Red and blue in black and white
The modern Republican party was built on opposition to civil rights. Don’t believe me? Prior to the beginning of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s, Republicans almost never won even a single southern state:
From 1904 to 1948, Republicans broke 30 percent of the section only in 1920 (35.2 percent, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 (47.7 percent, carrying five states).
In the last two elections, the Republicans won every single southern state. You’d have to be very naive to think this was a coincidence, especially after years of Republicans explicitly referring to their “southern strategy“. The strategy has been refined over the years, but at root it remains the same. Here’s Paul Krugman (finally free of the Times Select subscription wall):
Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,†with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.
And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixieâ€: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.â€
This is why the Republican party is dying in the northeast. Those tactics just don’t work as well up here. And those tactics — along with God, guns, gays, perhaps — are just about all the Republicans have got.
My point here isn’t that the Republican party as a whole is racist or that racism dominates the southern psyche. I don’t believe that at all. I doubt that even some of the most cynical practitioners of the fine political art of race-baiting (say Lee Atwater, for example) are themselves racists. The point is that race is a shell game, a distraction, that Republicans have used to manipulate their base for years.
Make no mistake: Steve Minarik’s attempts to frame every election as a choice between city and suburb are cut from the same cloth as the southern strategy. But, nevertheless, every time I talk to a local Republican who votes Republican at the national level because of issues like “small government” and lower taxes, I think to myself “this person won’t be voting for Republican presidents and Congressmen in another couple years.” Even the best political spinmeisters can only fool voters for so long, and with nothing as potent as lingering resentment over the Civil War to play with up here, voters are a lot tougher to spin.
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I wish I had written this post. Excellent.
Thanks
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[...] touched on this before but it bears repeating: the modern Republican part (at the national level) is built largely [...]