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Tommy Duncan
08-11-2004, 11:05 AM
www.chicagotribune.com/ne...entary-hed (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0408110119aug11,1,7705619.story?coll=chi-printcommentary-hed)

Reflections from an African-American voter atop the elephant

By Jeremy Levitt.
Jeremy Levitt is an assistant law professor at DePaul University

The Chicago Tribune

Published August 11, 2004

In the run-up to the Republican National Convention this month and the November elections, Democrats and Republicans are vying for the black vote. No more was this evident than at the Democratic National Convention when the Rev. Al Sharpton "rocked the house" with an impassioned speech about the failings of the Bush administration and how Sen. John Kerry will help fulfill the hopes of African-Americans. The speech was so well received by Democrats that blacks and whites alike gyrated and cheered in unity.

By embracing the falsehood that the Republican Party was founded on racism and broken promises and has made no contribution to the plight of African-Americans, Democrats seek to mislead America, particularly blacks, into believing that the GOP is responsible for reneging on a promise to give all blacks "40 acres and a mule."

While I believe that the United States owes a debt to African-Americans for enslavement and legal segregation, I strongly object to Sharpton's attempts to hold the Republican Party solely responsible for such evils. This is not to say that the GOP has or is living up to its "pro-black" radical Republican roots, because it clearly has not and is not. Bush must truly engage substantive issues that are important to African-Americans before asking blacks to vote for the GOP. If Democrats are correct that the black vote must be earned, neither party is worthy of our vote today. That said it is important to place some of the Democratic Party's propaganda in context.

All African-Americans were not promised and are not entitled to 40 acres and a mule. This myth is borne out of the skewed interpretation of the history of "Field Order 15," issued by Gen. William T. Sherman in January 1865, which set aside lands seized from the Confederacy, including all the sea islands from Charleston to Port Royal, and portions of abandoned plantation lands extending 30 miles inland along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, for the exclusive settlement of free blacks in 40-acre plots or less. The order seems to have been adopted under the authority of the Freedman Act and was intended only to grant lands to freedmen who supported Sherman's Union Army and makes no mention of mules or donkeys. Approximately 40,000 blacks settled on the lands distributed in Field Order 15 with the assistance of the Union military and under the supervision of the Freedmen's Bureau.

However, it was Lincoln's successor, Democratic President Andrew Johnson, who rescinded Sherman's order by pardoning members and sympathizers of the Confederate Army and thereafter confiscating and dispossessing blacks of their property, forcing them to work on farms they previously owned. In order for blacks to farm their own crops they were forced to grow crops for their Confederate dispossessors--giving birth to the exploitive system of sharecropping.

From this background it is clear that not all blacks were promised 40 acres and a mule, only those who supported Sherman. Hence, we African-Americans need to stop asking for unpromised land and animals and begin to practice self-help by "investing" a more significant portion of our $600 billion in consumer spending power into appreciable things, such as land, as opposed to depreciable goods, such as automobiles.

What Democrats fail to mention is that at perhaps the most critical juncture in American history, certainly for black Americans, Republicans fashioned and passed critical legislation over the opposition of Democrats, including the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery (1865), the 1866 Civil Rights Act granting blacks the same rights as whites, and the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing civil and political rights, including access to the ballot for black men. It was the gains made during Reconstruction that allowed for more than a dozen blacks to serve in Congress before the end of the 19th Century. It was this legislation that laid the groundwork for the second "Reconstruction" during the 1960s.

The point is that Democrats often give an inaccurate historical depiction of the relationship between African-Americans and the Republican Party. The Republican Party was the original party of African-Americans. African-Americans have a conservative tradition and heritage in the U.S. that is independent of white conservatism and patently different than the brand peddled by many black Republican propagandists. It is this original brand of conservatism and its progressive and principled legacy that must be awakened in the consciousness of black people.

Most African-Americans are politically, socially and culturally conservative and should pressure the GOP to challenge its current patrons to honor the legacy of its black and white Radical Republican founders. We should never be fooled by hollow paradigms of compassion, slick and entertaining political preachers or persuasive neo-buffoonery, but rather, be guided by righteousness and a legacy of struggle regardless of our political affiliations. For now, this black man will conserve a royal legacy and independently ride the elephant as my ancestors have on two continents.


Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

Joe Chalupa
08-11-2004, 11:49 AM
Well written article.

Yonivore
08-11-2004, 01:45 PM
"Well written article."
How patronizing of you. Now, how 'bout you comment on the content and not the form?

This, for example:

"However, it was Lincoln's successor, Democratic President Andrew Johnson, who rescinded Sherman's order by pardoning members and sympathizers of the Confederate Army and thereafter confiscating and dispossessing blacks of their property, forcing them to work on farms they previously owned. In order for blacks to farm their own crops they were forced to grow crops for their Confederate dispossessors--giving birth to the exploitive system of sharecropping.
And this:

"What Democrats fail to mention is that at perhaps the most critical juncture in American history, certainly for black Americans, Republicans fashioned and passed critical legislation over the opposition of Democrats, including the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery (1865), the 1866 Civil Rights Act granting blacks the same rights as whites, and the 14th and 15th Amendments guaranteeing civil and political rights, including access to the ballot for black men. It was the gains made during Reconstruction that allowed for more than a dozen blacks to serve in Congress before the end of the 19th Century. It was this legislation that laid the groundwork for the second 'Reconstruction' during the 1960s."
Or this:

"The point is that Democrats often give an inaccurate historical depiction of the relationship between African-Americans and the Republican Party."

Joe Chalupa
08-11-2004, 02:19 PM
I have no comment other than it was a well written article.

Yonivore
08-11-2004, 02:29 PM
Well, Jeeze Beave, I'm sure several editors at the Tribune arrived at that conclusion before putting it in ink.

Joe Chalupa
08-11-2004, 03:47 PM
Perhaps I should be an editor then.

DeSPURado
08-11-2004, 04:17 PM
Yonivore the Democrats and Republicans effectively switched parties after the civil war. It started with Teddy Roosevelt (leaving the republican party and forming the bull moose party) and ended with Johnson (with the civil rights acts). It was a slow transition, but to claim democrats were the party of racists is to ignore how the Democratic party has evolved from the party of Strom Thurmond to the party of Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama. Democrats don't own the black vote nor do we always deserve it, but there is a concerted effort amongst liberals to make civil rights a priority.

Tommy Duncan
08-11-2004, 05:07 PM
The Civil Rights Act passed with more Republican than Democrat support. The "switch" came a bit later than the Progressive era. And by "switch" I mean liberal v conservative.

The South did turn increasingly Republican since the 1960s, but a trend that is often overlooked is the suburbanization that has hit the deep South since the 80s, bringing in younger families, usually professionals, college educated, etc. Sure, some good old boys switched parties but a lot of it was the influx of transplants. One only need to look at what happened in Texas. Texas had been a traditional Democrat state for a century. If it was a reaction to the Civil Rights movement that was going to make it a Republican state that would have happened prior to the 1990s. Instead it was explosive growth in the suburbs of DFW, Houston, Austin, and SA that led to that political switch.

People tend to look at Southern politics in monolithic terms, as if race is the only factor at play. It's not. The South had traditionally been populist when it came to regulation and social programs (ie Medicare, SS, etc...) and that was alive and well after the 60's.

Southern conservatism had always been more about culture than economics. There still are a number of these Southern Democrats who, shall we say, hold 'old fashioned' views on matters of race yet vote Democrat on pocketbook issues. Whereas the suburban Republicans hold the views you might expect from 30 and 40 year old college educated somethings on race yet are economic conservatives.

To say that the GOP has absorbed all the old segregationists is a bit simplistic and belies other trends at play in the South.

mstexmex
08-11-2004, 05:28 PM
The point is that Democrats often give an inaccurate historical depiction of the relationship between African-Americans and the Republican Party. The Republican Party was the original party of African-Americans. African-Americans have a conservative tradition and heritage in the U.S. that is independent of white conservatism and patently different than the brand peddled by many black Republican propagandists. It is this original brand of conservatism and its progressive and principled legacy that must be awakened in the consciousness of black people.

The point is: obviously times have changed buddy. This may have been the case in the what, 1800'S?? this is 2004 and the parties have obvioulsy re-aligned themselves and what the stereotypical "conservative" is nowadays is not the african-american as the "face" of the Republican party.
so is he for or against either party? He was all over the place in his article. The last sentence read to me like he was an independent. Another question I have is if he is so pro-AFRICAN american which I respect and I applaud why is his last name Levitt?
I would have changed my name a long time ago to identify with my ancestors. just IMO.

DeSPURado
08-11-2004, 05:38 PM
We are in complete agreement, and I never would have said the republican party absorbed all of the racist elements of the old south. I was talking more of the Democratic evolution....Which would fall the most between those two key events. The last one being the catalyst for the full switch. The republican party saw its switch from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond a bit later.

Tommy Duncan
08-11-2004, 05:44 PM
There's a bit more of old Strom in the current Democratic party than you may care to realize. Also let us not forget that there were some rather strong racial conflicts which occurred post 1960s in Boston, among other places in the North.

Ancedotally, some of the more bigoted individuals I have met in my life have been native New Yorkers. Democrats through and through. I doubt they were happy to be part of the party of Al Sharpton but they more or less looked over that. That's not why they are Democrats.

For the GOP the major source of its growth in the South has not been race but rather religion and transplanted professionals from other parts of the country.

Nbadan
08-11-2004, 05:51 PM
The Democrats, led by Eisenhower, introduced the first civil rights legislation in 82 years in the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The bill was a watered down version because the democratic party still had some elements of right-wing Southern democrats mixed in with the ever burgeoning left-coast, liberal ones.

All you have to do is look at a map of the 2000 Presidential election to tell that the Democratic Party has shed itself of its shameful past association with these old right-wing, southern segregationist, and they have found a new home in the Republican party.

Tommy Duncan
08-11-2004, 05:59 PM
An overly simplistic and rather ignorant view, danny. Try the rise of the suburban middle class in the South as well as spread of evangelical Christianity. That has been what has provided the success of the GOP in the south much more than race. If race was all that mattered Texas would have turned solidly Republican in the 60s, for example. Instead it was the late 80s/early 90s. Why?

Also, you need to take a look at just who is voting Democrat. The old South is more prevalent in your party than you might realize.

Tommy Duncan
08-11-2004, 06:12 PM
Instructive reading...

www.claremont.org/writing...ander.html (http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/spring2004/alexander.html)


The Myth of the Racist Republicans

By Gerard Alexander

Posted March 20, 2004
This essay appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books


Books Discussed in this Essay:

The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, by Joseph A. Aistrup.

The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, by Dan T. Carter.

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell.

The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips.


A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. 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. Either way, today's Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. But it is testimony to its growing influence that it is taken aboard by writers like Dan Carter, a prize-winning biographer of George Wallace, and to a lesser extent by the respected students of the South, Earl and Merle Black. 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, one in which racial intolerance really won't be tolerated." It has become a staple of Democratic politicians like Howard Dean, who accuses 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 in U.S. politics. Certainly the 2000 Bush campaign went to a lot of trouble to combat the GOP's reputation as racially exclusionary. I even know young Republicans who fear that behind their party's victories lies a dirty, not-so-little Southern secret.

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. And 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. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must be traced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallace blended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and traditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup, claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation of the Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had once been the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of Barry Goldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latest exploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short, 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. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. 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. Black and Black 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. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

In effect, these 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.


The Southern Strategy

This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances 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 scholars 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. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet 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.

Given that trend, 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. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.


Electoral Patterns

In all these ways, 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.

But 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 GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Each prediction is wrong. 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.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, the 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. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike 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. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, 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, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills. 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. And its strongest supporters most years were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning in the Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwater pattern re-emerged soon afterward. 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.

The GOP's congressional gains followed the same pattern. Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South. Before Goldwater, the GOP's few Southern House seats were almost all in the Periphery (as was its sole Senator—John Tower of Texas). Several Deep South House members were elected with Goldwater but proved ephemeral, as Black and Black note: "Republicans lost ground and stalled in the Deep South for the rest of the decade," while in the Periphery they "continued to make incremental gains." In the 1960s and '70s, nearly three-quarters of GOP House victories were in the Peripheral rather than the Deep South, with the GOP winning twice as often in urban as rural districts. And six of the eight different Southern Republican Senators elected from 1961 to 1980 were from the Peripheral South. GOP candidates tended consistently to draw their strongest support from the more educated, middle- and upper-income white voters in small cities and suburbs. In fact, Goldwater in 1964—at least his Deep South performance, which is all that was controversial in this regard—was an aberration, not a model for the GOP.

Writers who vilify the GOP's Southern strategy might be surprised to find that all of this was evident, at least in broad brush-strokes, to the strategy's early proponents. In his well-known book, Kevin Phillips drew the lesson that a strong appeal in the Deep South, on the model of 1964, had already entailed and would entail defeat for the GOP everywhere else, including in what he termed the Outer South. He therefore rejected such an approach. He emphasized that Ike and Nixon did far better in the Peripheral South. He saw huge opportunities in the "youthful middle-class" of Texas, Florida, and other rapidly growing and changing Sun Belt states, where what he called "acutely Negrophobe politics" was weakest, not strongest. He thus endorsed "evolutionary success in the Outer South" as the basis of the GOP's "principal party strategy" for the region, concluding that this would bring the Deep South along in time, but emphatically on the national GOP's terms, not the segregationists'.

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?

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South. This is a very strange way to reincarnate George Wallace's movement.


The Decline of Racism

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. So 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. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that 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. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

What's more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that "people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

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

NameDropper
08-11-2004, 06:28 PM
Rumor has it that most voters don't give a rat's ass about this crap and vote for who they want based on their beliefs not on the color of their skin.

Nbadan
08-12-2004, 04:46 PM
The old South is more prevalent in your party than you might realize.

:wtf

What the hell you smoking. Hell, Gore couldn't even win Tennesse. His own state.

Here is a breakdown of states from the 2000 election.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/cu/images/map_2000pres.gif

Nbadan
08-12-2004, 05:00 PM
Try the rise of the suburban middle class in the South as well as spread of evangelical Christianity. That has been what has provided the success of the GOP in the south much more than race. If race was all that mattered Texas would have turned solidly Republican in the 60s, for example. Instead it was the late 80s/early 90s. Why?

Who is moving out to the burbs? Primarily, the white middle to upper-middle class, and these people vote in large percentages while hispanics, African Americans and other minorities have in recent years become more and more disenfranchised, ignored, or as in Florida in 2000, purged from voting rules altogether. One reason that Texas didn't become a Republican state sooner is because Hispanics traditionally voted Democratic by a wide majority, but Reagan changed that and there were many Reagan democrats.

Well, after years of neglect and apathy by Repubilcan Conservatives, it seems like the hispanic community in Texas is at a cross-road, supporting democratic candidates at the local level again, while voting for a Republican Governor and Senators at the State level.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 05:38 PM
Your view is rather simplistic and quite silly, to say the least. You assume that since the civil rights legislation occurred in the 1960s that all Southern whites simply switched parties and that was it. A lot has changed in the forty years since then. In fact, the article explained that the trend actually began in 1952 in the border states and through the 1950s when it was the GOP that was providing support for civil rights legislation that the Demos were not. Why? Again, the rise of the Southern suburban middle class, many of whom were transplants from other parts of the US.

The article spelled out precisely what has happened in the South since the 1960s and the most important trend for the GOP was not the angry white vote but rather the increasing suburbanization of the South, the growing professional middle class, and transplants from other parts of the country.

When I say that the "old South" is still in your party I am referring to lower class whites with limited education whose interests align more closely with the Democrats on matters of economic policy rather than the traditional GOP voter, who tends to be a married professional with kids living in the suburbs.

The South had never been a bastion of economic conservatism prior to the 1980s. It was very populist in nature. Again, a natural fit historically for the Democrat party.


Who is moving out to the burbs? Primarily, the white middle to upper-middle class, and these people vote in large percentages

Where did those people come from? Do those type of people tend to be more racist than lower class whites with limited skills and education?




while hispanics, African Americans and other minorities have in recent years become more and more disenfranchised, ignored, or as in Florida in 2000, purged from voting rules altogether.


Of course! It's a conspiracy!



One reason that Texas didn't become a Republican state sooner is because Hispanics traditionally voted Democratic by a wide majority, but Reagan changed that and there were many Reagan democrats.

Bullshit. The reason that Texas became Republican is due to the tremendous growth in the suburbs of Dallas, Houston, SA, and Austin throughout the 80s and 90s. This brought in a huge influx of transplants from all over the US. Yes, as you pointed out above, suburbanites, who are often married college educated professionals with children, are more likely to vote Republican. The Democrats were competitive in Texas for statewide office up until the early 1990s. If it was "racist whites" who were leaving the Democrat party in response to the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s then such a move would have happened a couple decades earlier.

The reason it did not switch earlier is because the traditional white Democrats, many of whom still vote Democrat, are not economic conservatives. They are populists. They view the GOP as the party of "the rich." For some of these people in the Deep South, they are still voting in response to the Civil War. It is historical for them and it is also a class issue. They tend to be older than the suburbanites.

For them, they ignore the Democrat line on racial issues. What they want with respect to race neither party can provide.

Those individuals are much more likely to be racist than college educated white suburbanites. But they will still vote Democrat, primarily on pocketbook issues.



Well, after years of neglect and apathy by Repubilcan Conservatives, it seems like the hispanic community in Texas is at a cross-road, supporting democratic candidates at the local level again, while voting for a Republican Governor and Senators at the State level.

You are mistaken. As long as you and others of your party feel that the reason for GOP success in the Southern states has been simply that white racists vote for them then the party will continue to be an electoral failure throughout the South.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 06:01 PM
Also, the racism of working class whites is not limited to the South. This is something the DNC I am sure is aware of but of course are they going to complain if someone votes for their candidates? Of course not.

Far easier to write off their failures in the South to 'racist white voters' even though in reality some of the most ardent ones are still voting Democrat because they want their Medicare and Social Security benefits left untouched.

DeSPURado
08-12-2004, 07:37 PM
Funny I have never met a single one Tommy.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 07:40 PM
Not surprising for you.

DeSPURado
08-12-2004, 08:02 PM
Are you claiming some kind of knowledge about my life experiences?

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 08:04 PM
Did I say I did?

None of what I say should be that controversial or shocking.

DeSPURado
08-12-2004, 08:06 PM
No just wrong...You haven't sited a single statistic or study to back up your claim that racists from the old guard found a home in the democratic party.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 08:08 PM
They never left.

I'm waiting on your stats to back up your argument that they are no longer Democrats. Saying that 'all white people in the South are racist and they vote Republican' doesn't count.

DeSPURado
08-12-2004, 08:16 PM
Saying that 'all white people in the South are racist and they vote Republican

I claimed this? You have a good imagination. I have never been talking about the republican party in this thread. In fact I have told you this already. I am only talking about the modern trend that lead to Blacks voting near a 9 to 1 ratio for democrats. Yet you keep returning to some made up thing you think I am saying. I don't think all racists or millitia groups or KKK memebers or whatever are a part of the Republican party. They are not. They tend to be far to extreme in their anti-government sentiments to like the either party.

All I have contended is that the democratic party has made a transition from the party of Strom Thurmond to the party of Barack Obama over this century.

Tommy Duncan
08-12-2004, 09:27 PM
Well good. If you don't agree with dan's assessment then there is hope for you yet.

Nbadan
08-13-2004, 06:03 AM
More on the Alexander article posted by Tommy


The prècis of Alexander’s argument is essentially that, while Republicans were willing to run avowed and former segregationists on occasion as candidates in the South in the 50s and 60s, and while their candidates “from the 1950s on” for state and federal office were willing to “craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters,” this conduct—which Alexander concedes is expedient—does not rise to the level of making “a pact with America’s devil”—selling out the Lincolnian principles the GOP was founded on.

Alexander says that proponents of the “racist Republican” myth rest their case on an accomodation with Southern racism that is based on “code words.” He concedes that Goldwater’s call for “state’s rights” in 1964 may have been an instance of Republicans pandering to segregationists, but argues that other allegedly “coded” appeals to racism, such as the positions of Nixon and Regan “on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform” were designed to appeal to broad middle-class discontent with the Democratic Party’s approach to these issues, rather than being part of a deliberate strategy to court racists; more to the point, he writes:

In effect, these 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.

Of course, given the strategic choice that Republicans have made to “craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes” of racists—a choice that Alexander himself acknowledges the GOP has made—it would seem that, at the very least, emphasizing these issues over (say) lower taxes or increased spending on defense, shows a willingness to cater to racist sentiment, which in itself borders on racism.

He then turns to why the GOP gained support from disaffected Southern whites; here he is on stronger ground, as it is fairly clear that the Democratic Party abandoned the tacit “New Deal” agreement to soft-pedal racial issues in favor of a more aggressive pro-civil rights stance beginning in the late 1940s with Truman’s integration of the armed forces, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His argument is essentially that Southern racists came to the GOP “mountain,” rather than the other way around—an argument that would be stronger if he hadn’t already conceded that the GOP was tailoring its messages to appeal to racists and win votes from the Democrats in the South. The “mountain” moved a bit on its own—he quotes Kevin Phillips as saying that Republicans didn’t “have to bid much ideologically” to gain the support of Wallace voters—but they did have to bid something, which arguably included “go slow” desegregation (in opposing busing) and opposition to affirmative action programs.

Alexander then looks at the pattern of GOP growth in the South, noting that the GOP did better in the Peripheral South than it did in the Deep South; he argues that this is further proof that the “Southern strategy” was essentially benevolent, and that the GOP‘s ideology was too moderate to appeal to hard-core segregationists, but an alternative intepretation is that the slowness in Deep South segregationists to move to the Republicans was a result of historical antipathy toward Republicans—who were, after all, the party of blacks (at least, the minority who had managed to evade the barriers to participation erected by segregationists) in the South until the 1960s—coupled with state Democratic parties that were more tolerant of old-line segregationists remaining under the Democrat banner.

It is, of course, overly simplistic to say that Wallace voters make up the bulk of today’s GOP in the South—the typical Wallace supporter from 1968 is probably a Constitution Party voter today, assuming his or her racial views remain intact. Nor is it necessarily the GOP‘s fault that some segregationists support it, any more than it is the Democrats’ fault that they have some support from eco-terrorists like the Earth Liberation Front. But I think it is valid to criticize the GOP for the “Southern strategy” that even Alexander concedes the party has used—and I also think it’s reasonable to believe that at least some of the Republican platform is motivated by an interest in appealing to those with unreconstructed racist views. Does that mean opposition to affirmative action is racist? No. But it does mean that the GOP‘s sincerity in being a non-racist party is somewhat questionable.

I also find it interesting that Alexander manages to write 3500 words on contemporary Southern politics without mentioning Trent Lott, which seems like a rather important oversight; however, that’s neither here nor there.

Signifying Nothing (http://blog.lordsutch.com/?entryid=1507)

Tommy Duncan
08-13-2004, 12:02 PM
That critique would make some sense, if the South's demographics had not changed substantially over the past forty years.

Opposition to affirmative action does not make one a racist. The professional married couple with kids who live in an Atlanta, Charlotte, or Dallas suburb might not necessarily like to hear that they are racists because they don't think the law should grant privileges on the basis of race. But the left does not seem to understand that. They think that whites in the South are some kind of monolithic entity which has not changed at all.

The GOP's success in the South has been tied to the rise of the middle class as well as the alliance/whatever with evangelical Christianity. Again, economic and religious conservatism.

The problem for the left is that they have interpreted white rejection of affirmative action in the South as indication of white racism.

The left continues to delude itself and think that white voters in the South consist of bubbas riding around small towns with confederate flag stickers on their truck's rear bumper. Howard Dean got into a lot of trouble for making a comment along those lines, except the reason for that controversy was that some thought Dean was saying that Democrats should overtly cater to those who fit that profile.

I also stand by what I originally asserted about older, lower-income, low skilled white voters in the South. They are far more likely to be longtime residents of the South, likely to have been a white voter who kept segregationist politicians in power and definitely far more likely to be racists than suburbanites. Also, they are more likely to be Democrats. I'm not necessarily saying that they are Klan members. But they definitely are not the kind of enlightened sort on race which some here seem to think they might be. They vote based on their economic situation and in doing so they fall squarely in line with the Southern Democrat populist tradition.