How racist was the Southern strategy?

Matt offers a slightly new view of the Republican "southern strategy":

It's true that the recent political success of the GOP has an enormous amount to do with the party's success in the white south, but I think the evidence strongly suggests that conservative politicians get the votes of white southerners precisely because white southerners like conservative positions on taxes, moral values, and national security. Southern Democratic politicians of the Jim Crow era, after all, mostly took conservative stances on all of these issues. The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.

And for a long time the strategy worked. Democratic politicians like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt loyally upheld white supremacy. The dam began to crack with Harry Truman, and then under Lyndon Johnson the national party decisively broke with this corrupt bargain. With that done, white southerners just took their conservative views on taxes and national security into the Republican Party where such views belonged. Racism is a key part of the story, but it plays a much bigger role in explaining why Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy won South Carolina than in explaining why Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush won there.

I think Matt is obviously right that the South is not just conservative because they hate blacks . . . although it would be interesting to see how much the experience of Reconstruction altered Southern views of government.

The "Southern strategy" should imply not merely that Republicans started campaigning in the south (that would be logical if they thought they should win there . . . and would Paul Krugman really spurn white racist voters who supported, say, the Democrats on single payer?) It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?

Comments

"It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists."

...or that Democratic policy became less palatable. There's a reason Lyndon Johnson said the Civil Rights Act would doom the party for a generation.

I grew up in Georgia during the 70s and 80s. (In fact, my mom was friends with New Gingrich and we hosted fundraisers for him when he was still a professor at West Georgia.) While I don't think the Republican party became more racist per se, I sure recall hearing a lot about quotas and welfare queens.

Posted by Drek Scruggs | August 24, 2007 3:05 PM

Republican candidates started getting rabid about "law'n'order" and the "death penalty" and "welfare" and guns bigger issues than they had been in the party beforehand. It was quite deliberate. It was also a given that Republicans, once in office, would softpedal civil rights pursuits.

There's no mystery here at all. Anyone paying attention knew what they were doing and why they were doing it. Just ask Ken Mehlman.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 24, 2007 3:32 PM

as moelarryand jesus said: just ask ken mehlman.
mehlman apologized for the gop's southern strategy which was explicitly and specifically designed to appeal to southern racist sentiments. anyone who paid attention understood what was happening from the moment nixon began to utilize the strategy. mehlman has simply admitted the fact that the gop exploited racist sentiments and he offered an apology for having done so. what is so difficult to understand about that?
it certainly does not speak well for the gop, but it is a very simple matter.

Posted by frankie d | August 24, 2007 4:21 PM

. . . although it would be interesting to see how much the experience of Reconstruction altered Southern views of government.

The 80 years or so of government-enforced apartheid that followed Reconstruction makes me think that the South was pretty cool with big government, as long as the majority got what they wanted.

Posted by Thomas | August 24, 2007 4:30 PM

"would Paul Krugman really spurn white racist voters who supported, say, the Democrats on single payer?"

Nicely done. Paul Krugman would probably support Castro, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Chairman Mao, Megatron, Dr. Evil, Agent Smith from the Matrix, Xerxes, Darius, the Pharoah, and Skeletor--they all offer great benefits. Afterall, when he argues for healthcare for all, he obviously means healthcare for whitey.

Seriously, can someone please tell me how I can get my dog a blogging gig at the Atlantic. He sleeps most of the day, but even groggy he can write better than this. And I'll go ahead and cover his healthcare, so the Atlantic won't have to cover his and Ms. McArdle's.

Posted by Brady | August 24, 2007 5:08 PM

This is what I wrote over there:

Krugman's analysis of the racial issue is OK.

But the point that Matt is missing is that Republican economic policy is not what it use to be.

Remember, prior to 1980 the Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. The southern shift to the republican party was originally based on racism. But the shift was accompanied by a major change in the republican party's economic policies. In the 1930-50 era the poor southern whites did not make enough money to pay taxes. So that got the benefits of the democratic income transfer policies without any of the cost. But by 1980 the poor southerns had become wealthy enough, particularly in the urban centers that they became tax payers. So they started to see that their taxes were going to support poor blacks and did not like this. This coincided with the republican shift to free lunch economics that allowed the two strands of racism and anti-government, anti-tax paying to come together and swing the now middle class southern whites to the republican party.

Posted by spencer | August 24, 2007 5:28 PM

It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?

Yes.

(The following is excerpted from wikipedia's entry on the southern strategy. You really should check out wikipedia, Megan.)

Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discusses politics in the South:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say 'nigger'—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.".[8]

Herbert wrote in the same column, "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."[9]

Posted by liberalrob | August 24, 2007 6:19 PM

I grew up in the North and then spent 20 years in the South before moving to Metro New York. The biggest racists I saw were clearly in the North. It looked as if when the word got through to decent whites in the South that racism was not only bad, but wasn't going to be tolerated anymore, that the South took it to heart. In contrast, the North refused (and still refuses) to admit they are racist, and therefore have done nothing about it. School systems in the South are integrated; those in the North aren't--they have many small districts so that they can have white districts and black districts. And now Hispanic districts. That just doesn't happen in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Posted by Rex | August 24, 2007 7:31 PM

Rex writes: "School systems in the South are integrated; those in the North aren't--they have many small districts so that they can have white districts and black districts. And now Hispanic districts. That just doesn't happen in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia."

Yeesh, more bovine feces. There are plenty of integrated schools in the North, and plenty of lily-white towns in the South. Making crap up is no way to conduct an argument.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 24, 2007 7:45 PM

Megan, what do you mean by "spurn"? Are you asking if Krugman would stand outside the voting booths with a racial sensitivity quiz, turning away those who didn't pass? Or are you asking whether Krugman would deliberately adopt racist rhetoric and signaling to attract racists to the pro-single-payer voting bloc?

Posted by Avram | August 24, 2007 8:01 PM

ML&J,

Continue in your blinded world and don't open your eyes to any facts that are contrary to your world view.

I am not saying that there aren't a lot of integrated schools in the North; what I am saying is because of the way many school districts are drawn in the North, they are segregated. Compare Roosevelt School District with Merrick-Bellmore on Long Island and you will quickly find out what I am talking about. In the South, by contrast, there are city and county school districts, and a city and a county are just too darned big to be segregated.

What you might be thinking of are individual schools within the districts that usually gather their students from local neighborhoods, but even so, I never found any schools in the three states I mentioned that had any "lily white" schools in them.

Posted by Rex | August 24, 2007 9:05 PM

Maybe, just maybe, the appeal of the Republican party in the south has a lot to do with federalism. I know that in Manhattan "states rights" is code for racism, but in the south it is a serious discussion about the role of a central government.

And Rex is right, there is racism in the south, but it is individual racism. It appears that in the north the racism is still institutional. I know that the "elites" like to feel smug and condescending about southerners, but they have disdain for actually being in contact with working class black people, whereas in the south the culture is integrated.

For the record, I'm a Texan, so I don't belong in either camp.

Posted by J.R. | August 24, 2007 10:07 PM

Bear in mind also that the Republicans, as the party of Lincoln, were not going to be favored by Southern whites, and until FDR the black vote (such as it was, & mostly in the North) was much more Republican. Then the Democratic Party made moves in the direction of civil rights, and most white Southern Democrats (think of them, really, as "Dixiecrats," not fully part of the national Democratic Party) saw which side their bread was buttered on, & changed affiliation accordingly.
As to Northern/Southern school districts, geography & population distibution/density may have a lot to do w/ it, although I've no doubt there's been deliberate segregation as mentioned above by Rex. Similar sorts of things have been done in the Indianapolis metro region, where I understand a consolidation of school districts was done in a way that allowed mostly white suburbanites to avoid devoting any of their property taxes to "inner-city" (one of those coded Republican phrases) schools.

Posted by M. Bouffant | August 24, 2007 10:29 PM

GADGET OF THE WEEK
Object of the week
Ms. McA.: Are you a paid celebrity endorser?
And it's "Dalmatian" (w/ an "a," not an "o").

Posted by M.Bouffant | August 24, 2007 10:36 PM

Southern politicians were not notably more conservative than others on non-racial issues during the segregation era. The arch-segretationists Orval Faubus and George Wallace pursued generally "progressive" policies. (Liberal policies were commonly called "progressive" at that time in the South.) Curiously, Faubus had to fight off allegations of Communist connections. Many other prominent politicians supported progressive policies, such as Senators Allen Ellender (also charged with Communist connections), William Fulbright, and Richard Russell, as well as politicians such as Sam Rayburn, the Long faction in Louisiana, and even Spiro Agnew. Spencer made some good comments above about the change in status of Southern whites from beneficiaries of liberal policies to seeing themselves as victims of them. Other cultural issues helped the Republicans gain Southern whites, such as the perception (brilliantly exploited by Wallace for his own goals) of liberals as cultural elites seeking to impose their views on the South. But really, racial prejudice carried the Republicans to dominance in the South. Barry Goldwater was not a racist, but his state's rights rhetoric was music to segregationist voters opposed to federal civil rights legislation. Of course, "liberal" and "conservative" have changed meaning over the years: a Goldwater conservative of the 1950's-1960's might see little to support in the current conservative administration, and might assail it as espousing foreign policy adventurism, reckless enlargement of Medicare, attacks on civil liberties, wild expansion of the executive branch, a weak dollar policy, and fiscal irresponsibility.

Posted by g c | August 24, 2007 11:04 PM

How racist was the Southern Strategy?
The Southern Strategy was very racist.

Megan, this isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of historical fact and interpretation. Please do bother to do some research before posting silly questions.

Posted by cs | August 25, 2007 12:14 AM

Ah, I see, or rather 'cs' is showing more than a wee bit of the intolerance in that statement. I haven't been impressed with the level of discourse brought to the table by this commenter, and will probably find myself just skipping over the blather, if it continues and is true to form.

'Why continue to beat your head against a wall, when you already know the result?'

Posted by falkoyn | August 25, 2007 12:17 AM

GOP strategist Lee Atwater in historian Alexander Lamis' book The Two-Party South:

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

Krugman was more right than you or Matt.

Posted by joejoejoe | August 25, 2007 12:43 AM

Rex replies: "I am not saying that there aren't a lot of integrated schools in the North; what I am saying is because of the way many school districts are drawn in the North, they are segregated. Compare Roosevelt School District with Merrick-Bellmore on Long Island and you will quickly find out what I am talking about. In the South, by contrast, there are city and county school districts, and a city and a county are just too darned big to be segregated.

What you might be thinking of are individual schools within the districts that usually gather their students from local neighborhoods, but even so, I never found any schools in the three states I mentioned that had any "lily white" schools in them."

I'm sure you made an exhaustive search, chuckles.

What you actually said was "School systems in the South are integrated; those in the North aren't--they have many small districts so that they can have white districts and black districts." So yes, you DID say Northern schools weren't integrated. PERIOD. Don't blame me for your inability to say what you think you meant.

And if you're claiming all Southern schools are integrated, I still say you're spraying bovine by-products around.

Comparing one Northern district to one Southern one is simply not convincing, chuckles. And are you going to tell me that there aren't suburbs of Atlanta (for example) that are lily-white or close to it? Get serious.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 25, 2007 12:47 AM

Even if no politician changed their views about anything at all (stated or true), and nobody had any political strategy at all, it would have probably still happened that:

(1) the south would have started electing more republicans.

(2) the republican party as a whole would become more "racist" as "racist" southern democrats were replaced with "racist" southern republicans.

Posted by ed | August 25, 2007 1:21 AM

I kant wait until R.S. MkKain and S. Sailer get MkArdle's invite to this topik.

Posted by Kluxers Kome Krawling | August 25, 2007 1:42 AM

The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views.

Matthew is misstating the history. Poor white southerners were not particularly anti-tax from the 1930s through 1950s. They were not anti-big government in the era of the TVA, or for that matter while their state governments were run for the benefit of whites. (It's hard to imagine a greater government intrusion than pervasive segregation.) And while it may be true that the South was pro-military and had certain martial or militarist tendencies, those tendencies were shared by Democratic presidents until 1972 -- i.e., until the beginning of the Southern strategy. So there is no "mystery" as to why Southerners would "vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views". They didn't. Democratic presidential candidates didn't diverge from their views decisively until 1972. (Except with regard to race, viz. Truman and Johnson and, once in office, Kennedy. But the race issue is precisely the one MY is saying has been overplayed.)

Posted by brooksfoe | August 25, 2007 1:44 AM

Just a brief comment: I've lived 8 years in the north--New York--and about 20 in the south. The whole "the north is more racist because it's hidden" thing now seems to me an obvious canard. I see naked, angry racism in the south frequently. I have never seen it, not once, in the north. To say that you know deep down, northerners are more racist but they're just not telling you is to play a psychological guessing-game that is non-falsfiable. "They don't admit their racism, which proves they're racists!" Come on. Who're you gonna believe, the guy who tells you he's a racist, or the guy who, at worst, shows the average American residual societal racism? It's ridiculous, and I say this not only as a southerner, but a proud one.

As for the southern strategy, it's pretty clear--to the extent that it played on racist whites' anger, it was racist. "To the extent." The extent was and is debatable, but it certainly existed; they knew it then and we know it now. You pretty much have to create an alternate universe for this not to be true.

Posted by Lane | August 25, 2007 1:58 AM

You fellas will want to return to this theme as often and as vocally as you can between now and the next election. If Southerners were to go to the polls unaware of how much better you are than them, there's no telling who they might end up voting for.

Posted by Paul Zrimsek | August 25, 2007 3:52 AM

Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Philadelphia, Mississippi is a very small place that is distinguished only for being the town where civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were kidnapped and murdered in 1964.

Reagan spoke about states' rights. He didn't mention civil rights or the murders. He didn't say anything even remotely racially inflammatory - other than being there, that is. He didn't need to say anything, but white Southerners got the message. I don't think Reagan was personally racist or even that he intended to directly promote discriminatory policies, but the effect was to convey to the intended audience that he wouldn't be beholden to "special interests" (blacks) and that he'd be on the side of white Southerners to keep the Federal Govt. from intruding into how they wanted to run their states.

I think it was quite obvious to white Southerners and blacks everywhere what the Southern strategy was about. And anyone who paid attention to the newspaper - I was still a kid when Reagan spoke there, and even I was stunned by the brazenness of the symbolism.

Posted by Ben | August 25, 2007 3:54 AM

Reagan saw the basic argument of state v. federal rights for years, and what he was trying to establish, was the place state rights had over an all-pervading federalist state. He was as non-racist a president we have had. This was exemplified in his actions and how they helped bring minorities to a higher economic standard of living, while widening all individuals rights, not just those of select, smaller special-interest groups.

He was the warmest man you could possibly meet, because he was a real person, someone you liked when you met him. He shared that trait with Bill Clinton, at least if you were a man. Women seemed to have a different effect on the two, at least in their reactions to a woman.

Posted by Ray Gun | August 25, 2007 4:10 AM

In the South, racists used a backdoor form of school segregation after Brown v. Board: privatization. White schools were privatized so that they could stay majority white and had low tuitions but enrollment criteria that guaranteed that they would be all white. Meanwhile, in the Massachusetts of past decade, whenever you have attempts at further de-segregating schools, conservatives like Jeff Jacoby start screaming bloody murder. On my old computer I had a poll saved that broke down Americans' responses to approving/disapproving of interracial relationships. As a region, the South was the last region to have at least 51% of people approving of it, which only came around 1991. Going to school in the North, the biggest problem kids with racism tended to be kids who had recently moved northward from the South or Texas.

Posted by Reality Man | August 25, 2007 4:40 AM

Look, "How racist was the Southern Strategy?" is a completely inane question insofar as the term "Southern Strategy" refers to a Republican decision to campaign in the south employing coded racist appeals. Asking after the extent of the racism just demonstrates ignorance of the meaning of the term: it's completely, inherently racist by definition.

"It should imply that Republican policy changed to make it more palatable to racists. Is this true?"

This is a question not of opinion but of fact and it's easily answered by a few minutes of research. Beyond that laziness, the question is so ill informed that it makes me doubt you have any idea what you're talking about. Matt at least makes some historically debatable points - sure, southern whites held some conservative views before the end of Jim Crow, but the south was also the bed of radical agrarian populism ala Huey Long. The various political views of white southerners wasn't nearly as historically stable nor as homogenous as Matt makes it out to be. Nor were the meanings of "conservative" and "progressive" stable over the period of time under discussion, and it's questionable whether our definitions of those terms are apt for those various sets of circumstances. So, to say the least, Matt's conclusion is pretty questionable. But it's certainly not ignorant.

The racism of Republican policies since, say, 1965 isn't really all that subtle. As (I assume) you're going to be doing the research anyway, try looking up the differential effects by race of welfare reform, or of "law and order" policies. Then try looking up the relative enforcement rates of affirmative action employment laws and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 by Republican and Democratic administrations. It's not the party of Lincoln anymore, and it hasn't been for quite awhile.

(btw - falkoyn: "intolerance"? bite me.)

Posted by cs | August 25, 2007 5:02 AM

Racism explains everything in the south. You can't ingore that in the south 90% of the blacks vote for dems, and 75% of the whites vote for republicans -- its not because of the capital gains tax.

The south was THE tax and spend region before blacks became enfranchised enough to be potential recipients of that spending.

Are you seriously arguing that the region that spawned Huey Long and his "Share Our Wealth" economic platform was always conservative on taxes.

It may be becoming conservative on taxes now, for two reasons. First, republicans have ably portrayed blacks as the recipients of the sharing of the wealth. Second, once you jump on board with a platform, psychologically pressure builds to align your views -- its basic self perception theory. I am a conservative, so I have these views, including the conservative view on taxes.

Posted by pj | August 25, 2007 7:46 AM

The South is still the tax and spend region, so long as we look at how the various federal spending bills (especially the earmarks) are, in effect, massive transfer payments from the Northeast to the Southeast.

Posted by Xenos | August 25, 2007 9:19 AM

You've got a point, Xenos, about money flowing form NE to SE (and a number of other places, too). The states with less people tend to generate a whole hunk less taxes.

The 'natural flow' of taxes would make you tend to believe it goes massively from the more advanced, richer, developed areas to those areas that are traditionally considered more backward, poorer, and especially, more Southern. It's enlightening to see that the flow of dollars to the less densely-populated areas is usually due to one or several large projects that eat up the money. More like build this dam, that bridge, another bigger runway for the airport, as opposed to direct money give-aways to individuals. Don't get me wrong, there are many poor people in the south and intermountain states that do get money directly from agencies of governmental control. But the big projects that skew how money is sent to many of the states makes the money-counting process complex and not simplistic, like human nature prefers to make it.

Seems to be a match: those with hugely passionate (or make it 'partisan') views and an ungodly belief in their own infallibility (or intelligence, arrogance,etc.) tend to make the 'in-' even more pronounced than the 'tolerant.'

Posted by falkoyn | August 25, 2007 9:44 AM

And where were we... racism and the 'Southern Strategy'. Megan's ingenuous question was whether GOP policy changed along racist lines after, say 1964.

As noted above, the economic condition of whites from 1930 to 1964 improved so much that policies that favored the upper and middles classes over the working class necessarily translated into better returns for typical southern whites. While holding onto the aspects of the New Deal that infused the South with Northern cash and working against the Great society programs that were designed to aid the poorest of the poor as so much 'socialism', southern whites were able to use the racially neutral language of GOP rhetoric to advance a governing system that was, in its result, plainly racist and supporting of white privilege.

Then you take the shifts in political rhetoric advanced by Atwater and his followers since 1975, and we have a major political party now composed of occulted racists, self loathing and denying homosexuals, self-dealing corporate insiders, militarists, petty thugs, and all the other loathsome hangers-on generally associated with nascent fascist movements.

So the answer, Megan, is yes, but in a complicated way that is belied by the astonishingly simplistic way you posed the question. Then again, as someone who shamelessly associates herself with the moral, philosophical, and literary fraud that is objectivism, we should not be surprised by such juvenile poses on your part.

Posted by Xenos | August 25, 2007 9:50 AM

Now that the Atlantic has hired a libertarian blogger, it should hire a Communist blogger to balance her out.

McArdle apparently believes, as do most disciples of Ayn Rand, that individuals have no major responsibilities to the society in which they live, and that it is evil and repressive for society to impose any responsibilities, beyond obeying laws necessary to maintain order, upon them.

If the Atlantic really wants to give equal space to all wavelengths of the political spectrum, it should hire someone whose beliefs are the opposite of hers. That would be someone who thinks society has no responsibilities to the individual, just to its collective members — in other words, a Communist.

I like Matthew Yglesias, but pretending that he is a counterbalance to McArdle just doesn't cut it. He's a sensible liberal. This calls for a flame-thrower. Hire a Red.

Posted by Philly Boy | August 25, 2007 11:01 AM

ML&J,

Evidently you think that a school system or district is the same as an individual school. I guess that you also think that Atlanta is in Virginia, North Carolina, or South Carolina.

It's not my writing ability that's in question; it's your reading ability.

Posted by Rex | August 25, 2007 11:03 AM

Defending southern racism as a love of federalism doesn't work either. Procedure never gets people worked up, its substance that matters.

Currently, southern politicians who supposedly love federalism are pushing for a federal law banning gay marriage, a federal law requiring prayer in schools, a federal law banning abortion, and on and on. It's not federalism they care about in the south

Posted by pj | August 25, 2007 11:32 AM

Rex replies: "Evidently you think that a school system or district is the same as an individual school. I guess that you also think that Atlanta is in Virginia, North Carolina, or South Carolina."

Ah, I see. This isn't about the South. It's only about where Rex lived.

Sheesh. Here's what Rex said: "School systems in the South are integrated; those in the North aren't--they have many small districts so that they can have white districts and black districts."

Then after that he listed 3 states. He was making a general statement about "the South."

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 25, 2007 11:42 AM

In 1964 I was a Goldwater guy. The last Republican I voted for was Gerald Ford. I did not leave the Republican party; the party left me. In 1964 the argument for states rights still had some plausibility in the Midwest. By 1968 it was clear to me that this a code word for segregation. I then became very selective in voting. By 1977 I realized that the Republican Party was dependent on soft toned racism for its victories and left.

Most likely I will support another Goldwater girl for President: Hillary. Her positions, like mine, grow out of Goldwaterism. Odd how conservativism has changed.

Posted by dalea | August 25, 2007 1:43 PM

Megan, reading a few threads back, I see you never answered the questions about the your proletarian background. You are quoted as saying both these things, can you please please elucidate?

A)My parents did not spring, full grown from the head of Zeus, into being on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I have relatives elsewhere

B)Megan McArdle was born and raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Please don't just duck this. Your fans here deserve better.

Posted by Mary Elkins | August 25, 2007 1:57 PM

http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/weir/weir_pdf/STATES_%20RACE%20revisionA%206-1-05.pdf

Posted by jonathan | August 25, 2007 2:04 PM

megan,

Weapons-grade stupid?
Whoever tagged you with that description pretty much got it right.
(For those interested, Megan participates in a fairly revealing diavlog over at Bloggingheads, entitled: "The Weapons Grade Stupid Edition". In that edition, Megan reveals that someone had described her as "weapons-grade stupid"! It appears to be a fairly accurate description, I'd say.
Readers should be able to link to it here:

http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=372. )

The more I ponder your post, the dumber it seems.
Jeez...I also have a dog that is pretty smart. I'm sure he can conjure up something that has more substance than I've seen so far from this tripe! Where do I send his resume?

Posted by frankie d | August 25, 2007 2:06 PM

Also,
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3067/1/42/

I have "Working Toward Whiteness"; there's a huge chunk in the middle which details how a lot of New Deal and post-war programs were pushed through only on the contingency that they were white-only. For example, the FHA deliberately zoned housing into "good" and "bad" areas, and your chances on getting a mortgage in a "good" area very much depended on the color of your skin. This wasn't/isn't a north vs. south issue, and to try to make it into one misses the point. It is very much a liberal/conservative issue, however, and if you don't recognize that, your high school history teacher needs to be punched in the face repeatedly.

Posted by jonathan | August 25, 2007 2:11 PM

"...the experience of Reconstruction..."

And what is that supposed to mean? That somehow the poor southerners were put-upon by Reconstruction? And are the injured parties? How perverse.

Go read some history, Megan.

Posted by DMS | August 25, 2007 2:16 PM

Mary E.: I showed Megan's two mysterious propositions to a professor I know in the Dept. of Obviousness at Columbia. His interpretation is that Megan's parents were born in a proletarian neighborhood someplace (where they still have relatives)-- whence they moved to the Upper West Side, where they had Megan.

He made a point of asking you whether there's anything else he can help you with-- warning labels, that sort of thing. He sounded anxious.

Posted by Paul Zrimsek | August 25, 2007 2:23 PM

Megan McArdle. Smart enough to get a good discussion going. Too lazy to do research.

Posted by Walter Crockett | August 25, 2007 3:32 PM

It's a matter of historical record that when the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the most racist whites moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party. The progressive white Republicans, who had clung to that "party of Lincoln" business, switched to the Democratic side, as did new black voters.

The argument people on the right should be making is that the Democratic majority, mid-century, was one founded on white supremacy -- and so was illegitimate. But to its credit, the national Democratic party then undermined itself by embracing justice. The Republicans saw an opening, and opened their doors to the former Democratic racists. The outright racism is gone, but there's no doubt the Southern strategy was founded on racism.

As late as '78-79, Reagan announced his candidacy for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers had been slain, and invoked "states rights" in his speech. Whom do you suppose that appeal was aimed at?

Posted by Xavier | August 25, 2007 3:57 PM

DMS,

Perhaps it is you who should read some history. The Jim Crow movement and the KKK both arose out of the Reconstruction period. Did you ever hear of the Carpetbaggers? Or the term, the Rape of the South?

I'm in no way defending the Jim Crow laws or the KKK, nor would I have belonged to them if I had lived back then. But to ignore the unfair conditions which spawned them is to indeed ignore history.

Posted by Rex | August 25, 2007 4:07 PM

Megan (ahhh...Jane),

As a fan of your original blog, I wish more of us would show up - if nothing else to help recover the level of conversation from the descent into leftist sneering.

As to the racism inherent in the Republican Southern strategy, I can't help but notice that many of the self-professed "more-sophisticated-than-thou" would-be elites fail to make much reference to the extent of present day Southern racism. One would think that, should such a policy have been dependent on the success of maintaining the legitimacy of Southern racism, such racism would have necessarily been maintined or such a strategy would have failed miserably. Can anyone proffer any evidence that this alleged racism in excess of national averages has been maintained? Or are we dealing with a group of pseudo-intellectuals who just know those dastardly Republicans just detest black people.

Posted by Bill Dalasio | August 25, 2007 4:49 PM

Southern blacks are more conservative than northern blacks, FWIW.

The Southern Strategy certainly did reach out to white conservatives dispossessed by LBJ's Great Society programs and the changing world, etc, but it wasn't as simple as racist vs. non-racist. The federal measures that were enacted in the 60s to combat racism in the South did have some side-effects in terms of federalism that were not inconsiderable. And they didn't do much to curb northern racism, which was and is just as virulent as the southern variety.

Posted by Richard Bennett | August 25, 2007 4:59 PM

As a fan of your original blog, I wish more of us would show up - if nothing else to help recover the level of conversation from the descent into leftist sneering.

At the time she moved, I thought she was a moderate liberal with an MBA. Now The Atlantic's readers have me confused.

Posted by Kwyjibo | August 25, 2007 5:55 PM

The more pertinent question, though it is unlikely to be addressed here, is: How racist is the current liberal/progressive plantation?

Posted by Ed Reid | August 25, 2007 9:37 PM

Ed Reid writes: "The more pertinent question, though it is unlikely to be addressed here, is: How racist is the current liberal/progressive plantation?"

How paranoid are the right-wingers who still like to pretend that liberals run everything?

I've even seen some of the nutjobs claim that Fox News is run by liberals.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 25, 2007 11:34 PM

Moe~Curly: How you take this statement by Ed Reid, "The more pertinent question, though it is unlikely to be addressed here, is: How racist is the current liberal/progressive plantation?" and turn it into your mess of a statement, is beyond me.

Even the lamest ninth grader who slept through the first 8 months of civic class can understand the question. It has nothing to do with who is in power (let's see, just who IS the Senate Majority Leader and House Majority Leader...???), it's an honest question triggered, I believe, by the results of the policies the Left has pushed for mega years. Why, even that ultra-Liberal old scalawag from West Virginia would flip you the Byrd, Moe, if you tried to besmirch his Heritage.

Posted by falkoyn | August 26, 2007 12:57 AM

I'm sure most things are beyond you, falkoyn. Now go out in your front yard and polish your lawn jockey.

I understood Ed Reid's question. I just think it's the sort of inane thing Rush Limbaugh grunts out while marginal intellects like you guffaw.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | August 26, 2007 2:04 AM

Welfare-for-life was a good example of the left wing thought plantation. It assumed that black women were too stupid and laze to hold jobs, and that black fathers were born to run. The heartless Gingrich welfare reform turned these assumptions upside down, and all fair-minded welfare students acknowledge that it was a huge success. Welfare-for-life was racist at the core, an example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Posted by Richard Bennett | August 26, 2007 6:22 AM

Victimhood-for-life and affirmative-action-for-life are also racist at the core. However, the disdain for achievement and responsibility in the black community today is probably an unintended consequence, though many "black leaders" have been very loud in their criticism of Bill Cosby and others for pointing it out and telling the black community that it must end.

Posted by Ed Reid | August 26, 2007 8:37 AM

The media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.

Posted by Bobby MkKkain | August 26, 2007 10:41 AM

Yep, this is exactly the quality of commentary produced by innocently asking "How racist is the southern strategy?"

Again, Megan, nice job.

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