The Southern Strategy

Jamelle Boule Bouie calls out the deceptiveness of conservatives noting that the Democrats have historically been the party of Jim Crow:

The problem with Fund’s argument is that he takes these facts, divorces them from historical context, and spins them into an unconvincing indictment of the modern Democratic Party and a disingenuous exoneration of its conservative counterpart.

It’s worth a read. But what Boule misses (or undersells) is the conscious decision by the GOP to slide into the position vacated by the Democrats. It wasn’t just that the Democrats supported Jim Crow until quite late and only abandoned it during the 1960s. It was that LBJ knowingly pushed through the Civil Rights Act against the best electoral interests of his own party, and the Republicans, with malice aforethought, went after Southerners angered by the CRA. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was a deliberate effort to win a Presidential election by appealing to Southern whites disillusioned with Democrats over civil rights. They picked up the racial baton from the Democrats and ran with it, and have continued to run with it today. Yes, one might say to a Republican criticizing the Democrats for building Jim Crow in the South, they did do that. Why have you continued it?
(We have, of course, written about this extensively before).