-ish 2001). As I recall, his assertion was that with the adoption of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Republican Party unofficially became exactly what it bemoans: an identity-based movement, it’s just that that identity was white grievance.
Heather Cox-Richardson has suggested that the triumph of Republicans in the last few decades of the 20th century was based on uniting those who wished to roll back the new deal with those who opposed the elimination of Jim Crow and expanding civil rights for Blacks. If she is right this means that the racists are not just your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving but folks the GOP depended on to win elections (while still distracting them from their crazy notions). Eventually the crazies just took over the GOP.
Yeah I think this is right. The southern strategy was explicitly racist, that would appear to be recognizing the appearance of a wolf.
If then decades later subsequent generations of Republican politicians had definitively broken with this, renounced and apologized for it, undertaken steps of racial reconciliation at political cost to themselves, and were still being called “racist,” that would be crying wolf.
JVL made a similar point a while back (want to say it was early-ish 2001). As I recall, his assertion was that with the adoption of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the Republican Party unofficially became exactly what it bemoans: an identity-based movement, it’s just that that identity was white grievance.
Our electing a Black president was like manna from heaven for the RNC.