Debunking Right-Wing Myths: The Southern Strategy Isn’t A Myth, and It’s Time For Republicans To Own It
Southern Strategy deniers are to history what flat earthers and Climate Change deniers are to science.
The recent Black Lives Matter protests and renewed calls to tear down confederate statues in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Amaud Armburry, and Breona Taylor, Daunte Wright, and the shooting of Jacob Blake. This has prompted Republicans to quickly deny the racism that exists within their party and project it all onto the Democrats. Denying the Southern Strategy is nothing new for the Republicans, they’ve been denying it ever since the South started voting Republican. However, given recent events, Republicans are feeling compelled to do everything they can to deny the Southern Strategy and deny that their party is lead by a hateful racist. So let’s debunk this myth, shall we?
The Republicans Were Initially The Party That Supported Equality When They Were the Leftwing Party
The one fact that Southern Strategy deniers cling to is that the Republican Party started off as the party that abolished slavery. President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, lead the Union Army to defeat the Confederate Army and stop the spread of slavery. The Confederacy’s president was Jefferson Davis, a Democrat, who wanted to maintain and expand slavery. It was Republicans in Congress like Thaddeus Stevens who passed the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution which freed the slaves. That’s all true. However, even then the Democratic Party was in a bit of an identity crisis at the time. Northern Democrats had objected to slavery and began to feel that it was wrong, while Southern Democrats were the racists who wanted to maintain slavery and expand it. The Republican Party was a new party at the time and it was formed by Whigs who strongly opposed the expansion of slavery. In fact, Abraham Lincoln’s position on slavery was to stop the expansion of slavery into the west. Lincoln didn’t publicly support abolishing slavery until the Civil War forced his hand, and activists like Frederick Douglass and Congressional Republicans successfully convinced him to publicly declare his support for the abolition of slavery. Privately Lincoln was contemplating various ways he could abolish slavery. Lincoln would go on to sign the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 which changed the legal status of African Americans from slaves to free citizens. However, there were abolitionists in Congress like Thaddeus Stevens who introduced a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery. President Lincoln supported the Thirteenth Amendment from the White House and tried to convince Congress to support it. Representative Stevens and the Republicans were successful in passing the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, with the support of Northern Democrats as a matter of fact. Southern Democrats strongly opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. However, the Thirteenth Amendment was still ratified in state governments across the US, and slavery was abolished.
After the Civil War, the Republicans still tried to maintain racial equality as part of their party’s identity. President Lincoln was assassinated after the Civil War and before the Reconstruction Era. So the Congressional Republicans were those trying to rebuild the Union during Reconstruction and establish a country where whites and blacks are treated fairly. Unfortunately, Democratic President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s Vice-President, fought Republicans in Congress every step of the way during Reconstruction, and Reconstruction ended up being a failure. Republican President Ulysses S. Grant did try bridging some gaps between whites and blacks during his presidency. Grant did run the Ku Klux Klan out of the United States of America, but the KKK did reemerge during the end of Grant’s presidency which he failed to stop. Grant was also the commanding general of the Union Army during the Civil War. President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, did dine with African American Professor at the Tuskegee Institute Booker T. Washington. Roosevelt was the first sitting US President to dine with an African American. Roosevelt is often considered by historians America’s first progressive president, his only competition for that title is Lincoln. However, Roosevelt’s policies did little to advance Civil Rights during his presidency. Roosevelt did have bold proposals for the African American community for his 1912 Progressive Party platform, but his third-party bid lost to Woodrow Wilson. That sums up the Republican Party Pre-Civil Rights era, now time for some myth-busting.
MYTH: Republicans Became Competitive in the South in the 1930s.
FACT: Democrats Didn’t Lose Their Grip in the South Until 1948.
The first piece of the Southern Strategy denial is that Republicans had started gaining ground in the south before the Civil Rights Era. They base this on the fact that Herbert Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower won some southern states in their elections. However, that is far from gaining ground in the south. Eisenhower and Hoover both won landslide victories and in a landslide, a candidate wins states his/her party wouldn’t normally win. Also, neither Eisenhower nor Hoover won the deep south in their victories. This means the Republican Party was far from competitive in the south prior to the Civil Rights Era.
So what did start to happen at that time frame? Starting in 1948 the Democrats did start to lose ground in the south, why was that? In 1948 Harry S. Truman came out in favor of Civil Rights and called for the end of segregation. On the campaign trail, Truman spoke at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and said in the speech he gave at the NAACP, “My forebears were Confederates … but my very stomach turned over when I had learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of Army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.” In fact, Truman, a Democrat not a Republican, was the first sitting US President to speak at the NAACP. In 1948, President Harry Truman and Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey made Civil Rights part of the Democratic Platform. What that did was infuriate Southern Democrats otherwise known as Dixiecrats, these were the racist pro-segregation Democrats. The Dixiecrats split from the Democratic Party in 1948 and formed their own party, the States’ Rights Party, or the Dixiecratic Party. The Dixiecrats ran Strom Thurmond as their nominee in 1948. Thurmond ended up winning the deep south, but Truman still won the election. What Thurmond’s run showed is that the Democrats' stronghold in the south was weakening. Adlai Stevenson still won the south in 1952 and 1956 largely because he ignored the issue of Civil Rights and that reduced any defections from Dixiecrats. However, in 1956, there was a faithless electoral vote cast for Judge Walter B. Jones in Alabama. Jones was a notorious right-wing judge and segregationist, that’s why a faithless electoral vote cast in Alabama. In 1960, Democrats lost the south again to a write-in campaign and faithless electoral votes. In the 1960 Election, John F. Kennedy ran for president as a Democrat, and he ran on a strong Civil Rights campaign. Kennedy famously said in the Presidential Debate that he “was not satisfied until every American enjoyed the same rights as white people.” This caused another Dixiecrat exodus from the Democratic Party, but there wasn’t a segregationist third-party candidate running for president and Richard Nixon didn’t pander to racists in 1960. So what Dixiecrats did in 1960 was a write-in campaign for Harry Byrd in the deep south. Byrd despite not being an actual presidential candidate actually won Missippi and Alabama, and he even got a faithless electoral vote in Oklahoma. Kennedy still won the 1960 election, but Byrd’s wins in the south sent a message to Republicans that the Democrats were losing ground in the south. So while yes, the Democrats were losing ground in the south, but the Republicans were not the immediate beneficiaries of the Democrats losing their grip in the south.
MYTH: Republicans Gained Support in the South Because of Their Economic Policies.
FACT: Republicans Started Winning in the South Because They Pandered to Racists
The second tenet of the myth that the Southern Strategy never happened was that Republicans won the south because they campaigned on appealing to the economic needs of southerners instead of racial division. Nothing could be further from the truth. The first major gains the Republicans made in the south was in 1964 when the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater as their candidate for President. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was a major issue for the election and voters. President Lyndon B. Johnson ran on fulfilling the late John F. Kennedy’s promise to pass the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater on the other hand ran on an Anti-Civil Rights campaign and called the act unconstitutional. This anti-Civil Rights platform hurt Goldwater with black voters and northern white voters. In fact, Johnson won a landslide victory with 94% of the black vote because he ran on finishing Kennedy’s Civil Rights mission to contrast Goldwater. However, Goldwater won the south and became the first Republican to win in the south. After 1964 the south went Republican as Lyndon Johnson said it would after signing the Civil Rights Act. “We lost the south for a generation,” Lyndon Johnson said.
After 1964 the Republicans needed to find a way to win over racist southerners without losing their support in the north. Goldwater was successful in winning over the Dixiecratic voters, but he lost the election so the Republicans needed to refine their strategy. That’s where the Richard Nixon campaign came in. The Nixon campaign formulated the Southern Strategy to win over racist southerners without losing non-racist northerners. Hubert Humphrey was never going to win the south after 1964, so Nixon saw an opening to make the south red. Nixon utilized dog-whistle politics to win over racist voters without making it obvious that Nixon was campaigning on racism. The idea of dog-whistle politics is to send a seemingly normal message to voters, but one that communicates specific things to the message’s intended audience. What Nixon did was run a campaign on law and order which appeared normal to the broader American public, but it communicated to racists that Nixon planned to lock up minorities. In 1968, Nixon had to compete with George Wallace of the American Independence Party for the racist vote and so Nixon ran on his Southern Strategy to peel votes away from Wallace. Wallace won the deep south in 1968, but Nixon won the rest of the south except Texas. In 1972, Nixon won the entirety of the south on his Southern Strategy. Then came the 1980s.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan became the Republican Party nominee and he made his first campaign stop in Philadelphia, Mississippi to give his stump speech. Ronald Reagan’s stump speech was about states' rights. Why was this controversial? Well Philadelphia, Mississippi is where three Civil Rights activists were killed by the Ku Klux Klan. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer were taken to an isolated area by Neshoba County Sherif Cecil Price to be killed and buried by the Klan. By giving that speech Ronald Reagan was signaling to the racists in Mississippi that he was going to protect their “state’s rights” to continue to use violence against civil rights workers. Throughout the 1980 campaign, Reagan repeatedly used racist dog whistles to appeal to racist southerners who were disaffected by the Democrats' push for civil rights. Reagan used terms like “welfare queens” and “crack babies” to characterize African Americans. This usage of racist rhetoric worked in getting those racist voters to vote Republican. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, would go on to recycle the Reagan campaign’s racist dog whistles. The Bush campaign also ran the Willie Horton ad campaign to further vilify African Americans. Willie Horton was an African American convict who was sentenced to life in prison for murder until he was furloughed in Massachusetts. Horton did not return from his furlough and instead committed a series of crimes including armed robbery and rape before being recaptured. Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, was the governor of Massachusets at the time of the Horton incident. So Bush and his campaign went out of their way to use the Willie Horton incident to portray Dukakis as being soft on crime. Like Reagan, Bush was successful in winning over racist southerners. If anyone isn’t convinced that this was the goal listen to Lee Atwater’s own admission about the Southern Strategy.
MYTH: Since Clinton and Carter won in the South, the Southern Strategy isn’t Real.
FACT: Carter and Clinton won in the South simply because they were southerners themselves
This is a point Republicans bring up every now and then to argue that they didn’t run the Southern Strategy. They’ll say that they didn’t run the Southern Strategy because Richard Nixon lost southern states that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton won in their respective elections. Now, this is largely a lie by omission on so many levels. One they’ll say Nixon lost southern states in 1968 without addressing who he lost them too. That leaves people with the impression that Nixon lost those states to a Democrat, but that’s not the case Nixon lost those states to a third-party candidate. That third-party candidate was George Wallace of the American Independence Party, who was openly racist and that’s why he won those states. Secondly, both Carter and Clinton had a field advantage in the south because they were both southerners themselves. In 1976, Gerald Ford didn’t run on Nixon’s southern strategy and didn’t do much to appeal to the voters Nixon had won over. Also pardoning Nixon hurt Ford’s popularity nationwide. So those voters didn’t feel compelled to vote at all. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter used his background as a southerner to appeal to independent voters in the south, and he also ran a pro-Civil Rights campaign to appeal to black voters in the south. That’s how Carter won in the south. In 1980, Carter lost every southern state except his home state Georgia. In Bill Clinton’s case, Ross Perot threw a monkey wrench into the 1992 election. In 1992, Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate against George Bush and Bill Clinton and pulled evenly from both candidates. Perot’s focus on the deficit pulled voters away from Bush while his attacks on free trade pulled voters away from Clinton, because of this Perot’s candidacy threw states that would’ve gone to Bush to Clinton and vise versa. That’s primarily how Clinton won states that Bush won ’88. Clinton was also a southerner which gave him a field advantage in the south for both of his elections. Yes, two Democrats won in the south post-Southern Strategy, but that’s because they were southerners and their victories were anomalies.
MYTH: The Republicans Don’t Enact Racist Policies
FACT: They Do.
Now once you establish that the Republicans pandered to racists, conservatives will immediately move the goalpost to the Republican Party’s actual policies and deny the racist nature of their actual policies. Of course, their first instinct is to cite Abraham Lincoln and how he freed the slaves as proof that Republicans aren’t racist and deny how radically different Lincoln’s Republican Party is from today’s party. Then they’ll falsely say that the Republican Party passed the Civil Rights Act. The Democratic Party was the majority party in Congres at the time. Yes, progressive Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act. However, it was progressive Democrats who lead the charge on passing the Civil Rights Act and it was a Democratic president who signed it into law. Meanwhile, conservatives in both parties opposed it. As previously mentioned Barry Goldwater, a Republican, campaigned against the Civil Rights Act. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Democrats, were for the Civil Rights Act. Ultimately, it was the Democrats who delivered on Civil Rights with the help of some Republicans. So what are current racist Republican policies?
The War on Drugs
Let’s start with the racist policy that has sparked these recent protests by Black Lives Matter activists that started last summer and last into the early fall, and that is the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs was started by the Republican president, Richard Nixon, to crack down on the use of illegal drugs, or at least that’s what it was on the surface. In reality, the War on Drugs was started so the Nixon administration could justify disproportionately throwing African Americans in prison. This is not speculation either Nixon adviser, John Ehrlichman, has even admitted that’s why Nixon started the War on Drugs. Ehrlichman said:
The Nixon Campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Ehrlichman’s admission proves what many critics of the War on Drugs speculated and that is that Nixon didn’t care about marijuana or heroin use, he just wanted to fill America's prisons up with black people. It was the logical conclusion of Nixon’s southern strategy rhetoric. It doesn’t stop with Nixon. Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were also drug warriors. On the campaign trail, Reagan would refer to African Americans as “crack babies.” As president, Reagan instituted a zero-tolerance policy for crack use so he can explode America’s prisons with minorities. Also, Reagan let the crack epidemic get out of hand in the first place and then chose to use the pandemic to systemically target African Americans. Bush was a drug warrior like Reagan, look no further than the Willie Horton campaign mentioned earlier. As president, Bush ordered the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to arrange a drug buy at Lafayat Park from a black teenager. This was done to portray the drug epidemic as being worse than it was and was used to justify Bush’s escalation of the War on Drugs. The race of the teenager was no coincidence either, Bush deliberately chose an African American teenager to portray African Americans as drug addicts and criminals. Keith Jackson, the teenager that was set up in the drug buy, was sentenced to ten years in prison, his life was ruined by Bush.
Now, this is when Republicans deflect Bill Clinton and Joe Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill which exploded America’s prison population with minorities. They aren’t entirely wrong about the damage of the bill, but they omit very important facts. First of all, the Democratic Party had shifted in a right-wing direction during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Biden and Clinton are very conservative Democrats. Secondly, most of Biden’s cosponsors for the Crime Bill were Republicans, like Orin Hatch. So in other words Republicans are as much to blame for the Crime Bill as Democrats are. However, let’s not ignore the fact that Republicans are the most fierce drug warriors in politics, not Democrats. It’s Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg who introduced methods like “stop & frisk” to clamp down on drug use by minorities. It was Republicans who started the War on Drugs in the first place.
Immigration
The Republican Party’s current stance on immigration is based entirely on race. Their hyper-focus on immigrants coming in through the southern border or the Middle East is driven by racism towards Latinos and Arabs. See this may not be an example of racism towards African Americans, but it is a clear as day example of racism. Look no further than Donald Trump’s announcement speech, he refers to Mexicans as thieves and rapists. Trump and the GOP’s portrayal of Mexican immigrants as people who intentionally cross the border illegally to sell drugs to Americans, rape people, and commit crimes is identical to the rhetoric that Nixon and the GOP used to characterize African Americans in the 1970s. Trump may not be as sly or as clever about hiding his racism as Nixon was, but they both used the same racist characterizations of nonwhite people to excite racist voters. Trump and the Republicans also echo Reagan’s “welfare queens” rhetoric when they say that Mexicans come to America to mooch off of the system. Neither claim about Mexican immigrants is based in reality. It’s not just Hispanics who are the victims of the Republican Party’s racist attitude towards immigrants, Arabs are the other group of people who are targeted by the GOP. The Republican Party portrays Arab immigrants as terrorists, this is also part of their War on Terror rhetoric. Again look at Trump, he portrayed Muslims and Arabs as terrorists to justify banning travel from Middle East countries.
It isn’t just Trump, this rhetoric of Latinos being rapists and Arabs being terrorists predates Trump. Mitt Romney played on those same racist tropes in 2012 and was even endorsed by Trump. Former Republican Representative Steve King was the first person to call for building a wall between Mexico and America, a policy on which Trump campaigned on. Also, right-wing media uses these same racist tropes regularly. Whether it’s Fox News, Breitbart News, One America News Network (OANN), Newsmax, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, and BlazeTV, they all push those racist narratives. The best example is Tucker Carlson, editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller and host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Fox News, who routinely uses hateful rhetoric to characterize Mexican immigrants. Carlson faced an advertiser boycott in 2018 after he said that Mexicans make America “dirtier” and “poorer.” This just one example out of several racist remarks Tucker has said about Mexicans on his show. Tucker has also said that “‘dirty’ immigrants overpopulate America.” Tucker Carlson is a mouthpiece for Trump, the GOP, and white supremacy itself.
How does this racist rhetoric translate to policy? First and foremost there was Donald Trump’s Muslim ban, which was an executive order Trump enacted on his first day in office. The Muslim ban was a policy that banned travel from seven majority Muslim countries and prevented refugees from entering the country. It was a campaign promise that Trump fulfilled. Of Course, Trump never built that wall, but he was cruel to Mexican immigrants in ways that appeased his racist base. Trump repealed DACA in his first year in office. Donald Trump kicked off his second year in office by enacting the Zero Tolerance Immigration policy which separated families at the border. This policy separated parents from their children as they approach the southern border. Then these migrants are placed in detention camps where they are held indefinitely. Now, this is when Republicans deflect to “Obama built the cages” which is true but misleading. Glenn Beck left an interview with Brian Stelter because Stelter wouldn’t take Beck’s bait over this issue. First, as previously established the Democrats shifted to the right in the 1990s. Barack Obama did build the migrant detention facilities and place migrants in those camps. However, Obama’s policy was largely geared towards unaccompanied minors, and they were held in those prisons for twenty days until they were released with a family member. The Zero Tolerance policy was uniquely Trump’s policy towards immigrants. Children died in those camps during Trump’s reign because of Trump’s excessive cruelty towards immigrants. Both policies were bad, but Trump’s policy was much worse and far more inhumane. Let’s not forget Trump’s handling of the migrant “caravan,” where he had ICE douse Asylum seekers in tear gas and attack those immigrants. Now, this issue goes far beyond Trump, let’s not forget that George W. Bush founded ICE. Bush also had the record in mass deportations, until Obama broke it. Given that Trump was only a one-term president, he couldn’t have surpassed Obama’s record. He most certainly would’ve had he been reelected. These aren’t just policies enacted at the federal level, several Republican governors have enacted harsh anti-immigrant policies at the state level. A well know example is Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act in 2010 which was passed by Republican Governor Jan Brewer. The law was the harshest and most anti-immigrant law passed at the time because it encouraged racial profiling of undocumented immigrants. The law stated that immigrants had to have documentation on hand at all times or else they’d be detained by law enforcement. The late Arizona Republican Senator John McCain even supported this law. It wasn’t just Governor Brewer in Arizona who passed harsh immigration laws, it happened across the country in states like Kansas under Sam Brownback’s governorship. Ultimately, this is further proof that the Republicans have expanded their racist policies and rhetoric to Hispanics and Arabs to satisfy the Dixiecrats that now support them.
War on Terror
Like immigration, Republicans use the same racist tropes towards Arabs to justify denying refugees from the Middle East that they use to justify the War on Terror. Republicans portray Muslims and Arabs as terrorists to get their racist base to continue to support the War on Terror. In fact, this racist rhetoric was used to justify starting the War on Terror. George W. Bush following the September Eleventh attacks created a “Free world vs Arab world” dichotomy to justify waging the War on Terror. Throughout his Presidency Bush and the Republicans used dog whistles to vilify Muslims and this helped plant the anti-Muslim sentiment into the American public. On top of that, the Bush administration and Republican state and local officials like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg began racial profiling America’s Muslim communities in hopes that it would curb the spread of terrorism. Donald Trump took the mask off of the Republican Party’s Islamophobic War on Terror when he called for the Muslim ban and to kill the families of terrorists. Trump lambasted the Obama administration and the media for not addressing the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism.” He chose this terminology for a reason, it was to excite the Dixiecrats in the Republican base and to portray Muslims as terrorists. Notice how Trump and Republicans sing a different song when it comes to white supremacy and terrorist attacks committed by white supremacists. Of course, the deflection from the right is that Democrats also support the War on Terror. Now, for the third time, the Democratic Party underwent a right-wing shift in the 1990s with the New Democrats Coalition and Third Way. Also, Democrats don’t make their War on Terror rhetoric about America’s hegemonic interests and defending national security interests, and not about stopping Islamic terrorism. So Republicans throw racism into their already terrible foreign policy agenda. This just proves that Republicans will make anything about as long as it appeases their base including foreign policy.
Voter Suppression
This is a behavior that’s unique to Republicans and that is delisting nonwhite voters from the voting rolls in order to win elections. This is NOT something Democrats do. This is a behavior that begun in 2000 when Jeb Bush kicked minority voters off of the voting roles in Florida to help his brother George W. Bush win the election. What happened was that George W. Bush, at the time Governor of Texas, and Texas Secretary of State Elton Bomer composed a list of Texas felons and sent that list to Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State Kathryn Harris. Bush and Harris had passed a law in the state of Florida that barred felons from voting and made it state policy to delist felons from the voting rolls. Of course, these Texas felons and Florida voters who shared the same names as the felons were all people of color. This is not a coincidence, it’s intentional voter suppression because Republicans know that nonwhite voters disproportionately vote Democratic. So in order for them to win elections, they have to deny nonwhite voters the ability to vote. It worked in 2000 voter suppression is how Bush won in that election. Republicans have only gotten worse since 2000, look no further than Georgia’s recent voter suppression law. Republican Governor Brian Kemp passed legislation to ban no-excuse absentee voting, bar people from providing voters waiting in line with food & water, and close precincts at 5 PM on election day. This was done to prevent Democrats from winning future statewide elections. Kemp and the Republican state legislature saw what happens when black voters turn out in droves during a general election and they didn’t like it. So the Kemp and his cronies signed this legislation to suppress the voice of African Americans in the electoral process so Democrats will never win. Of course, conservatives defend this by asserting that they’re protecting the integrity of American elections with these laws by preventing “voter fraud.” Now they’re in fact doing the opposite because taking away the rights of citizens to vote in elections only makes the results more fraudulent, not less. On top of that “voter fraud” doesn’t exist, if anything Republicans engage in election fraud when they fight against “voter fraud.” The reality is that Republicans have embraced white supremacy so much to the extent where they can win unless white people are the only people voting, and so they enact laws to suppress the vote of nonwhite voters. Just further proves that the Republicans did the Southern Strategy and now they’re dealing with the ramifications of pandering to white supremacists.
Why Do We Have To Talk About The Southern Strategy?
Why is this important? Why do we have to talk about a strategy that Republicans enacted in the 1970s? For one it explains a lot about the behavior of today’s Republican Party. However, more importantly, Republicans and conservatives have been working day and night on propaganda campaigns to convince people that the southern strategy is a myth. Look no further than PragerU’s video on the Southern Strategy. If these lies aren’t debunked about the Southern Strategy, then people will buy these lies and not know what the truth is. Republicans have a vested interest to lie about the past and deny the real history of their party. Their end goal is to convince nonwhite voters that the Republican Party isn’t a racist party when in reality it is. Ever since Trump came along Republicans have doubled down on the efforts to rewrite history and erase the Southern Strategy from history. You have the Trump diehards like Candace Owens and Dinesh D’Souza claiming that the true racists are the Democrats and that they invented the Southern Strategy to keep black voters on the “plantation.” Then there are the Never Trump Republicans like Rick Wilson who claim that Republicans did nothing to court these racists over to their party and that they voted Republican because of fiscal policy and paint Trump as an anomaly. Wilson basically denying the very thing his hero’s campaign manager admitted. Then you have the Mostly Trumpers like Liz Cheney (the Republicans who support Trump but don’t support everything he does) who play stupid as to why white supremacists support the Republican Party and pretend that the Southern Strategy was a thing. These Republicans also don’t care enough about Trump to defend Trump’s racism or paint him as an outlier in the GOP. All three camps recognize that the Republicans have almost no support from people of color and are working day and night to deny the facts of their party’s long history of embracing white supremacy. As matter of fact, Neoliberal Democrats help Republicans in their efforts to deny the Southern Strategy by painting Trump as an anomaly in the GOP. When Joe Biden says that Republicans will “come back to their roots once Trump is gone” or Hillary Clinton says that Trump is “bringing hate into a party that has long since rejected racism until he ran,” that helps conservatives deny that the Southern Strategy was a thing. The media also aids and abets Southern Strategy denialism when pundits like Chris Cillizza do cringe-worthy segments about how different Donald Trump Republicans are from George Bush Republicans, again portraying Trump as something new instead of the logical conclusion of the GOP’s long documented history of pandering to racists and embracing racism. The Southern Strategy is part of history that needs to be known, and we can’t allow political operatives to erase it from history for political reasons.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Southern Strategy is a very real campaign strategy that all Republicans are uncomfortable reconciling with. The reality of the Southern Strategy is shown throughout the rhetoric, strategies, and policies Repubublicans use to keep power and appease their base. It is important to know what the Southern Strategy is in order to better understand American history and politics. It is high time that Republicans and conservatives to stop denying the Southern Strategy’s existence and own it.
