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0 pointsrayiner5y ago0 comments

TL;DR version

1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.

It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.

2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.

0 comments

tptacek5y ago

It's not often I get to say that I think you're genuinely wrong, but here I think you're really far off the mark. Goldwater flipped the deep south (GA SC AL MS and LA). Nixon noticed and ran the same strategy in '68, by which point the entire south, wall-to-wall, was lined up behind the southern strategy (the states that didn't go for Nixon went for Wallace). I don't see any way you can read the history of the 1960s and 1970s as the Republican party running away from segregation; the opposite is true, and was literally recorded in newspaper features of the time:

https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-souther...

(Similarly, I think you've collapsed the GOP of the 60s too far down; the Rockefeller Republicans were, on domestic policy, square in the middle of where the mainstream Democratic party is today. George Romney would have opposed AOC, but so does Gina Raimondo.)

At any rate, when people debate which is the "racist" party, they almost invariably ignore the fact that the US was a 4-party polity in the mid-century, not a 2-party polity. What's changed since then is that we have, from 1980 through today, sorted down to 2.

rayinerOP5y ago

You're just incorrect to equate Goldwater with Nixon/Reagan, and to draw a straight line from supporting segregation to opposing affirmative action/bussing/etc.

Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.

Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.

This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...

> 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.

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