Let's have some fun.
The South was conservative and racist.
The South was also a ONE-PARTY bastion at virtually all levels. Furthermore, this comment implies that ONLY conservatives are racist, which is amusing to anyone who has ever interacted with, well, anyone.
However - before we continue - let's note that the rest of your post basically SUPPORTS my point. Let's go back and actually READ what I was saying:
The liberal narrative basically says, "The South was Democratic and racist and then all the racists went and voted for the Republicans and that's why the Democrats lost the South - because of racism.
I love to get some liberal ranting about Nixon's "Southern Strategy," which not one of them ever gets right. Their version goes like this: Nixon appealed to racism in the South and won because of that.
This is about to become VERY important given some of your comments below, because I NEVER denied the Southern strategy exists. What I emphatically deny is that it is a strategy based upon racism. Both parties have had "Southern strategies" because the Electoral College has been heavily Southern slanted (though at one time the Rust Belt was sufficient to win the White House virtually alone).
79.85% of the people in Alabama were voting right-wing, not liberal. In fact, had Nixon been more conservative he might have done better in Alabama.
But what would he have lost elsewhere? Keep in mind that you just sort of proved my point - which you did repeatedly in this post. Nixon DID NOT appeal to racism or any such thing, and I defy you to come up with one explicit example because it never happened. Nixon wrote off the bulk of the South because he had no prayer against the Democratic Party AND Wallace combined - and he knew it.
Keep in mind that the Gallup poll of 9/27/68 said (nationally - documented by White, 1968: 412)
Nixon: 43
Humphrey: 28
Wallace: 21
The final numbers from Leip's Election Atlas:
Nixon: 43
Humphrey: 42
Wallace: 13
In other words, all those so-called racist Wallace voters nationally voted for......Hubert Humphrey. Nixon's national numbers NEVER MOVED from the Convention onward. And the same source, written in 1969 before all the revisionism (I should also note White was a liberal), "To compete with Wallace in the South on any civilized level was impossible - thus, states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and several others were scratched as targets, as were, at the other end of the spectrum, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Instead, Nixon would challenge Wallace in the peripheral states - Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, South Carolina." (White, 1968: 386)
But it's about to get better....
The Southern strategy is not a myth.
I never said it was - I VERY SPECIFICALLY SAID - and I quote - "the liberal narrative" and "which none of them ever gets right." In other words, I'm conceding there was a Southern strategy just not that it is a racist based strategy.
It has been well documented by the likes of Kevin Phillips,
"It's conceivable,' said (Kevin) Phillips at one point, 'that you could see something bigger than Johnson's victory in 1964, that we could carry everything but four states - Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Alabama, and Mississippi." (White, 1968: 386).
Incidentally ON THE PREVIOUS PAGE, Phillips is overseeing what is expected to be a national sweep and they have concocted what at the time is called "the peripheral strategy," designed to "contain" Wallace by carrying states like Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee..incidentally, Nixon won ALL of those states.
Incidentally, in t
he article about the book that made him famous, Phillips refers to it as "an outer South Strategy."
Thus, Phillips agrees with me.
Atwater didn't document anything; there's a video out there that is controversial and stripped of context, but know that Atwater was a play for keeps consultant who - by his own admission - his reputation for ruthlessness far exceeded his effectiveness. Atwater was mostly a play actor who didn't do all that much but was beloved in the party for his sense of humor. And let me be blunt: the ONLY problem Democrats have with Atwater is he BEAT them. That's all. Yes, he played dirty, but let's not pretend politics was pristine and then Atwater showed up.
LBJ (a weird hawkish liberal),
LBJ simply made an insulting observation he had no way of knowing whether was true or not. LBJ said all kinds of things, but a political psephologist he was not.
Let's see what Buchanan said about the "Southern strategy" just last June (Hey, you cited him as an authority, so let's see what he said):
In 1956, as vice president, Nixon went to Harlem to declare, "America can't afford the cost of segregation." The following year, Nixon got a personal letter from Dr. King thanking him for helping to persuade the Senate to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
Nixon supported the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965 and 1968.
In the 1966 campaign, as related in my new book "The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority," out July 8, Nixon blasted Dixiecrats "seeking to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice."
Nixon called out segregationist candidates in '66 and called on LBJ, Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy to join him in repudiating them. None did. Hubert, an arm around Lester Maddox, called him a "good Democrat." And so were they all -- good Democrats.
While Adlai chose Sparkman, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew, the first governor south of the Mason Dixon Line to enact an open-housing law.
In Nixon's presidency, the civil rights enforcement budget rose 800 percent. Record numbers of blacks were appointed to federal office. An Office of Minority Business Enterprise was created. SBA loans to minorities soared 1,000 percent. Aid to black colleges doubled.
Nixon won the South not because he agreed with them on civil rights -- he never did -- but because he shared the patriotic values of the South and its antipathy to liberal hypocrisy.
When Johnson left office, 10 percent of Southern schools were desegregated. When Nixon left, the figure was 70 percent.
============
Now let me make something clear: I do not agree with Buchanan's spin on this as far as "Nixon did this, the Democrats did this." I have no tolerance for that. But you cited him as a source and, in fact, Buchanan spelled out precisely what it was.
Even Nixon himself said so, as he sought the "law and order" silent majority.
Are you now using the old liberal device that the phrase "law and order" is "code" for racism? Very well. Since you later make reference to having lived through it, you now full well then that the FIRST candidate to use the "law and order" argument in the 1968 race was Robert F. Kennedy, right?
So fine, RFK was a racist.
The 1964 election showed conservatives (almost all of whom had became Republicans by 1980)
Because the circumstances surrounding the electorate of 1964 were EXACTLY THE SAME as the DIFFERENT electorate of 1980, right? (Rolls eyes).
that an anti-segregation racist platform would get them the swath of states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Are you now alleging there was "an anti-segregationist racist platform" in 1980? Please give me specifics. In 1964, it is TRUE that the South voted for Barry Goldwater and it is also TRUE that was primarily because of Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But that has NOTHING to do with 1968 or 1980, and you even admit this later on.
Btw - I THINK you mean "anti-INTEGRATIONIST," right? Anti-segregation would not be racist.
Those were the states that Goldwater won, along with Arizona. Why? Because Goldwater opposed civil rights legislation.
True. No argument there at all. But that has nothing to do with 1968 and beyond, either.
He was a conservative. In those days conservatives were unbelievably racist.
Generalize much? And btw, to hear the narrative told today, anyone who is conservative IS a racist. Hubert Humphrey basically made that charge in April 1976, that the conservatism that Jimmy Carter was showing in the primaries was "a disguised form of racism."
I lived through that era. I saw it firsthand..
Then you have no excuse for suggesting the Southern strategy was an appeal to racism then, do you?
Read Phillips' book "The Emerging Republican Majority."
I've read excerpts, and I quoted one from the article above. Incidentally, Phillips was right but he does NOT appeal to the race card back then.
The reason the Democrats got walloped in 1972, 1980, 1984 and 1988 was because they supported women's rights, minority rights and abortion, and idiotic economic policies.
THANK YOU!!! YOU JUST ADMITTED THE POINT I WAS MAKING!!!!!
Dukakis did NOT lose because of Willie Horton; Carter did not lose because Reagan said "states rights" in MS in 1980 (another misdirection).
I try to caution folks not to get wrapped up in the party designations because those are not the way to analyze election trends.
You're correct - and I didn't. (Go back and see my criticism of the GOP pretending modern conservatives have anything in common with the 1964 GOP that supported the CRA). The Southern strategy as practiced by Nixon was NOT an appeal to racism, it was a border states strategy of containment. Thank you.
