But if you suggest that the Republican Party became a haven for racists, you're wrong.Well I want to be clear. I don't think the Republican Party is based on inherent racism, but they did practice it on an institutional level. There is no doubt however that it is the #1 political party for racists here in 2012. It began to clearly and openly steer that course in 1966 when it began to pick up people who had left the Dems over the Civil Rights issue, and by 1969 it was the winning strategy in the presidential race, a strategy that every 'Pub running for President followed until the Reagan years when they were just brought into the party outright along with the Christian Right - despite lots, and lots, and lots of warnings from real conservatives like Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater about what that would do in the long run.
But hey here are some 'real Republicans' saying it.
Atwater:
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.Questioner:
But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?Atwater:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "->-bleeped-<-, ->-bleeped-<-, ->-bleeped-<-." By 1968 you can't say "->-bleeped-<-"—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.Bob Herbert,
New York Times, quoting Lee Atwater (advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee) from 1981 interview with the author.
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local DemocratsKevin Phillips, one of Nixon's campaign workers in '68 who is credited (perhaps incorrectly as he's pointing out) with coming up with the Southern Stragity.
By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out," Mehlman says in his prepared text. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.Ken Melman, RNC Chair, apologizing for the Southern Strategty in 2005.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/13/AR2005071302342.htmlIf that's not inherently racist, then it's a racism of convenience - using racism and racists to gain power and money. Which in it's own way is a lot worse then the average trailer park KKK nut with a confederate flag flying, because those people knew better, and did it anyway.
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Strom Thurmond of South Carolina (who, interestingly, fathered a child out-of-wedlock, by a black woman). There is absolutely nothing interesting about that at all. It's pretty typical behavior for male members of an entitled ruling class to think they can stick their penis into any convenient receptacle and then turn around and deny that person their dignity and most basic human (and American) rights. So sure, she was OK to ->-bleeped-<-, (and that's spot-on, because he sure didn't 'make love' to her or do it out of tenderness, he just hosed her) but don't let her go to 'your' school, or 'your' church, or swim in the same river as you, or watch a movie in the same theater as you, or show up at your house as anything more than hired help.
I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the ->-bleeped-<- race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches. That's classic Strom, running for President in 1948. Oh yeah, he was 22, she was 16 - today we would call that rape/child sexual abuse and he would not be seated in the US Senate he would be being asked by Chris Hansen to '
take a seat over there.'
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But most did not, like George Wallace, Robert Byrd, Harry Byrd, William Fulbright, James Eastland, Russell Long, John Stennis, Lester Maddox. The list is rather long.They didn't then, but by the 80s they would have changed, or just become DINOs like Strom was. And, at that, in 1954 the Dems blocked Strom from running as a Dem.
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your recounting of political history smacks of revisionismThat's cute. I have a word-of-the-day calender too. But like Inigo Montoya in
The Princess Bride said:
You keep using that word — I don't think it means what you think it means. What I wrote is pretty much the mainstream consensus in American Political History, the exact polar opposite to 'revisionism'. Here is how Wiki (the most mainstream source of commonly believed stuff) describes The Southern Strategy:
In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the Republican Party strategy of winning elections in Southern states by exploiting anti-African American racism and fears of lawlessness among Southern white voters and appealing to fears of growing federal power in social and economic matters (generally lumped under the concept of states rights). Though the "Solid South" had been a longtime Democratic Party stronghold due to the Democratic Party's defense of slavery prior to the American Civil War and segregation for a century thereafter, many white Southern Democrats stopped supporting the party following the civil rights plank of the Democratic campaign in 1948 (triggering the Dixicrats), the African-American Civil Rights Movement, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and desegregation.I had written:
But in the US (at least until quite recently) they had some vague ideological values, but there was also a lot of history (there is a reason that until the passage of the Civil Rights Act that most Southern political types were Democrats and not Republicans. But (and here's that racism again), the passage of the Civil Rights Act (and others) by the Democrats was considered somehow worse than winning the Civil War, and that odious lurch toward liberty and justice for all caused them to leave the party of Civil Rights and turn Republican.That seems to be pretty much the same statement with the same facts, I just write more casually than Wiki does.
And, within the historical profession that's a loaded word. First of all every work of history is a revision of what has gone before or else there would be no need to write it again.
Second you really have to do it - I mean come up with a radically different conclusion than is commonly agreed to. My idea of a classical piece of historical revisionism is a 1974 book called
Time on the Cross by Fogel and Engerman where they argued that in the Pre-Civil War era slaves lived longer and healthier lives than their white counterparts in New England factories. Because slave owners approached slave production as a business enterprise, there were some limits on the amount of exploitation and oppression they inflicted on the slaves, where factories had no such economic incentive to treat their workers well. Fogel based this analysis largely on plantation records and claimed that slaves worked less, were better fed and whipped only occasionally. Needless to say, that point (as well as some of the others that were actually more important in the book - such as American slavery was extremely productive, more so than Northern farms, and very profitable and was not going to go away on it's own as Southern historians tended to claim - were not exactly received with open arms, or open minds. Now in that sense I can't claim I'm doing any sort of revision, I'm not a historian in the same ballpark as those two guys, as much as I might want to be. At least not yet, maybe my technological history of rock music might end up that way. I can only hope.
And, third, anymore it tends to get used for things like Holocaust deniers and conspiracy kooks, and that's not me either.
And - don't take this wrong but... I don't think you've read and studied enough of the American Historical cannon to be able to differentiate between the interpretations of the various schools - or even between the schools themselves. And, not knowing the cannon, you can't know what is - and what is not - revisionism. Thus your use of the world sounds all 'buzzwordish' (like the Alinsky stuff), it's stuff you've read somewhere as opposed to insight gained from study.
