12th Doctor
supersoulty
Atlas Star
Posts: 20,584
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« on: February 01, 2010, 01:02:27 AM » |
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The last Presidential election in which the forces of segregation (think anti-Catholicism, anti-Judaism, et al) were a significant force in either party (in this case the Democrats) was the election of 1924. After that began the long decline of segregation as a serious political force. That is not to say that it still wasn't present, but it no longer had the force to sway the electoral discussion that it once did.
People misinterpret the events of political elections following WWII. The political ideas that went along with segregation were in steep decline through that period. Hence why they went rouge so many times. That's something you do out of desperation, not because you are powerful. The Democrats proved that they didn't need the politics of segregation to carry an election, and the Republicans never did.
Of course, these leads to talks about "The Southern Strategy" and how the Republicans supposedly coopted the politics of the Old South in the 1970's (and supposedly this became a lock with Reagan). Serious analysis no longer supports this urban legend. The fact is that vast areas of the South changed, both socially and economically. There was nothing particularly socially conservative about the South prior to the 1970's, except on issues of race. The South, for instance, had the most liberal abortion laws in the country, prior to Roe vs Wade. And the South was probably the most economically liberal region of the country, due to the deep poverty that existed there prior to the emergence of the New South. That economic resentment fed into the racial resentment that held up segregation. One that changed, the nature of the South changed. Plus, many Northerners moved into the South, to follow the new economy.
In many places, the social order of the Old South simple fell apart. You want to know what happened to it, look at the counties in the upper south that still held their allegiance to the Democrats until a black man ran on the ticket.
There is no "shift". It died with a whimper. And that process started in 1928.
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