Wingnutology and Civil Rights and The Solid South

 How do you get to a Solid GOTP South today when for 100 years after reconstruction, the South was solidly Democratic without talking about Race?

Here is a pretty good example of thinking on Race and the history of Political Parties in right wing counter-culture.

NRO Guy Williamson:

That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery 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. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless. 

Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. 

Race is not an implausible explanation for the transformation of the GOP from the Party of the Union to the Party of the old Confederacy.   While the GOP did include African Americans in their voting coalition from the end of the civil war until the 1890s and RINOs support was important  to pass Civil Rights laws, today's GOTP and yesterday's GOP are two different animals. The former version had more progressive views, shall we say, than the current version.

Taking the mythology in order, we see that Abraham Lincoln came from the same family as Old Line Clay Whigs who supported the American System, i.e., high tariffs (taxes), public works projects (financed by taxes) and a National Bank (scary).  Douglass was repulsed by southern conservatism. There is no reason to believe that he'd feel at home in a religiously driven political party controlled by southern conservatives.  Also there is no evidence that Anthony was an abortion crusader. Susan B Anthony and her partner in advocacy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, produced thousands of pages of text documenting their political views.  Absent are any references to Anti-abortion activism that contemporary wingers now claim as Anthony's legacy.

Next folks are not afraid to state that Woodrow Wilson was a racist or that the Klan and other like groups like the Red Shirts were the military arm of the democratic party. The re-emergence of the Klan in the 1910s and 1920s corresponded with reaction to progressive era reforms. When folks compare the Klan to today's teahadists, this is what they mean.  Maybe it is unfair as history does not necessarily repeat -  it does rhyme however.   And nobody disputes that Southern conservative democrats held civil rights legislation back for many years. 

The South had been in effect a Third World country within the United States, and that changed with the post-war economic boom. As Clay Risen put it in the New York Times: “The South transformed itself from a backward region to an engine of the national economy, giving rise to a sizable new wealthy suburban class. This class, not surprisingly, began to vote for the party that best represented its economic interests: the GOP. Working-class whites, however — and here’s the surprise — even those in areas with large black populations, stayed loyal to the Democrats. This was true until the 90s, when the nation as a whole turned rightward in Congressional voting.” The mythmakers would have you believe that it was the opposite: that your white-hooded hillbilly trailer-dwelling tornado-bait voters jumped ship because LBJ signed a civil-rights bill (passed on the strength of disproportionately Republican support in Congress). The facts suggest otherwise.
... 

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades.  

New Deal Reforms and the Post War Boom lifted the American South out of third world status. It is not surprising that as suburbs started replacing dirt farms, that voting patterns started to change allowing for some GOP inroads. The economic argument as stated by the NRO guy has some validity but is not the proximate cause behind the shift of a solid democratic south to the GOP. If you want a proximate cause, if  there is such a thing, 1948 is as good a place to start as any.

In the Democratic Convention in 1948, tricky northern state liberals were successful at adding a civil rights plank in the party platform. This led to the formation of the third party Dixiecrats committed to states' rights, jim crow and other such bullshit and it also opened the way for Southern Conservatives to migrate to the GOP.  And the migration happened over time - first with the Dixiecrats then with Nixon's Southern Strategy onto Reagan's welfare queens.  When a RINO today or a old timey Southern Democrat says "I didn't leave the party, the party left me" he is referring to the switch from the post civil war period where political parties had both liberal and conservative wings to the current period where the Democratic Party represents liberal ideology and the GOP represents reactionary ideology.

There are also other factors. Just go back to the merger of the GOP with religious conservatives 20-25 years ago. Under the Southern Strategy, if the GOP could obtain a supermajority of the white vote it could secure victories at the polls. While it initially produced electoral gains, by the late 80s and early 90s, the Southern Strategy risked bringing declining returns at the polls. By this time, appeals based on race could backfire. But if your electoral strategy is based upon supermajorities of white folks, how do you motivate enough white folks to vote GOP? The answer obviously was to bring in Religious Fundamentalists, Evangelicals and other Religious Conservatives into the fold to maintain a sufficient share of the white vote to win elections. This occurred throughout the 1990s. It was an explicit part of the First Bush Administration campaign.  There is a reason that Bush chose Dan Quayle as VP and a reason that Quayle declared war against the fictional TV character Murphy Brown. It was an appeal to white evangelicals and to help shore up the GOP base.

Today's Teabagging Movement, based on right wing populism, may be a recent component of the crumbling Southern Strategy intended to bolster White Vote in advance of the 2012 elections. However the data does not exist at this time for Political Scientists to evaluate this hypothesis.

Sure there are other factors such as when you turn dirt farms into middle class suburbs, you see changes in demographics. But to leave Race out of the discussion and pretend the Dixiecrats and Nixon's Southern Strategy never happened only tells your NRO readers comfortable tales that they want to hear. 

You can't leave out this side of the story as one Republican strategist tells it:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N*****, n, n*****." By 1968 you can't say "n*****" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*****, n*****." [edited text-mine]

Nope nothing about race here.

UPDATE: There are lots of pixels on today's right wing counter culture from the NRO.

Here is a good riff:

As V.O. Key demonstrated in his classic study, Southern Politics, the most race-sensitive white southerners, centered in the Black Belt regions of the Deep South, stuck with the White Man's Party even as other southerners defected to the GOP in 1920 (over Prohibition) and 1928 (over Prohibition and Al Smith's Catholicism). In 1948, these same racists heavily defected to the Dixiecrats in a protest against the national Party's growing commitment to civil rights. They mostly returned to the Democrats after that uprising, until 1964, when they voted almost universally for Barry Goldwater, purely and simply because Goldwater had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Four years later most of them voted for the race-centered candidacy of George Wallace, and four years after that just about every one of them voted for Richard Nixon. These were not people attracted to the GOP, when they were, because it was "pro-civil rights," as Williamson asserts, or because they favored that party on any other issue. It was all about race, which is why, for example, the GOP percentage of the presidential vote veered insanely in Mississippi from 25% in 1960 to 87% in 1964 to 14% in 1968 to 78% in 1972.

Nope, Race had nothing to do with Mississippi's voting pattern.