If one were to search the Internet with the phrase “southern
strategy” you would find that it has become the linchpin of the liberal claim
of Republican racism. Liberal politicians, mainstream media, pundits and
bloggers all suggest that the GOP, starting with Richard Nixon, had a strategy
to win southern states by appealing to the anti-civil rights sentiment of the
southern whites. That this strategy was used to win the affections of
disaffected white racist with an appeal to “states rights.” Makes sense, right?
Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebank is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.
Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebank is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.
If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so.
First, 1968, as the Vietnam War approached its high-water
mark and the antiwar movement was starting to roll:
Nixon picked up some of the states of the Old Confederacy, largely because of their pro-military tradition and support for the war. “Wallace,” for those of you born yesterday, was Democrat George Wallace, a rabid segregationist who founded the American Independent Party and ran for president on its ticket. He won 13 percent of the popular vote, and carried five states in the Deep South for a total of 46 electoral votes.
Four years later, Nixon faced the first modern Democratic Party presidential candidate, George McGovern, who ran on a “Come Home, America” platform, and on whose campaign many of today’s radicals cut their teeth. Two items of note: Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton was McGovern’s first running mate, who got dumped by the Compassion Party after it came out that he had been hospitalized for clinical depression and had undergone shock therapy. The other is McGovern’s extensive quote from “This Land is Your Land,” a hit for Peter, Paul and Mary written by the communist fellow-traveler, Woody Guthrie.
The Nixon White House is endlessly denounced for a “Southern
Strategy” that captured all 11 states of the Old Confederacy in 1972. But
Nixon’s vice president was a pro-civil rights governor, Spiro Agnew of
Maryland, who had defeated George P. Mahoney, a Democrat who ran in 1966 on his
opposition to open housing. In the six presidential elections in which Wilson
and FDR topped the ticket, Democrats carried all 11 Southern states every time.
Outside of Missouri, Deep South states were the only ones
Adlai Stevenson carried in 1956. The sainted Adlai balanced both his tickets
with Dixiecrats: John Sparkman of Alabama and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.
Liberal hypocrisy is exceeded only by liberal amnesia about who kept them in
power from 1933 to 1968.
Richard Nixon kicked off his historic comeback in 1966 with
a column on the South by Pat Buchanan that declared we would build our
Republican Party on a foundation of states rights, human rights, small
government and a strong national defense, and leave it to the “party of Maddox,
Mahoney and Wallace to squeeze the last ounces of political juice out of the
rotting fruit of racial injustice.”
In that ’66 campaign, Nixon – who had been thanked
personally by Dr. King for his help in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 –
endorsed all Republicans, except members of the John Birch Society.
In 1968, Nixon chose Spiro Agnew for vice president. Why?
Agnew had routed George (“Your home is your castle!”) Mahoney for governor of
Maryland but had also criticized civil-rights leaders who failed to condemn the
riots that erupted after the assassination of King. The Agnew of 1968 was both
pro-civil rights and pro-law and order.
When the ’68 campaign began, Nixon was at 42 percent,
Humphrey at 29 percent, Wallace at 22 percent. When it ended, Nixon and
Humphrey were tied at 43 percent, with Wallace at 13 percent. The 9 percent of
the national vote that had been peeled off from Wallace had gone to Humphrey.
- raised the civil rights enforcement budget 800 percent;
- doubled the budget for black colleges;
- appointed more blacks to federal posts and high positions than any president, including LBJ;
- adopted the Philadelphia Plan mandating quotas for blacks in unions, and for black scholars in colleges and universities;
- invented “Black Capitalism” (the Office of Minority Business Enterprise), raised U.S. purchases from black businesses from $9 million to $153 million, increased small business loans to minorities 1,000 percent, increased U.S. deposits in minority-owned banks 4,000 percent;
- raised the share of Southern schools that were desegregated from 10 percent to 70 percent. Wrote the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1975, “It has only been since 1968 that substantial reduction of racial segregation has taken place in the South.
The charge that we built our Republican coalition on race is
a lie. Nixon routed the left because it had shown itself incompetent to win or
end a war into which it had plunged the United States and too befuddled or
cowardly to denounce the rioters burning our cities or the brats rampaging on
our campuses.
Nixon led America out of a dismal decade and was rewarded
with a 49-state landslide. By one estimate, he carried 18 percent of the black
vote in 1972 and 25 percent in the South. No Republican has since matched that. So the next time a liberal tries to repeat the Thurmond myth, show him the maps -- and make the Democrats own their history. They don't like it much, and who could blame them?
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