Biden’s $6.8 Trillion Budget Proposes New Social Programs and Higher Taxes on wealthy

[Badger]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

1. Actually read Reagan’s state rights speech and you can see there was nothing wrong with the content of it .  

2. Ok tell me what did the racists get policy wise in the past 40 years if The southern strategy was so evil .

3. I mean you are an economic progressive as well , and without the southern strategy it’s likely the US is more like Canada today and you would obviously prefer that but I 100 would not .  

4. Also look at a map of the 1980 election and you can see Reagan lost the White Rural Vote in the south . He just overwhelmingly won the suburban vote and proved you could win states just by winning that vote and that’s what changed politics.

Reagan showed that any candidate who could dominate the suburbs , would win that particular state and it really didn’t matter how a candidate did in rural or urban areas in that state as well .

Characteristically foolish and myopic on so many levels, but let's start with the biggest Whopper of all that white Suburban Southerners in 1980 weren't especially racist.

You still haven’t answered my question of what policy win did the southern racists get in the past 40 years .

Policy > Vibes so please answer that question

Where to begin? A hardcore attack on affirmative action in executive orders, enforcement of civil rights laws - hello Clarence Thomas - and in the courts.

An attack on the welfare state was widely regarded by many working class whites as not catering to those shiftless inner-city blacks. If you really are ignorant of what Lee Atwater EXPRESSLY SAID the Republican party's strategy on this point was then you really should just do a quick Google search to educate yourself. That was a HUGE part of Reagan’s legacy even you must admit.

I could go on at length, but here's a single article I found with about 8 Seconds of internet search, which you could do as well if you had the slightest interest in actually exploring the issue in good faith.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a34733508/reagans-showtime-racism-matt-tyrnauer-ian-haney-lopez-donald-trump/

And then there's Beyond you trying to break it down to actual policy, even though there's a great deal of that. You know the old LBJ line, right? If you can convince the poorest white man that he's better than the richest black man you can pick his pocket at will. Hell, they'll even help you pick his pocket! Reagan undeniably seen by whites as " standing up" to blacks and Hispanics and other racial minorities who had, in the mind of too many people with racist beliefs, run things too long and were given special advantages over White people. Thank goodness that ignorant mentality has totally disappeared today, and the Republican party no longer Stokes that myth, right?

Dude, it's okay to assess Your Heroes fairly and call them out for their own shortcomings and wrongdoing. I consider FDR perhaps easily the top three if not best present we ever had, but I likewise don't cut him any slack whatsoever for one of the worst post slavery outrageous in our history with the Japanese American internment. ( the only other thing I can say is that there wasn't a single politician in america, including a single republican, who opposed it. It doesn't make it any better, but it doesn't make FDR's Republican opposition one iota more desirable.) Feel free to grow a little and do some research, and maybe acknowledge that even if you appreciate Reagan's Economic Policy of scaling back upper level taxes and government regulation, that his race policies we're awful and regretful. Give it a shot.

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

[Vosem]

I love that we have this conversation every six months and every six months we are forced to contend with allegedly educated people seeming to sincerely believe that one dying man with a brain tumor blew the lid on a conspiracy that half of society is in on.

[Badger]

Just because conservatives will vote for blacks or Hispanics who tell them what they want to hear the same as white conservative politicians, even when those views do not reflect the views of the vast majority of Black and Hispanic voters proves nothing about there being intrinsic racism or a history thereof in the past decades and right up to the present in the Republican party. This whole " look at my African-American supporter!!" Proves nothing.

It does, actually; the raw numbers involved here are quite large. (Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans vote Republican in any given US presidential election, even in the Obama races). Moreover, you should try to judge people by their actions, not in some weird circuitous way where you're judging them by how others have already judged them.

Let's get to the point where conservatives can regularly earn more than 10% if they're lucky of the African-American vote, and ditto for the large percentage of Hispanics and Asians- notwithstanding some shifts in 2020 which have yet to be shown to be long-term- and then we can discuss whether or not the Republican party has a problem with race. But if you're getting 10% of the African-American vote and regularly getting blown out with other minorities, yeah, the problem isn't with those voters, but with the Republican party. Very difficult for you to accept I know, but reality and you rarely been on speaking terms.

Conservatives bottomed out at about a quarter of the Hispanic and Asian vote, and typically get over a third; these numbers are perfectly respectable. (Unlike with blacks, they also routinely win particular subdemographics; there exist overwhelmingly-Hispanic areas that are Safe R and, while that's not true for Asian areas, ther exist overwhelmingly-Asian areas that are Leans R or so and at least typically vote GOP). Even if that wasn't true, though, the absolute numbers here are again very large. Even if that wasn't true, you should judge people by their actions, not by how others have judged them. You are multiple layers deep in your bad thinking here; you can only reach the nonsense you've posted with several different layers of faulty premises.

Wow! The African-American vote for Republican raised from 9% to 11%, and are only getting blown out by two to one ratio for Hispanic and Asian voters? Color Me convinced! Surely nothing to see here! Truly the Republican party is a rainbow tapestry and has no antipathy whatsoever towards minorities.

Now why can't those silly minority voters just figure that out?

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

1. Actually read Reagan’s state rights speech and you can see there was nothing wrong with the content of it .  

2. Ok tell me what did the racists get policy wise in the past 40 years if The southern strategy was so evil .

3. I mean you are an economic progressive as well , and without the southern strategy it’s likely the US is more like Canada today and you would obviously prefer that but I 100 would not .  

4. Also look at a map of the 1980 election and you can see Reagan lost the White Rural Vote in the south . He just overwhelmingly won the suburban vote and proved you could win states just by winning that vote and that’s what changed politics.

Reagan showed that any candidate who could dominate the suburbs , would win that particular state and it really didn’t matter how a candidate did in rural or urban areas in that state as well .

Characteristically foolish and myopic on so many levels, but let's start with the biggest Whopper of all that white Suburban Southerners in 1980 weren't especially racist.

You still haven’t answered my question of what policy win did the southern racists get in the past 40 years .

Policy > Vibes so please answer that question

Where to begin? A hardcore attack on affirmative action in executive orders, enforcement of civil rights laws - hello Clarence Thomas - and in the courts.

An attack on the welfare state was widely regarded by many working class whites as not catering to those shiftless inner-city blacks. If you really are ignorant of what Lee Atwater EXPRESSLY SAID the Republican party's strategy on this point was then you really should just do a quick Google search to educate yourself. That was a HUGE part of Reagan’s legacy even you must admit.

I could go on at length, but here's a single article I found with about 8 Seconds of internet search, which you could do as well if you had the slightest interest in actually exploring the issue in good faith.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a34733508/reagans-showtime-racism-matt-tyrnauer-ian-haney-lopez-donald-trump/

And then there's Beyond you trying to break it down to actual policy, even though there's a great deal of that. You know the old LBJ line, right? If you can convince the poorest white man that he's better than the richest black man you can pick his pocket at will. Hell, they'll even help you pick his pocket! Reagan undeniably seen by whites as " standing up" to blacks and Hispanics and other racial minorities who had, in the mind of too many people with racist beliefs, run things too long and were given special advantages over White people. Thank goodness that ignorant mentality has totally disappeared today, and the Republican party no longer Stokes that myth, right?

Dude, it's okay to assess Your Heroes fairly and call them out for their own shortcomings and wrongdoing. I consider FDR perhaps easily the top three if not best present we ever had, but I likewise don't cut him any slack whatsoever for one of the worst post slavery outrageous in our history with the Japanese American internment. ( the only other thing I can say is that there wasn't a single politician in america, including a single republican, who opposed it. It doesn't make it any better, but it doesn't make FDR's Republican opposition one iota more desirable.) Feel free to grow a little and do some research, and maybe acknowledge that even if you appreciate Reagan's Economic Policy of scaling back upper level taxes and government regulation, that his race policies we're awful and regretful. Give it a shot.

The irony about this; is that Reagan's racism..... benefited him in the Midwest more than it did in the South in 1980.

And I would argue on the whole, this Southern Strategy actually helped Reagan ( and Nixon ) in the industrial Midwest more than it did in the South.

[Vosem]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

[Vosem]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

[libertpaulian]

Even more generally, the actual politicians who wanted segregation to be reinstated remained Democrats well into the heyday of the 1980s, or long after the Southern Strategy had been in effect. There really isn't any evidence that it was based on racial resentment, which is why to 'prove' this people commonly resort to either the location of a speech coinciding with the location of another, or the literal ravings of a man dying of a brain tumor (nobody has cited Atwater yet but it's obviously going to happen). It's never done with appeals to things that were actually done in office, because they were transparently not racially motivated.

Moreover, all examples of 'dog whistlism' in politics are like this: a close examination reveals that paying attention to alleged dog whistles would not allow you to make accurate predictions about politicians' time in office, and paying attention to what they actually say usually would. And this is true of every culture, not just the United States!

Many of these white voters still support things like universal healthcare, slightly higher taxes for the wealthy, etc., but know that if they vote Republican, black and Hispanic people will be more harmed by GOP economic policies.

"Yeah, I know that voting for the Republican means I might lose my Obamacare, but the GOP will cut TANF, SNAP, and Medicaid for those mooching welfare queens, and we know they don't deserve those benefits!"

I like the part where they continue to do this even as they vote for black and Hispanic politicians and racially intermarry at greater rates and reports of actual racist sentiment in polls have dropped so low as to basically equal the lizardman constant. But we know that, deep down, they really are racist! Some studies that failed to replicate said so!

At some point you have to cut the Gordian knot and admit that maybe people think that if you lower taxes on the wealthy and privatize healthcare, they personally will be better off.

Except we have state and local policy to show that the GOP policies generally don't work.

[libertpaulian]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Willy Horton.

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Willy Horton.

Crime was a big issue for the white ethnic voters who used to previously live in the big cities/ethnic neighborhoods.

Once again folks, read the article I shared.

Was it a big issue in the South ? No.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Just because conservatives will vote for blacks or Hispanics who tell them what they want to hear the same as white conservative politicians, even when those views do not reflect the views of the vast majority of Black and Hispanic voters proves nothing about there being intrinsic racism or a history thereof in the past decades and right up to the present in the Republican party. This whole " look at my African-American supporter!!" Proves nothing.

It does, actually; the raw numbers involved here are quite large. (Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans vote Republican in any given US presidential election, even in the Obama races). Moreover, you should try to judge people by their actions, not in some weird circuitous way where you're judging them by how others have already judged them.

Let's get to the point where conservatives can regularly earn more than 10% if they're lucky of the African-American vote, and ditto for the large percentage of Hispanics and Asians- notwithstanding some shifts in 2020 which have yet to be shown to be long-term- and then we can discuss whether or not the Republican party has a problem with race. But if you're getting 10% of the African-American vote and regularly getting blown out with other minorities, yeah, the problem isn't with those voters, but with the Republican party. Very difficult for you to accept I know, but reality and you rarely been on speaking terms.

Conservatives bottomed out at about a quarter of the Hispanic and Asian vote, and typically get over a third; these numbers are perfectly respectable. (Unlike with blacks, they also routinely win particular subdemographics; there exist overwhelmingly-Hispanic areas that are Safe R and, while that's not true for Asian areas, ther exist overwhelmingly-Asian areas that are Leans R or so and at least typically vote GOP). Even if that wasn't true, though, the absolute numbers here are again very large. Even if that wasn't true, you should judge people by their actions, not by how others have judged them. You are multiple layers deep in your bad thinking here; you can only reach the nonsense you've posted with several different layers of faulty premises.

Wow! The African-American vote for Republican raised from 9% to 11%, and are only getting blown out by two to one ratio for Hispanic and Asian voters? Color Me convinced! Surely nothing to see here! Truly the Republican party is a rainbow tapestry and has no antipathy whatsoever towards minorities.

Now why can't those silly minority voters just figure that out?

The GOP got 40% of the Asian vote and 39% of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and in states like Texas and Florida did way better with them than that number as well .

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

I'm not arguing that Reagan didn't use Racialized language. He did. But it wasn't targeted towards the south. It was targeted at these white ethnic voters in the rust belt.


The South I would assert was going to trend Republican with or without race anyway. The emphasis on lower taxes, no unions, was a big sell for the South, and it attracted a lot of businessmen. We already have seen this in the 1952 election, where Eisenhower won Florida, Texas, for the first time ever.

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

1. Actually read Reagan’s state rights speech and you can see there was nothing wrong with the content of it .  

2. Ok tell me what did the racists get policy wise in the past 40 years if The southern strategy was so evil .

3. I mean you are an economic progressive as well , and without the southern strategy it’s likely the US is more like Canada today and you would obviously prefer that but I 100 would not .  

4. Also look at a map of the 1980 election and you can see Reagan lost the White Rural Vote in the south . He just overwhelmingly won the suburban vote and proved you could win states just by winning that vote and that’s what changed politics.

Reagan showed that any candidate who could dominate the suburbs , would win that particular state and it really didn’t matter how a candidate did in rural or urban areas in that state as well .

Characteristically foolish and myopic on so many levels, but let's start with the biggest Whopper of all that white Suburban Southerners in 1980 weren't especially racist.

You still haven’t answered my question of what policy win did the southern racists get in the past 40 years .

Policy > Vibes so please answer that question

Where to begin? A hardcore attack on affirmative action in executive orders, enforcement of civil rights laws - hello Clarence Thomas - and in the courts.

An attack on the welfare state was widely regarded by many working class whites as not catering to those shiftless inner-city blacks. If you really are ignorant of what Lee Atwater EXPRESSLY SAID the Republican party's strategy on this point was then you really should just do a quick Google search to educate yourself. That was a HUGE part of Reagan’s legacy even you must admit.

I could go on at length, but here's a single article I found with about 8 Seconds of internet search, which you could do as well if you had the slightest interest in actually exploring the issue in good faith.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a34733508/reagans-showtime-racism-matt-tyrnauer-ian-haney-lopez-donald-trump/

And then there's Beyond you trying to break it down to actual policy, even though there's a great deal of that. You know the old LBJ line, right? If you can convince the poorest white man that he's better than the richest black man you can pick his pocket at will. Hell, they'll even help you pick his pocket! Reagan undeniably seen by whites as " standing up" to blacks and Hispanics and other racial minorities who had, in the mind of too many people with racist beliefs, run things too long and were given special advantages over White people. Thank goodness that ignorant mentality has totally disappeared today, and the Republican party no longer Stokes that myth, right?

Dude, it's okay to assess Your Heroes fairly and call them out for their own shortcomings and wrongdoing. I consider FDR perhaps easily the top three if not best present we ever had, but I likewise don't cut him any slack whatsoever for one of the worst post slavery outrageous in our history with the Japanese American internment. ( the only other thing I can say is that there wasn't a single politician in america, including a single republican, who opposed it. It doesn't make it any better, but it doesn't make FDR's Republican opposition one iota more desirable.) Feel free to grow a little and do some research, and maybe acknowledge that even if you appreciate Reagan's Economic Policy of scaling back upper level taxes and government regulation, that his race policies we're awful and regretful. Give it a shot.

I don't see however how this effect was limited to the South. As if the South is everything.

Indeed, new historical research has shown, that " southern " strategy was in fact, a national strategy. More specifically in the Industrial Midwest. Once again, read the article. https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

The urban decay of the 1970s, contributed to the trend as well.

[Badger]

Just because conservatives will vote for blacks or Hispanics who tell them what they want to hear the same as white conservative politicians, even when those views do not reflect the views of the vast majority of Black and Hispanic voters proves nothing about there being intrinsic racism or a history thereof in the past decades and right up to the present in the Republican party. This whole " look at my African-American supporter!!" Proves nothing.

It does, actually; the raw numbers involved here are quite large. (Hundreds of thousands of African-Americans vote Republican in any given US presidential election, even in the Obama races). Moreover, you should try to judge people by their actions, not in some weird circuitous way where you're judging them by how others have already judged them.

Let's get to the point where conservatives can regularly earn more than 10% if they're lucky of the African-American vote, and ditto for the large percentage of Hispanics and Asians- notwithstanding some shifts in 2020 which have yet to be shown to be long-term- and then we can discuss whether or not the Republican party has a problem with race. But if you're getting 10% of the African-American vote and regularly getting blown out with other minorities, yeah, the problem isn't with those voters, but with the Republican party. Very difficult for you to accept I know, but reality and you rarely been on speaking terms.

Conservatives bottomed out at about a quarter of the Hispanic and Asian vote, and typically get over a third; these numbers are perfectly respectable. (Unlike with blacks, they also routinely win particular subdemographics; there exist overwhelmingly-Hispanic areas that are Safe R and, while that's not true for Asian areas, ther exist overwhelmingly-Asian areas that are Leans R or so and at least typically vote GOP). Even if that wasn't true, though, the absolute numbers here are again very large. Even if that wasn't true, you should judge people by their actions, not by how others have judged them. You are multiple layers deep in your bad thinking here; you can only reach the nonsense you've posted with several different layers of faulty premises.

Wow! The African-American vote for Republican raised from 9% to 11%, and are only getting blown out by two to one ratio for Hispanic and Asian voters? Color Me convinced! Surely nothing to see here! Truly the Republican party is a rainbow tapestry and has no antipathy whatsoever towards minorities.

Now why can't those silly minority voters just figure that out?

The GOP got 40% of the Asian vote and 39% of the Hispanic vote in 2022 and in states like Texas and Florida did way better with them than that number as well .

And as noted, even those highly lopsided margins were an extraordinarily good result for republicans over the last 20 to 30 years. That's cherry picking.

[Badger]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

I'm not arguing that Reagan didn't use Racialized language. He did. But it wasn't targeted towards the south. It was targeted at these white ethnic voters in the rust belt.


The South I would assert was going to trend Republican with or without race anyway. The emphasis on lower taxes, no unions, was a big sell for the South, and it attracted a lot of businessmen. We already have seen this in the 1952 election, where Eisenhower won Florida, Texas, for the first time ever.

Both, actually. Though yes it was every bit as effective among Northern Archie Bunker working class types as it was among Southerners who had voted for largely conservative Democrats- with rare exception like William Fulbright- - out of habit since the Civil War.

Although when Goldwater embraced fighting the Civil Rights Act and Democrats embraced passing it, suddenly Southerners had an overnight switch. How odd

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

I'm not arguing that Reagan didn't use Racialized language. He did. But it wasn't targeted towards the south. It was targeted at these white ethnic voters in the rust belt.


The South I would assert was going to trend Republican with or without race anyway. The emphasis on lower taxes, no unions, was a big sell for the South, and it attracted a lot of businessmen. We already have seen this in the 1952 election, where Eisenhower won Florida, Texas, for the first time ever.

Both, actually. Though yes it was every bit as effective among Northern Archie Bunker working class types as it was among Southerners who had voted for largely conservative Democrats- with rare exception like William Fulbright- - out of habit since the Civil War.

Although when Goldwater embraced fighting the Civil Rights Act and Democrats embraced passing it, suddenly Southerners had an overnight switch. How odd

On the other hand, the 1980 election saw Reagan barely winning the South, often by 1 percentage points in many Southern States. Perhaps it's because of native son, Jimmy Carter. But even look at 1984.

Reagan underperformed with rural white working class voters in both elections. These voters were the base of George Wallace's 1968 campaign, and Nixon's. Where did Reagan over performed ? The New South Suburbs. Northern Transplants.

Rural White Working Class voters would not become fully Republican until Bush Jr.

But here's my other point. This effect wasn't limited to the south. All suburbs swung towards Reagan during this time especially, in the West.

The Suburbs I would argue was the lynchpin for Reagan's victory, in the South, and everywhere else. Look at Macomb County in Michigan. Voted for LBJ in 1964 with 74 percent of the vote. It voted for Reagan in 1984 with 66 percent of the vote.

The white backlash was national. It was not limited to the South. But it started in the suburbs.

[Badger]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

I'm not arguing that Reagan didn't use Racialized language. He did. But it wasn't targeted towards the south. It was targeted at these white ethnic voters in the rust belt.


The South I would assert was going to trend Republican with or without race anyway. The emphasis on lower taxes, no unions, was a big sell for the South, and it attracted a lot of businessmen. We already have seen this in the 1952 election, where Eisenhower won Florida, Texas, for the first time ever.

Both, actually. Though yes it was every bit as effective among Northern Archie Bunker working class types as it was among Southerners who had voted for largely conservative Democrats- with rare exception like William Fulbright- - out of habit since the Civil War.

Although when Goldwater embraced fighting the Civil Rights Act and Democrats embraced passing it, suddenly Southerners had an overnight switch. How odd

On the other hand, the 1980 election saw Reagan barely winning the South, often by 1 percentage points in many Southern States. Perhaps it's because of native son, Jimmy Carter. But even look at 1984.

Reagan underperformed with rural white working class voters in both elections. These voters were the base of George Wallace's 1968 campaign, and Nixon's. Where did Reagan over performed ? The New South Suburbs. Northern Transplants.

Rural White Working Class voters would not become fully Republican until Bush Jr.

But here's my other point. This effect wasn't limited to the south. All suburbs swung towards Reagan during this time especially, in the West.

The Suburbs I would argue was the lynchpin for Reagan's victory, in the South, and everywhere else. Look at Macomb County in Michigan. Voted for LBJ in 1964 with 74 percent of the vote. It voted for Reagan in 1984 with 66 percent of the vote.

The white backlash was national. It was not limited to the South. But it started in the suburbs.

I've looked at the 1980 and '84 swing, trend, and County maps, and I just don't see where your assertion is that Reagan notably underperformed for Rural whites, at least in 1984. Yes, you cannot underestimate how much Carter as a native son in the first Southerner - the Old South did not consider LBJ Southern- to-be president in over a hundred years helped him as a Native Sun candidate for the entire region in 1976, or in 1980 for that matter despite narrowly losing so many states. Just look at all the other presidential races from the Civil Rights era defining 64 election right up through 1984. Republican strength - or at least racist conservative strength is also represented by George Wallace - dominated Southern presidential politics outside of carter.

Looking at 1984, Reagan's biggest swings and Trends were by and large in the south, even outside of georgia. And in the county maps, although there were still pockets of blue dog voting, montdale's strength was limited largely to Black Belt counties and a few large cities like Atlanta and New Orleans. The real white counties shifted massively Republican, both from 1976 to 1980, and from 80 to 84 again.

Basically what Reagan succeeded in doing was to permanently co-opt the George Wallace racist voters as part of the Republican coalition. Nixon was able to do that as a one-off because McGovern was just such a god-awful disastrous candidate, and that's tradition goes right up to the present day.

[jojoju1998]

The Southern Strategy was both very real and had disastrous consequences. In 1976, America was obviously very far from being a post-racial paradise, but things did indeed seem to be moving in the right direction. Neither of that year's presidential candidates made any kind of concerted appeal to Southern segregationists (Ford won 16% of the black vote, a number no Republican presidential nominee since has exceeded), while across the South, a new generation of centre-left Democrats was being swept into office on the backs of multiracial coalitions, while many in the Republican minority in these states were pretty moderate. It seemed that both parties were ignoring the last gasps of racist Southern whites, whose influence on politics was rapidly waning.

Then along came Reagan and Atwater and all the rest. The Neshoba County Fair 'states' rights' speech, which remains one of the all-time low points of modern American politics. While of course massively improving over Ford with voters as a whole, Reagan haemorrhaged support among black voters. The black poverty rate, which had plummeted after LBJ's Great Society, ticked up slightly again (and would only start to fall again - and in fact fall rapidly - under Bill Clinton. Starting to see a pattern here?).

The tragedy of all this is that it didn't have to be that way. The Republican Party made a conscious effort to resurrect the central role of Southern racists in national politics, which took on a particularly toxic character under the cloak of the Evangelical Religious Right (which - and this can't be emphasised enough - was to a very large degree just the continuation of the segregationist movement). It's perhaps an uncomfortable fact for those of us who would like to believe in a romantic vision of democracy as representing the pure will of the people, but supply-side factors play just as important a role as demand-side ones in electoral politics. If politicians aren't selling something, voters won't buy it. No one made the Republican Party embrace Southern white resentment - there was nothing inevitable about its continued relevance in national politics.

Reagan barely won the south though in 1980. In fact, the electoral college lopsidedness aside, Reagan as a whole only won the election by 9 percent of the popular vote.

He barely won the Deep South. And the Peripheral South was mediocre for him at best. I mean, Texas or Florida was his strongest Southern State in 1980 I believe, but those two states have been swinging Republican since the Eisenhower era.


Even in 1984, you can see that Mondale still managed to win rural white areas in Alabama, despite being swamped overall.

Perhaps more relevantly, there were still active segregationist (not former-segregationist) politicians in the early 1980s, like Herman Talmadge and Larry McDonald. They were all Democrats. Republicans have always supported a society where the hierarchy is allowed to shift if people work hard or get lucky, while Democrats support either equality or supremacy. Nothing is worse than somebody getting ahead -- or falling behind -- and upsetting the apple cart. What if they're the wrong race?

The Racial Rhetoric I believe which Reagan did use in full force, actually made more of an impact in the Industrial Midwest. The Northern Strategy.  Especially with White Ethnic working class areas. Shocking isn't it ?

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476

Look at the results of the 1980 election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election_in_Michigan

Reagan did better in the Midwest, than he did in the South.

White Ethnic voters I would assert ( as a amateur political scientist, and a mini historian ) responded better to Reagan's racial rhetoric, than the south.

What is an example of 'racial rhetoric'? A sentence would do.

Well you have to look historically. By the 1970s, the Union project as we know it started to collapse. Read the research article I shared.

Violence between whites and blacks after the Civil Rights era, didn't happen in the South. Shocker. It actually happened in the Industrial States, especially between working class Irish/Polish/Italian ethnic catholics, and the newly liberated African Americans. Because now, they're fighting for the same pie.

These people became the Reagan Democrats of 1980, which gave Reagan his victories.

" In the 1930s and 1940s, millions of Southern Blacks moved to Northern cities (Phillips 106).3 As it happened, they settled in close proximity to the white working class. In most cases, they moved into the very same neighborhoods that white ethnics had occupied during the Great Depression, before moving to more residential areas a few miles away after the war (like Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn for example). This geographic proximity had a strong emotional component: when these old immigrant neighborhoods became black ghettos in the 1960s-1970s, the white workers who had spent their childhood there were shocked by the degradation of their former homes (Rieder 90).4 The geographic factor also exacerbated racist tensions when criminality started to increase in black slums (violent crime increased by 367% in the US between 1960 and 1980). Street crime in the ghettos inevitably spread to adjacent white ethnic neighborhoods (Edsall and Edsall 112, 52). More and more working class whites were victims of muggings or robberies and they started to associate ‘black’ with poverty and violence. Such developments opened an ideological and rhetorical window for Ronald Reagan whose campaign realized that "all law and order issues have [a] high profile" in places like New York since "poor and ethnics suffer most" (Briefing Documents)."

This is where Law and Order became the most effective for Reagan.


"  At the most basic level, the rejection of the Welfare State on the part of the white working class derived from a deep cultural incomprehension towards Blacks. Probably because Northern Blacks lived in formerly white immigrant neighborhoods, white ethnics saw them as any other immigrant group. As a result, they expected them to follow the traditional steps of the American Dream. In this sense, the condemnation of welfare by white ethnics—and later by Ronald Reagan—is inextricably linked to an idealized vision of the American Dream where work is the cardinal value, the only way for a poor immigrant to climb the social ladder."

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/476



Read the article folks. It opened my mind. And kind of proved the Southern Strategy to be false. The Southern Strategy didn't take full effect until the Bush years in my view.

Reagan practiced a Northern Strategy. Plain and Simple.

I'm not arguing that Reagan didn't use Racialized language. He did. But it wasn't targeted towards the south. It was targeted at these white ethnic voters in the rust belt.


The South I would assert was going to trend Republican with or without race anyway. The emphasis on lower taxes, no unions, was a big sell for the South, and it attracted a lot of businessmen. We already have seen this in the 1952 election, where Eisenhower won Florida, Texas, for the first time ever.

Both, actually. Though yes it was every bit as effective among Northern Archie Bunker working class types as it was among Southerners who had voted for largely conservative Democrats- with rare exception like William Fulbright- - out of habit since the Civil War.

Although when Goldwater embraced fighting the Civil Rights Act and Democrats embraced passing it, suddenly Southerners had an overnight switch. How odd

On the other hand, the 1980 election saw Reagan barely winning the South, often by 1 percentage points in many Southern States. Perhaps it's because of native son, Jimmy Carter. But even look at 1984.

Reagan underperformed with rural white working class voters in both elections. These voters were the base of George Wallace's 1968 campaign, and Nixon's. Where did Reagan over performed ? The New South Suburbs. Northern Transplants.

Rural White Working Class voters would not become fully Republican until Bush Jr.

But here's my other point. This effect wasn't limited to the south. All suburbs swung towards Reagan during this time especially, in the West.

The Suburbs I would argue was the lynchpin for Reagan's victory, in the South, and everywhere else. Look at Macomb County in Michigan. Voted for LBJ in 1964 with 74 percent of the vote. It voted for Reagan in 1984 with 66 percent of the vote.

The white backlash was national. It was not limited to the South. But it started in the suburbs.

I've looked at the 1980 and '84 swing, trend, and County maps, and I just don't see where your assertion is that Reagan notably underperformed for Rural whites, at least in 1984. Yes, you cannot underestimate how much Carter as a native son in the first Southerner - the Old South did not consider LBJ Southern- to-be president in over a hundred years helped him as a Native Sun candidate for the entire region in 1976, or in 1980 for that matter despite narrowly losing so many states. Just look at all the other presidential races from the Civil Rights era defining 64 election right up through 1984. Republican strength - or at least racist conservative strength is also represented by George Wallace - dominated Southern presidential politics outside of carter.

Looking at 1984, Reagan's biggest swings and Trends were by and large in the south, even outside of georgia. And in the county maps, although there were still pockets of blue dog voting, montdale's strength was limited largely to Black Belt counties and a few large cities like Atlanta and New Orleans. The real white counties shifted massively Republican, both from 1976 to 1980, and from 80 to 84 again.

Basically what Reagan succeeded in doing was to permanently co-opt the George Wallace racist voters as part of the Republican coalition. Nixon was able to do that as a one-off because McGovern was just such a god-awful disastrous candidate, and that's tradition goes right up to the present day.

Good points.   I'm just saying that the white backlash wasn't just relegated to the South.  Or that the South itself perpetuated this.


There's new historical scholarship that.... frames the 1964-1980 era in terms of the rapid suburbanization that was occurring all over the country, and the racial tensions that was happening in every state during this time.


Guess what George Wallace's second biggest group was ? The white ethnic voters in the Midwest.

[Ferguson97]

Without the Southern Strategy the US likely would be like Canada today, and thank god that never happened.

I like how most conservatives deny the existence of the Southern Strategy, but here's OSR providing us with "it was real and it was good".

[OSR stands with Israel]

Without the Southern Strategy the US likely would be like Canada today, and thank god that never happened.

I like how most conservatives deny the existence of the Southern Strategy, but here's OSR providing us with "it was real and it was good".

I don’t really care about vibes or really even think the views of the individual voters you are getting is important since we aren’t a direct democracy . What matters is the views of the politicians and the policies they pushed and I’m a fan of the policies Reagan implemented and think they were great . Without the southern strategy it wouldn’t have been possible and it’s possible without it we would have had a continuation of the new deal coalition to this day or become Canada and I’m really happy neither thing happened.

 

[Ferguson97]

I don’t really care about vibes or really even think the views of the individual voters you are getting is important since we aren’t a direct democracy . What matters is the views of the politicians and the policies they pushed and I’m a fan of the policies Reagan implemented and think they were great . Without the southern strategy it wouldn’t have been possible and it’s possible without it we would have had a continuation of the new deal coalition to this day or become Canada and I’m really happy neither thing happened.

I think I finally realized why the language and phrasing of your posts always feel so weird. You phrase everything the exact same way that a Democrat would phrase it if they were holding the opposite opinion as you.

"If Janet Protasiewicz wins, then Scott Walker's legacy would be undone"

"Without the Southern Strategy, the New Deal coalition would remain"

"Democrats not only repeal right to work, but also want to make union dues tax deductible"

If I heard/read these sentences being said by someone, without knowing anything about them or their politics, based purely on the language, tone and phrasing, I would assume that they were a Democrat.

[OSR stands with Israel]

I don’t really care about vibes or really even think the views of the individual voters you are getting is important since we aren’t a direct democracy . What matters is the views of the politicians and the policies they pushed and I’m a fan of the policies Reagan implemented and think they were great . Without the southern strategy it wouldn’t have been possible and it’s possible without it we would have had a continuation of the new deal coalition to this day or become Canada and I’m really happy neither thing happened.

I think I finally realized why the language and phrasing of your posts always feel so weird. You phrase everything the exact same way that a Democrat would phrase it if they were holding the opposite opinion as you.

"If Janet Protasiewicz wins, then Scott Walker's legacy would be undone"

"Without the Southern Strategy, the New Deal coalition would remain"

"Democrats not only repeal right to work, but also want to make union dues tax deductible"

If I heard/read these sentences being said by someone, without knowing anything about them or their politics, based purely on the language, tone and phrasing, I would assume that they were a Democrat.

Why is it a surprise that a Reaganite Republican like myself would be a fan of Scott Walker, destroying the new deal coalition and right to work

[インターネット掲示板ユーザー Punxsutawney Phil]

I don’t really care about vibes or really even think the views of the individual voters you are getting is important since we aren’t a direct democracy . What matters is the views of the politicians and the policies they pushed and I’m a fan of the policies Reagan implemented and think they were great . Without the southern strategy it wouldn’t have been possible and it’s possible without it we would have had a continuation of the new deal coalition to this day or become Canada and I’m really happy neither thing happened.

I think I finally realized why the language and phrasing of your posts always feel so weird. You phrase everything the exact same way that a Democrat would phrase it if they were holding the opposite opinion as you.

"If Janet Protasiewicz wins, then Scott Walker's legacy would be undone"

"Without the Southern Strategy, the New Deal coalition would remain"

"Democrats not only repeal right to work, but also want to make union dues tax deductible"

If I heard/read these sentences being said by someone, without knowing anything about them or their politics, based purely on the language, tone and phrasing, I would assume that they were a Democrat.

Why is it a surprise that a Reaganite Republican like myself would be a fan of Scott Walker, destroying the new deal coalition and right to work

It isn't.