There are many odd features of the narrative based epistemology that governs party politics. One of them is the need for stories connecting the opposing party’s guilt and corruption, in the present day, to a history of guilt and corruption extending back over generations. This is an understandable instinct. Institutions do take on characters, and the cultures of institutions are heritable. Politically educated people should, however, recognize that political parties are particularly subject to change, over even short periods of time. The policies and cultural positions of the Democratic and Republican parties of today make them, in many respects, utterly unlike the Democratic and Republican parties of merely twenty-five years ago (or even ten). Nevertheless, American conservatives have been particularly adamant in tying the identity of the modern Democratic Party to the racist legacy of the Democratic Party of the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As a corollary, Republicans and conservatives have sought to elevate the perception of the modern GOP by connecting it to the abolitionist legacy of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil Rights Movement. To accomplish both these things, modern Republicans and conservatives have decried the story of the party switch (the idea that the Democratic and Republican parties switched places on matters of civil rights) as a myth. In so doing, we conservatives have created our own mythology around this period of history. For the sake of historical clarity, this counter mythology needs to be dispelled.
There is a crude version of the left-wing narrative around these events that is itself flawed. The ordinary telling that one hears is that the Republican Party, once the relative champion of civil rights in our two party system, embraced the bigotry of Southern white voters, starting in the late 1960s, soon after Democratic President Lyndon Johnson won the allegiance of African-Americans by signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thus, African-Americans, still largely Republican, and Southern whites, who were still largely Democrats, switched allegiance en masse.
This isn’t quite true, however. By the time LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, most African-Americans were already Democrats, and had been for some time. In 1960, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy won 68% of the black vote versus 32% for Richard Nixon. Yet he underperformed against Franklin Roosevelt, who won 71% of the black vote in his first re-election campaign in 1936.
For African-Americans then, the party switch was more a consequence of the impact of the Great Depression and the appeal of FDR’s New Deal than it was a consequence of LBJ’s civil rights legislation. It is also incorrect that white southern Democrats switched party affiliation to Republican in a fell swoop. Older white southern Democrats, in particular, remained Democrats as a rule into the 80s and early 90s. Republicans did not win a majority of congressional seats in the South until as late as 1994.
The core claim at the heart of the party switch myth, however, is not so much that white southerners and African-Americans immediately switched party affiliation following the Civil Rights Act and the advent of the Southern Strategy (this ignores the degree to which party affiliation was less tied to Americans’ larger sense of personal identity at that point in history). The core claim is that the appeal of the parties on the basis of perceived racial issues switched constituencies during this period. This is evidenced not so much by changes in voter registration (although black Republican registration did fall from 22% to 3% from 1960 to 1968) as it is by changes in voting patterns on the presidential level among demographics, starting in 1964. It is also evidenced by the actions and attitudes of key figures from the era.
In 1964, Republican nominee Barry Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination on a hard right platform, opposing the Civil Rights Act. This split the party, losing him the support of prominent African-American Republicans like Jackie Robinson as well as moderate and liberal northeastern Republicans, such as George Romney. This position did help earn Goldwater support, however, in the only region of the country that would give it to him on election day: the Deep South.
The deep southern states include Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina. These states were the heart of the Confederacy and the epicenter of the Jim Crow era oppression that the civil rights activism of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was primarily designed to oppose. Given the context of this particular election, it is difficult to imagine any reason for this region’s support of Goldwater’s candidacy other than his lonely stand in opposition to the dramatic federally enforced changes in social policy visited against the legal (and cultural) status quo of the South.
Conservatives, including Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro, will acknowledge this fact, while pointing out that these deep southern states did not vote for Richard Nixon in 1968. This seems to disconfirm the notion that the Republican Party had developed an enduring appeal for white southerners on the basis of opposition to civil rights.
Yet the history of the Southern Strategy (an admitted effort by certain Republican officials and strategists to capitalize on Southern racial animus by signaling support for anti-civil rights views) is traceable to this time. In 1969, assuming that GOP success in the 1966 midterms and Nixon’s election in 1968 were largely the result of Southern and ethnic white backlash against race legislation and Johnson’s Great Society, Republican strategist Kevin Phillips published a book entitled The Emerging Republican Majority. In it, he prophesizes that “White Democrats will desert their party in droves the moment it becomes a black party.” (Phillips meant this particularly with respect to presidential elections.)
He had good reason to think this. Following the massive gains made by the GOP among white voters in the several years after the Civil Rights Act, Phillips had steered Republican candidates in formerly liberal areas, including the Bronx, away from an embrace of the Great Society and towards opposition to expanding welfare, busing policies, housing subsidies and other Democratic policies that aimed to appeal to blacks. His methods were successful, and he was brought aboard Nixon’s campaign to apply his savvy.
Yet, if Phillips is right, how do we explain Nixon’s loss of the Deep South in 1968?
Actually, it’s not that difficult. Candidate Nixon, while winning most southern states, did not lose the Deep South to his democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey. He lost the deepest, most socially reactionary states to the most socially reactionary candidate in the race—Dixiecrat turned American Independent Party nominee, former Alabama governor George Wallace.
Wallace was infamous as a symbol of the Jim Crow south. His own temporary defection from the Democratic Party had everything to do with his dissatisfaction with the party’s embrace of racial integration and associated reforms (as did Senator Strom Thurmond’s permanent switch to the GOP). After failing to gain support for an announced primary challenge against John F. Kennedy (who did not live to run for re-election) in 64, Wallace proceeded to sweep the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas on the strength of his segregationist appeal. Nixon, however, won the deep southern state of South Carolina, along with every other southern state. The real loser in the South was Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey.
As Phillips is reported to have explained in 1970:
In the Outer South, the national Democratic party has begun to replace the G.O.P. as the symbol of alien causes—the Negro politicians and Federal interference with local autonomy. Hence, the shift to Republicanism, a trend which for the same reasons has engulfed the milder border states and will, Phillips insists, capture the perfervid Deep South when events force the abandonment of the more extreme Wallace alternative.
In 1964, overtures were reportedly floated from Governor Wallace to Barry Goldwater, offering to partner on a bipartisan, national ticket, given their common opposition to the Civil Rights Act and anti-states-rights legislation. (“It must be apparent to a one-eyed N—h who can’t see good outta his other eye that me and Goldwater would be a good ticket.”) For reasons of both strategy and personal distaste, it appears that Goldwater had no interest in such a partnership. Beyond this, the appeal of Goldwater to Wallace and southern segregationists generally in 1964 was not necessarily indicative of the nature of the ongoing appeal of the Republican Party, with respect to racial issues in the South. Goldwater, hero of the conservative movement, was nevertheless opposed by much of his own party at the time—a party that would go on to overwhelmingly support the Civil Rights Act in Congress. It is harder to explain why serious conservatives would have sought to link Wallace on a similarly conceived bipartisan ticket with a more promising conservative star—California Governor Ronald Reagan—as the conservative movement grew more influential in the Republican Party and more appealing in the South.
As Laura Kalman writes in Right Star Rising:
In May 1975 … Richard Viguerie launched Conservative Digest: A Magazine for the New Majority, designed to unite the followers of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. “Our country, which badly needs a strong Winston Churchill, is stuck with a weak Gerald Ford,” Viguerie proclaimed. The American Conservative Union had preordered five thousand copies of William Rusher’s call for a marriage between followers of Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, The Making of the New Majority Party, as a fundraising premium.
That same year, the second annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC, to which this author has spoken), now the country’s most important annual conservative gathering, produced a “Committee on Conservative Alternatives,” tasked with fielding candidates to staff a third-party presidential ticket, which could unite conservative Republicans and those they considered conservative Democrats. Members of this committee included conservative trailblazer Phyllis Schlafly, prominent figures from the National Review and the American Conservative Union, and former assistants to Ronald Reagan and George Wallace. CPAC’s website describes their motivations: “many conservatives … concluded that it was time to junk the enfeebled GOP and found a new, truly conservative, party, linking forces with the followers of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, whose message had demonstrated surprising resonance in the country at large.”
Like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan seems to have had a distaste for Wallace, and resisted attempts to link his political fortunes to him. But also, like Goldwater, Reagan had opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act on the basis of their infringing upon state’s rights, in line with the position of Wallace and the Dixiecrat South. The evidence that prominent conservatives from the mid 60s to 70s saw some degree of philosophical kinship in the political culture of the white Democratic South is clear. That leading Republican strategists and politicians saw and sought to exploit a shift in southern white political sympathies to the advantage of the Republican Party on matters of race is also clear. Finally, the outcomes of the national elections that followed the Civil Rights Act are largely consistent with the shifting of these partisan sympathies on the national level.
Does this mean that a change in white voters’ perceptions of the parties’ racial sympathies, particularly in the South, is the only explanation for the long-term switch that occurred in this demographics’ party loyalty from the 1960s to today? Certainly not. Univariate explanations for shifts in the political landscape are always tempting. But race-related policies and prejudices are but one explosive factor in the multifaceted set of causes that have led American politics to evolve as they have.
Even before Goldwater, Republican president Dwight Eisenhower won the South, along with an overwhelming majority of the country, on the basis of a strong economy and towering international stature—and perhaps in spite of his having integrated the armed forces. In 1976, liberal Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Republican president Gerald Ford, handily winning the South. This is oft cited to indicate that there really had been no shift in the white South towards the Republican Party on the basis of perceived pro-white political attitudes. Yet Jimmy Carter was a southerner himself, which earned him favor in the region—a phenomenon from which even Bill Clinton would benefit, to a degree. At least as importantly, Jimmy Carter was America’s first evangelical president, at a moment when evangelical political consciousness was sweeping the country, particularly the South. (There is a reasonable argument to be made that the advent of unified evangelical politics and concerns over religious liberty had even more to do with white southerners’ embrace of the GOP than did matters of race.) The decline of the Republican brand, following Watergate, may also have been a factor. Industrialization of the South also shifted some of the economic interests of the region. A historical fixation on the explanatory power of racial politics has blurred a much more complicated picture.
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican parties are innately racist. Modern Republicans will frequently comment that Republicans in Congress supported the Civil Rights Act in greater percentages than did Democrats of the time. This is true, and a function of the fact that a greater percentage of Democrats represented constituencies in the South. However, 96% of northern Democrats supported the legislation, while 0% of southern Republicans did. This suggests that it is not party but region and culture that tend to be the major drivers of our political and social sensibilities. Though there is surely some virtuous cycle of mutual influence, parties tend to reflect and adapt to the attitudes of their constituents more often than they define them.
While the claim that the appeal of the parties on the basis of racial issues switched following the passage of the Civil Rights Act is true enough, there is a greater truth that conservatives who resist this claim often make which deserves to be acknowledged: the South changed its racial attitudes over time. It has changed, just as America has changed. Whether its overarching racial culture has changed nearly enough to meet the higher aspirations of our ideals of racial equality today is a separate question. But the South that the Republican Party represents today is not the South of George Wallace and the neo-segregationists. There is enough to legitimately challenge in the positions, practices and racial politics of both parties today without reaching back to slavery, the Southern Strategy and Jim Crow.
23 comments
Great article (which clearly I am discovering late). I appreciate the more comprehensive analysis. There is one important point that I would add that might give greater context.
You say “By the time LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, most African-Americans were already Democrats, and had been for some time.” and then you say
“For African-Americans then, the party switch was more a consequence of the impact of the Great Depression and the appeal of FDR’s New Deal than it was a consequence of LBJ’s civil rights legislation.”
I would adjust that by pointing out that “By the time LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, most African-Americans IN THE NORTH were already Democrats, and had been for some time.” Those were the African-Americans that had switched to the Democratic party as a result of FDR’s New Deal.
Based on my research, the African-Americans in the south, at the time of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, didn’t have the right to vote due to Jim Crow laws, so they were not really affiliated with any political party in any significant number. Then, in 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed, under a Democratic administration, African-Americans in the South joined the Democratic party, completing the shift of African-Americans to the Democratic party.
Thanks for the article, and the voice in this conversation that never seems to be heard, the one that acknowledges the complex web of processes we all use in decision making. I enjoyed the article much.
Goldwater was only opposed to the Civil Rights Act because he objected to some features of the act which he regarded as unconstitutional. However, he had been enthusiastically in favor of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts–which he voted for–while both acts were overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats. He was also a founding member of the Arizona chapter of the NAACP. He reportedly hired many blacks in his family business, while pushing for desegregation of the Arizona National Guard. But…LBJ seized the moment during the race and created an attack ad (“Confessions of a Republican”) associating Goldwater with the KKK (far from an honest ad), which helped LBJ win…
Yes, the author did a good job on this article and didn’r try to spin in either direction too much that I could see. He did mention once that Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 64 die to issue over states rights but as you pointed out it is a bit more than that. And people will latch on the fact that a senator or rep votes no on a bill like a Civil Rights bill or eqaulity bill and say they are racist or hateful, when in fact the bill will have some much other added stuff, hence the reasom for voting no. It is really unfair. It would be like congress writing a bill call We Love All bill but adding in that bill the government can take away all free speech. Then the one who vote no will always have that threw up forever. They voted against the We Love All bill. Yeah, but for good reason. I think the author of this should go back and add in what you have said about Goldwater for sure.
Isn’t it amazing that the white supremacists, neo-nazis, anti-semites, xenophobic, those in favor of separating children from their parents (those seeking refuge) are all far right? Crazy…
Almost as crazy as wikipedia’s definition of facism and that Antifa is a far left organization that is supported by the Democrats and rioting in the streets.
Isn’t it amazing that you don’t understand history. This article in a way debunks the party switch which means that slave owners during the civil war WERE ALL DEMOCRATS. Founders of the KKK were also democrats. JFK, who was a democrat admired Hitler. The hypocrisy amongst the democrats is wild.
Your primary flaw is the failure to acknowledge that the southern states were predominately Republican prior to the Lincoln Republicans.
Jefferson founded the original Republican party along with James Madison, and as southern slave owners, his party had the full support of the southern states.
While his party would later come to be known as the “Democratic Republican” party, this was a derogatory name given to the party by their federalist opposition.
Jeffersonian Republicans were the true Republicans.
And far closer in ideology to today’s Republican party than Lincoln Republicans ever were.
The abolitionists formed the Republican Party in the 1850s, with the goal of ending slavery. Abraham was the first Republican President. After the party emancipated the slaves and reunited the states, it became known as the Grand Old Party.
What is this garbage you are writing about that can EASILY be refuted — it’s not nearly as complicated a history as the above article was dealing with. You people really do make up stuff in your head, without ever reading a book, and call it “history.”
Wow. That’s a great spin and a distortion of facts. I hope you’re just getting confused with the “Old Republican’s” and the Whig Party. Either way you should really do some more research and reading before spitting such false information. No offense. The Democratic-Republican Party founded in 1790 splintered in 1824, one forming the party which we know today as the Democratic Party and the other the Whig Party. One thing you did accurately hit up on was the opposition from the Federalists to the Democratic-Republican Party, and they often were called the Republicans. The key distinction between these two parties was…the question of social equality. Remember that. Now, back to the newly formed Democratic Party. This party represented Jacksonian Democracy, which dominated the South and would be what you would associate with the “racist slave owning whites” of the Deep South. Now, remember what I told you about that key distinction between the parties being social equality? Well, go read about John C. Calhoun, a Democrat, who supported States Rights, urban workers and poor farmers, and emphasized the rights of…wait for it…minorities. Does this sound familiar? Except in this instance, it meant the “White South”. Now, the Whigs, opposed the Jacksonian Democracy Ideals, and announces themselves as the national Conservative party, holding to the traditional values of the Founding Fathers and patriots, and supporting what some would call Federalists ideals. This would be the branch that would go on to form the GOP that we know today. When Abraham Lincoln came in, a Whig by the way, he strongly appealed to conservative and classical liberal ideals. (The liberal ideals we see today are not the same and are a derivative of a shift in the 1950’s and the rest of the world would classify it as far left.) Abraham Lincoln supported big business, banks, industrialization, and most importantly argued that the Founding Fathers were anti-slavery, and that slavery violated the founding ideals of America. In fact, did you know that Thomas Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime” and wanted to add it to the Declaration of Independence along with other Founders who opposed slavery? Abraham Lincoln wanted to reform the nation based on the original ideals that makes America great. Does this sound familiar? To finish up, I recommend reading the Federalist Papers, and my comment to panthony down below.
Your premise is incorrect because there were no Republicans prior to Lincoln.
We cant let these people teach our children this bull
While I find your article interesting and in some respects knowledgeable, I disagree with your “But the South that the Republican Party represents today is not the South of George Wallace and the neo-segregationists. There is enough to legitimately challenge in the positions, practices and racial politics of both parties today without reaching back to slavery, the Southern Strategy and Jim Crow.’ The Conservative Democratic South has had no interest in Racial equality whether as Democratic or Republican. Why else would the attempt to suppress Minority voters? The GOP sold its soul to the “States Rights” theory in order to maintain white superiority and dominance. When or If the Southern Conservative ( Democrat or Republican) ever apologizes for their Attacks on “Freedom Riders”, Lynching, KKK atrocities, Murders of MLK, Medgar Evers, then I will consider revising my strongly held beliefs.
Go read my comment to Tracy Ripple and panthony.
Man. “ The GOP sold its soul to the “States Rights” theory in order to maintain white superiority and dominance.” That’s a loaded statement. Do you have factual evidence to back this up? The issue of state rights has always been a fluctuating issue between both parties and goes back to the original 13 colonies. The GOP has always supported conservatism and classical liberal ideals, adhering traditionally to the constitution and falling back on the philosophical ideologies of the Founding Fathers. It goes back to the question of how much power can the Federal government have without infringing on the rights of the people. What does a free and independent United States mean? Not every state is the same. The GOP pushed for Federalization and nationalism during and after the Civil War to reunify the country and abolish slavery. But at its core it has always believed in limiting Federal powers as much as possible and giving that back to the people, not just “Whites”. They didn’t “sell their soul”, states rights and social equality has always been a point of contention on both sides of the political spectrum. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party wanted to end slavery because they knew that the Founding Fathers expected it to die naturally, it violated the very ideals on which the nation was founded, and it had no place in America’s future. Now what follows is just my opinion, but your issue is with racist people in general, and you know I’ve met more racist people up in New York than I’ve ever seen in the south nowadays. You really think you’re going to get an apology from an insignificant small number of hateful racist diluted people though? Seriously, the number of KKK members nationwide has dropped to 3,000. That’s like .001 percent of the pop. They are dead and dying. We won the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement, America wins…many Americans died fighting that hate of all races. That’s the history to remember and tell. Hateful people will always be everywhere, dredging up the past and looking for some kind of retribution at this point is like beating a dead horse. The vast majority of the people in the south have changed. What we should be doing is continuing pressing forward dispelling any sense of disunity stemming from racism, by upholding the very ideals on which Abraham Lincoln and MLK fought for, the original ideals put forth by the founding fathers. Not looking back for an apology. We don’t need one, we won. Identity politics is dangerous, and stereotyping a person because of where they’re from or what they’re political belief is dangerous too, so I think it’s wrong to say “when the southern conservative of today apologizes”, when that person didn’t have anything to do with those awful acts of the past. Again, those people you want to apologize are dead or dying.
Good piece, people tend to adopt history they approve of rather than accept how it happened. But therein lies the rub, while we can record what DID happen, why it happened tend to be a bit more fluid. This is why using presidential politics to make certain claims towards regions or attitudes tends to favor one’s own beliefs. The only hard and fast rule that runs across the spectrum is personal financial security. Using trends and macros are useful only if various factors are isolated. Jimmy Carter is a good example as you pointed out. Not all voters bother to learn the politics of candidates, some are driven solely by media, others by political faction, and still others by philosophical reasons and they all could live on the same street.
This is why democracies are dangerous. A vote means very little outside an expression of one’s own bias. I am not opposed to self determination but without the discipline to adhere to inviolable principles our future as a republic will remain at risk.
I don’t have to agree with the entire article to truly appreciate so much nuance all in one place. Thank you. That does not discount the first comment.
And more importantly the 2nd one.
— panthony — June 26, 2019 at 4:12 pm
Yes I liked all the comments present at my time of posting. 😉
I guess you’re not old enough to know that the Southern states voted Democrat in every election up until the election of Richard Nixon. Other than the brief election period of Jimmy Carter in 1976 not one Democrat has won the Solid South in a presidential election.
That’s not true. It was literally just stated in the article that “ Even before Goldwater, Republican president Dwight Eisenhower won the South, along with an overwhelming majority of the country”. That’s a fact. Eisenhower won not once, but twice both in 1952 and 56. Look it up. Now it’s true that the majority of southern states still voted Democrat but this is still indicative of gradually shifting values. Even going further, in 1928 Herbert Hoover, a Republican, won 47% of the popular vote in the south. The Republican Party became more competitive in the south, especially following the Reconstruction Era and Industrialization of the South following the Civil War. This narrative that everyone just up and switched political affiliations in a matter of a few years is a farse. Oh, and one more fact to chew on, in 1964, after the majority of Democrats voted in opposition of the Civil Rights movement, only one switched to Republican. Just think about it, and read more carefully.
How dare you marshal enough nuance to derail cherished meta-narratives, Left and Right alike.
Hahaha. My apologies.