History : Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Core

Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Core

Racism, White Nationalism and White Supremacy in America is not a new or unique phenomenon. If one were to take the time to take a long and hard look at the President’s party, one would find that “The Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Core.” Proof of this lies in the party’s lack of diversity. In August, Will Hurd, Representative from Texas and the only African-American Republican Congressman announced that he will be retiring from Congress. Recently, so-called President Trump showed extreme contempt for the racial abuse that African-Americans have suffered at the hands of white-America by referring to the impeachment inquiry as a lynching. Neither Trump nor the rest of America could ever imagine a white president dangling from a tree, hands tied behind his back with a noose around his neck and his genitals stuffed in his mouth. The current philosophy of Donald Trump and his party is reminiscent of that of the founding fathers. When speaking of racism and lynching, in the Constitution of the United States, Black People were considered to be three fifths of a human being. Actually, when an entire race of people is relegated to being three fifths of a human being, that is a crime far worse that a lynching. This designation of Black People being less than a whole human being is called The Three-Fifths Compromise and is found in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution which reads:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Aside from being determined to be less than human, the effects of this constitutional clause also denied Black People the right to vote and representation since one had to be a whole-free-person to have that right. To rectify this injustice, the nation had to fight the Civil War. Truth be told, Lincoln’s motivation to fight the war and free the slaves was not based in morality. It was based in economics and done as a means to save the nation by crippling the Confederate economy which collapsed without the economic advantage of slave labor. Despite the declaration of the end of slavery by one of the greatest of American Presidents Abraham Lincoln, in reality, slavery did not end in this country until the end of WWII. It was the implementation of the Tuskegee Experiment by FDR, which gave birth to the Tuskegee Airmen that really opened the door and affected change in America’s racist society. The Tuskegee Airmen accomplished the impossible. This elite all Black Fighter escort group, never lost a single bomber that was under their protection during WWII. They proved through their military service, that Black People are as human as White People and in the most difficult of situations just as competent. Their success as the greatest fighter wing in American Military history led to widespread desegregation of the U.S. military and other government jobs.

Until the hearts and minds of Americans were won by their heroic actions, although Blacks appeared to be free, Black people were still being lynched indiscriminately and suffered from the inhumanities of Jim Crow just as if the Civil War had never been fought and won by the North. Despite the outcome of the Civil War, to this day, more than 250 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863, racism is alive and well. Today it may not look the same but it has evolved and it still exists. Through its evolutionary process, it progressed from slavery to Klanism, then the Jim Crow era of the early 20th century, to open-defiance in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-70s, followed by the Political Correct (PC) facade of the 1980s to the early 21st century and finally under the Trump Administration, open-defiance and brutality under his direction which subsequently led to the vehicular murder of a woman protesting racism. These are the evolutionary events of American Racism aka the Republican Party.

Under Trump and the Republican Party, we have gone backward in time to August 8, 1925, when the KKK paraded 40,000 members openly down the streets of Washington D.C., all of whom were dressed in full Klan regalia. Similarly, on the night of August 11, 2017, a group of more than 300 white supremacists marched through the University of Virginia campus carrying tiki torches and chanting “White Lives Matter! You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” They marched throughout the night while using a Nazi salute in protest of a group of civil rights activists that was meeting in the campus chapel. The next day, members of this racist mob rioted in the streets opposing the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. During the riot, a member of a white nationalist group, a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi plowed through a group of civil rights activist with a car injuring more than a dozen and killing a young woman. In June of 2018, he was indicted for murder and hate crimes. The day after the riots, President Trump stated “I think there is blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it either.” To blame a civil rights murder victim for being murdered by a white nationalist is both idiotic and racist. But, such behavior is neither out of character for Trump or the Republican Party.

The title of this article, “American Racism aka Republican Party” may seem a bit harsh but at Explicit News our goal is to provide an unvarnished “factual look behind the curtain” and here are the facts. Since the early 20th century nearly every Republican Party President has tolerated racism, supported racism and or implemented racist policies. The exception to this Republican rule was Gerald Ford who openly condemned racism in his college days. He defended a Black football team member against the racist policies of the University of Michigan which supported Jim Crow laws. Former President Ford threatened to quit the team if his friend and roommate Willis Ward were to be benched in games against southern teams. Ward was a famous sprinter that had bested Olympic Champion Jesse Owens in a track meet.

To chronicle America’s truth about racism in our lifetime, we can start with incidents stemming from the early 20th century which is a time period when our grandfathers and great grandfathers were young. Some of them are still alive today and can give testimony to the incidents of the following Presidents. Of particular interest is President Calvin Coolidge. From 1923-1929 Republican President Calvin Coolidge served in office and during his tenure he proposed the formation of a government council to address racial issues in America. But not unlike Republican Presidents that have followed him, his actions spoke volumes as to what was really in his heart. In the first nationally broadcast State of The Union Address in history, on December 26, 1923, he emphasized: “America must be kept American.” Just a few months later on May24, 1924 he signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924 1 which included the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act. The law which was co-sponsored by Washington Congressman and eugenicist Albert Jonson banned all immigration from the Asian-Pacific-Triangle, it placed limitations on Italians, Jews, Greeks and Slavs. Much like Trump’s Muslim ban, it prohibited Muslims from legally migrating to this country and it also severely limited the immigration to America by Africans. Just as horrifying were his actions that came straight out of the slavery playbooks of the old south. During the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, most White communities were saved while Black riverside communities were flooded to reduce the pressure on the levees. Reminiscent of slavery, thousands of Black flood victims were forced to work for their food rations while being threatened with gun violence by the National Guard and area farmers. These actions resulted in an onslaught of mass beatings, lynchings, and rapes.

In handling disasters, President George W. Bush followed in Coolidge’s footsteps. In response to the flooding of New Orleans (a predominantly Black city) caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Bush administration’s FEMA handling of the disaster caused critical delays in aid and relief for victims of the flood. No such delays have ever been experienced by predominantly White cities that suffered disasters. In a uniquely racist law designed to damage the futures of children of color, President Bush implemented his No Child Left Behind Act 2 (NCLBA) in 2002. The law placed a stranglehold of culturally biased and racially insensitive standardized testing on America’s poor and ethnically disadvantaged children. NCLBA created financial policies that decreased funding to schools when students were struggling or not making improvements on tests, thus privately leaving the neediest students of color behind. The provision of the Law were never funded by congress and Bush made no attempt to get them funded.

President George W. Bush is proof that “the apple does not fall far from the tree.” His father, George Herbert Walker Bush preceded him to the office of the Presidency. In one of the most blatant acts of racism in American politics, his 1988 presidential campaign featured the Willie Horton television commercial3. Considered by advertising professionals to be the father of dog whistle, political, attack-ads, the commercial attacked Democratic Party opponent Mike Dukakis as being soft on crime by featuring Willie Horton, an African America convicted of murder and of terrorizing a young white couple and raping the woman while out on a prison furlough. These actions had nothing to do with then Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts. The commercial was so frightening to White Americans that it cost Dukakis the election. This tactic of using racial dog whistles is a specialty of Donald Trump.

Other racist events in Bush senior’s life include his denouncement of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 when he was running for a Texas Senatorial seat. He proclaimed his opponent to be “radical” for supporting the bill that ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination.



Ronald Reagan, often considered by Republicans to be the Greatest American President of all times was by far, one of the most racist. His racist policies, opposition and attempts to block civil rights legislation was inhumane at the very least. The actor Ronald Reagan began to make his transformation to politician in the 1960s. During this turbulent time in our nation’s history, Reagan openly opposed all civil rights legislation which included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Reagan continued his racism via his administration’s policies. As president, he gutted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), fought the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act (which required all recipients of federal funds to comply with civil rights laws) and opposed the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed economic sanctions on South Africa that could only be lifted when that country abolished apartheid. Also, Reagan openly labeled anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress as Communistic. Like other Republican presidents before him, he did not openly consider himself to be a racist and feigned he insult on the matter. But fortunately, his actions speak volumes to the contrary.

In further support of the argument that the Republican Party is synonymous with racism, is the case of the disgraced 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon infamous for his “I am not a crook” exclamation. He was forced out of office due to his Watergate crimes and immediately pardoned by his Vice President and successor, Gerald Ford. Nixon implemented what would become known as the Southern Strategy which refers to a Republican Party’s electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to their racist ideologies against southern African Americans. The civil rights movement led to the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s and frightened southern Whites who felt betrayed by the Democratic Party. Key to their belief of betrayal was the Johnson administration’s support for civil rights through legislation and the use of the National Guard for enforcement of Johnson’s policies and laws. These southern Whites felt disenfranchised from the party and became known as Dixiecrats. Richard Nixon’s strategies successfully contributed to the political realignment of many White, conservative voters in the South and converted them to the Republican Party. Due to this strategy, the Republican Party through its annexation of the Dixiecrats became more overtly racist. This led to their conclusion that they would never be able to convert more than 20% of the Black population to their party, so their rights did not matter.

In all things, leadership matters, especially with the Republican Party. Leadership is top-down and is most often emulated by followers. Such is the case with Donald Trump and his far-right, white supremacist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi and extremely racist base. Proof of his racism is listed below

n 1973, Trump and his company Trump Management were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for housing discrimination against black renters—a lawsuit which, according to Trump, he settled without an admission of guilt.
During an Oval Office, discussion on immigration trump stated “Why are we having all these people from shit-hole countries come here?” in reference to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations. Trump then suggested that the U.S. try to increase immigration from countries like Norway.
In launching his 2016 Presidential campaign Trump spoke of Mexican immigrants “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people”.
On August 25, 2017, Donald Trump pardoned former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio who had been convicted two months earlier for disobeying a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling in detaining “individuals suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. The U. S. Department of Justice concluded that illegal tactics that Arpaio was using included “extreme racial profiling and sadistic punishments that involved the torture, humiliation, and degradation of Latino inmates.”
In an August 2017, Virginia rally to oppose the removal of the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which included white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, Klans-men and neo-Nazis, a civil rights activist was killed when a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi ran her down with his car. Some of the racist protestors chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans, carried Nazi flags, Confederate battle flags, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic banners, and semi-automatic rifles. President Trump did not denounce the white nationalists and KKK members. He instead condemned “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” after which he followed up with “very fine people on both sides.” In essence, he equated civil rights activists to the neo-Nazi murderer of an innocent woman.
A recently published report by the Leadership Council on Civil and Human Rights, a detailed list of the Trump Administration roll-back of civil and human rights policies, directives and Executive Actions is provided. The report is titled Trump Administration Civil and Human Rights Rollbacks4. It itemizes all of his racist, discriminatory and oppressive actions in chronological order.

From now on, I'll consider myself a Democrat!

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

So true.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

The Democratic Party’s claim to be the party of the good guys, while the Republicans are the party of the bad guys, hinges on the tale of Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy. According to this narrative, advanced by progressive historians, Nixon orchestrated a party switch on civil rights by converting the racists in the Democratic Party — the infamous Dixiecrats — into Republicans. And now, according to a recent article in The New Republic, President Trump is the “true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party has pursued for more than half a century.”

Yes, this story is in the textbooks and on the history channel and regularly repeated in the media, but is it true? First, no one has ever given a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Nixon during his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to the Deep South actually would have to be made, and to be understood as such. Yet, quite evidently none was.

So progressives insist that Nixon made a racist “dog whistle” appeal to Deep South voters. Evidently he spoke to them in a kind of code. Really? Is it plausible that Nixon figured out how to communicate with Deep South racists in a secret language? Do Deep South bigots, like dogs, have some kind of heightened awareness of racial messages — messages that are somehow indecipherable to the media and the rest of the country?


This seems unlikely, but let’s consider the possibility. Progressives insist that Nixon’s appeals to drugs and law and order were coded racist messaging. Yet when Nixon ran for president in 1968 the main issue was the Vietnam War. One popular Republican slogan of the period described the Democrats as the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion.” Clearly there is no suggestion here of race.

Nixon’s references to drugs and law and order in 1968 were quite obviously directed at the antiwar protesters who had just disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago. His target was radical activists such as Abbie Hoffman and Bill Ayers. Nixon scorned the hippies, champions of the drug culture such as Timothy Leary, and draft-dodgers who fled to Canada. The vast majority of these people were white.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was an avid champion of the desegregation of public schools. The progressive columnist Tom Wicker wrote in the New York Times, “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.”

Upon his taking office in 1969, Nixon also put into effect America’s first affirmative action program. Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions, first in Philadelphia and then elsewhere. Now, would a man seeking to build an electoral base of Deep South white supremacists actually promote the first program to legally discriminate in favor of blacks? This is absurd.

Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. His strategy, as outlined by Kevin Phillips in his classic work, “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was to target the Sunbelt, the vast swath of territory stretching from Florida to Nixon’s native California. This included what Phillips terms the Outer or Peripheral South.

Nixon recognized the South was changing. It was becoming more industrialized, with many northerners moving to the Sunbelt. Nixon’s focus, Phillips writes, was on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. Nixon won these voters, and he lost the Deep South, which went to Democratic segregationist George Wallace.

And how many racist Dixiecrats did Nixon win for the GOP? Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democratic Party.

The progressive notion of a Dixiecrat switch is a myth. Yet it is myth that continues to be promoted, using dubious case examples. Though the late Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott all switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP, none of these men was a Dixiecrat.

The South, as a whole, became Republican during the 1980s and 1990s. This had nothing to do with Nixon; it was because of Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” The conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity had far more to do with the South’s movement into the GOP camp than anything related to race.

Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures — not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democratic Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democratic big lie.

Prove me wrong conman. Name 1 other dixiecRAT to switch.

conman is a goon-ass twink bastard



Fuck his Mother

Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

From now on, I'll consider myself a Democrat!

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Reverse psychology won't save your lying ass either. I will happily bump these. People can watch you get owned. Over & over & over & over….

Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting racist republicans.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting racist republicans.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

It seems reverse psychology is working well on Soul_Venom. He just ran away without being able to refute anything you said.

You won that one really easy, Abe.

And I thought reverse psychology only worked on toddlers

I also frequently wonder whether any of this means anything at all. Which is just the experience of making art, I think.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

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Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Anyone besides Conman pay ANY attention to this thread in the past 5 months, no matter how many times he bumped it?

Each of these defeated threads bumped is my victory parade all over again. Thanks for that douchebag.








Fuck your mother

Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

BAHAHAHAH!

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co



Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Thanks for the bump! It helps fighting republican racism.

My password is password

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

The Democratic Party’s claim to be the party of the good guys, while the Republicans are the party of the bad guys, hinges on the tale of Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy. According to this narrative, advanced by progressive historians, Nixon orchestrated a party switch on civil rights by converting the racists in the Democratic Party — the infamous Dixiecrats — into Republicans. And now, according to a recent article in The New Republic, President Trump is the “true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party has pursued for more than half a century.”

Yes, this story is in the textbooks and on the history channel and regularly repeated in the media, but is it true? First, no one has ever given a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Nixon during his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to the Deep South actually would have to be made, and to be understood as such. Yet, quite evidently none was.

So progressives insist that Nixon made a racist “dog whistle” appeal to Deep South voters. Evidently he spoke to them in a kind of code. Really? Is it plausible that Nixon figured out how to communicate with Deep South racists in a secret language? Do Deep South bigots, like dogs, have some kind of heightened awareness of racial messages — messages that are somehow indecipherable to the media and the rest of the country?
You are missing a key ingredient: Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, championed the Civil Rights Act. That's what caused the mass migration by Democrats who felt betrayed. Nixon was also pro civil rights, but he wasn't President at the time. Nixon didn't have to do a thing except not speak about civil rights so much. In his presidential campaign, he ran not on civil rights issues, but on conservative values, and the hippie movement was a perfect target. While no one liked the war in Vietnam, conservatives sure did not like liberals or - ironically, we might say with modern lenses - radical anti-government kooks like the hippies.

Perhaps more importantly though, Humphries, the Democratic candidate, was seen as "soft on negroes". He tried to sharpen his rhetoric during the campaign to lessen this image, but if there was one thing conservatives didn't like, it was being soft on blacks.

There was nothing Humphries could have done, really. He was LBJ's VP, and could not escape the policies they had, in fact, supported or opposed. There were two unrecoverable calamities that scuttled the Democrats: the Civil Rights Act and Vietnam. Soft on negroes and warmongers. No coming back from those labels.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

There was no mass migration

Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Sure there was. All you have to do is look at the voting history. Look at the deep South in 1964, for example: what happened there? They had been blue up to that point. There was a swing-back in 1976, but since then the South has mostly stayed red.

http://metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/presidential-election-results-1952-2012.png

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

And how many racist Dixiecrats did Nixon win for the GOP? Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democratic Party.

The progressive notion of a Dixiecrat switch is a myth. Yet it is myth that continues to be promoted, using dubious case examples. Though the late Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott all switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP, none of these men was a Dixiecrat.

The South, as a whole, became Republican during the 1980s and 1990s. This had nothing to do with Nixon; it was because of Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America.” The conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity had far more to do with the South’s movement into the GOP camp than anything related to race.

Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures — not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democratic Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democratic big lie.

Beware the sound of one hand clapping.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Explain the voting pattern, then.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

I did. Its in the 3rd paragraph.

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Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

The voting pattern changed before Reagan.

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

What's that got to do with what I said? I'm not talking about the Southern Strategy. But since you insist:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Re: Republican Party Is Institutionalized Racism and White Supremacist At Its Co

The Myth of the Racist Republicans
The truth about the Southern Strategy.

by Gerard Alexander

A review of The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, by Joseph A.Aistrup;

The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black;

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, by Dan T. Carter;

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell;

and The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips.

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something like this: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today's Republican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at its heart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

This myth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. But it is testimony to its growing influence that it is taken aboard by writers like Dan Carter, a prize-winning biographer of George Wallace, and to a lesser extent by the respected students of the South, Earl and Merle Black. It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racial issues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for the Republican Party, one in which racial intolerance really won't be tolerated." It has become a staple of Democratic politicians like Howard Dean, who accuses Republicans of "dividing Americans against each other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst in people" through the use of so-called racist "codewords." All this matters because people use such putative connections to form judgments, and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have in U.S. politics. Certainly the 2000 Bush campaign went to a lot of trouble to combat the GOP's reputation as racially exclusionary. I even know young Republicans who fear that behind their party's victories lies a dirty, not-so-little Southern secret.

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grain of Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationist candidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a party acted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must be traced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallace blended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, and traditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup, claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation of the Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had once been the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of Barry Goldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only a short step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latest exploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short, the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact with America's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types of evidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its core messages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof in the electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern white backlash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It is not at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coated racist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became the South's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region's history, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardly mobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, not of white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like many others, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals. Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialism can be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtle manipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolition of affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads, and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

The problem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, but these other positions are not obviously racist. This creates an analytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimate viewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that second view—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held for entirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectuals might not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition to busing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the other hand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. To be persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which is which. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highly prone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for something else that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater, who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term "states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied the continuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try to extend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing that Nixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, and welfare reform in a political climate in which many white voters doubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individual responsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned as racist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxies for these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. The problem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Many scholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury, usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition to affirmative action would not be racist.

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.

The Southern Strategy

This bias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democratic dominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that the accommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modern conservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislation that remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does the segregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at its electoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the question by simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftly identified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study, authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married white Southerners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it would be for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams to generate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophical link between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yet liberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analytic error. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up voting Republican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicans went to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming to them. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first is the logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually have little choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at best the lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they truly desire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallace won less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became president anyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limited national bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOP was the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little the GOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their support after 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing and reluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason these policies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s, becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed a civil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, its agenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the Vietnam War, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.

Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists' collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" to get Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP," regardless.

Electoral Patterns

In all these ways, the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth's proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance. These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller black populations. Race loomed less large in its politics. In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Each prediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, the Democrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalition of presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broader national outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy to its arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as national hero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting. From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native-son LBJ was on the ballot—only twice, narrowly. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, states representing over half the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, before Goldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills. It was this which dramatically changed the GOP's presidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the least racially polarized part of the South. And its strongest supporters most years were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-income voters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning in the Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwater pattern re-emerged soon afterward. When given the option in 1968, Deep South whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president by winning most of the Peripheral South instead. From 1972 on, GOP presidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in the two sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimes not. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of the South's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery, throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidential support.

* * *

The GOP's congressional gains followed the same pattern. Of course, it was harder for Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaning black electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery than it did in the Deep South. Before Goldwater, the GOP's few Southern House seats were almost all in the Periphery (as was its sole Senator—John Tower of Texas). Several Deep South House members were elected with Goldwater but proved ephemeral, as Black and Black note: "Republicans lost ground and stalled in the Deep South for the rest of the decade," while in the Periphery they "continued to make incremental gains." In the 1960s and '70s, nearly three-quarters of GOP House victories were in the Peripheral rather than the Deep South, with the GOP winning twice as often in urban as rural districts. And six of the eight different Southern Republican Senators elected from 1961 to 1980 were from the Peripheral South. GOP candidates tended consistently to draw their strongest support from the more educated, middle- and upper-income white voters in small cities and suburbs. In fact, Goldwater in 1964—at least his Deep South performance, which is all that was controversial in this regard—was an aberration, not a model for the GOP.

Writers who vilify the GOP's Southern strategy might be surprised to find that all of this was evident, at least in broad brush-strokes, to the strategy's early proponents. In his well-known book, Kevin Phillips drew the lesson that a strong appeal in the Deep South, on the model of 1964, had already entailed and would entail defeat for the GOP everywhere else, including in what he termed the Outer South. He therefore rejected such an approach. He emphasized that Ike and Nixon did far better in the Peripheral South. He saw huge opportunities in the "youthful middle-class" of Texas, Florida, and other rapidly growing and changing Sun Belt states, where what he called "acutely Negrophobe politics" was weakest, not strongest. He thus endorsed "evolutionary success in the Outer South" as the basis of the GOP's "principal party strategy" for the region, concluding that this would bring the Deep South along in time, but emphatically on the national GOP's terms, not the segregationists'.

The tension between the myth and voting data escalates if we consider change across time. Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions of Midwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These "immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higher rates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter of self-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants. Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with the GOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older white voters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time. Do we really believe immigrants (like George H.W. Bush, who moved with his family to Texas) were more racist than native Southerners, and that younger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than did their elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90s than they had earlier?

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, and concentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least "Southern" parts of the South. This is a very strange way to reincarnate George Wallace's movement.

The Decline of Racism

Timing may provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfolding of events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identify as Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s did Republicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive in most state legislatures. So if the GOP's strength in the South only recently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial in nature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it) would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the most important events in Southern political history is the long-term decline of racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) books suggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on a demonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumed to have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. This view lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenic nature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizing categories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racial views remain intact.

What's more, the trend away from confident beliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think. David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the height of the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucial prop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diverse denominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation for either segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remained segregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before the Supreme Court's [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, the southern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutions supporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with it peacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted black applicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that "people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, the most prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

The point of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invited some nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOP finally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase of the South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not its declining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicans genuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers'.


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