In an attempt to break the Democrats’ near monopoly on the black vote, Donald Trump last week visited a black church in Detroit and held a roundtable meeting with black civic leaders in Philadelphia.
Then
Benny Huang gets to the meat of the matter:
But it was his remarks
in Everett, Washington that really got Democrats’ knickers in a bunch.
“It is the Democratic Party that is the party of slavery, the party of
Jim Crow and the party of opposition,” said Trump.
Democrats can’t deny these historical truths so they try to render
them irrelevant by resorting to the Great Switch hypothesis. Yes, they
will admit, the Democrats used to be a bunch of racist dirtbags but the
parties have “switched,” so please don’t bring it up.
To be sure, there was a “switch” in American politics but it occurred within the Democratic Party.
For the great majority of its history, the Democrats were a white
grievance party that discriminated against blacks but from the 1960s
onward they despised and scapegoated whites instead. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Today they offer blacks preference—a
commodity that Republicans, most of whom still believe that people
should be treated without regard to race, can’t compete with. Judging by
voting patterns, blacks appear to like preference quite a bit. Whites
who don’t like being treated as second class citizens are labeled
“racists”and treated as the ideological heirs of Jim Crow.
That’s not of course how Democrats tell the story. According to their
childishly simple version, white southerners were, are, and ever shall
be racist. If you want to know which party pushes a racist agenda just
take note of which party white southerners prefer. The South
has traditionally voted as a bloc (the “solid South”) because it has
always been animated by racism–or so the legend goes.
The Great Switch supposedly happened sometime in the 1960s when the
Democrats repented of their bigoted ways and the Republicans rushed in
to woo the racist voters they left behind. The precise moment that the
Great Switch took place is hard to pinpoint though 1964 is often cited
because it was the year of the Civil Rights Act. Democrats never explain
how exactly the Republicans won over the racist South by voting 80%
in favor of the Civil Rights Act (a horrible law, by the way), but
that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Another year often cited
is 1968 when Richard Nixon employed a so-called “southern
strategy”—coded appeals to southerners’ latent racism—to win election.
The South’s messy breakup with the Democratic Party is a lot more
complicated than Democrats would have you believe. It involves third
parties, double-talking politicians, and divergent party wings. It also
involves imprecise definitions of what constitutes the South. For the
purposes of this article, I will define the South as the eleven former
Confederate States of America: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee,
Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
and Virginia.
A perspective on the South’s political transformation can be found by
examining Electoral College returns. Anyone who examines the evidence, I
believe, will find that the Democrats’ tidy “switch” hypothesis
disintegrates under examination.
The solid South really was solidly Democratic from the end of
Reconstruction through 1924. Democratic unity, however, began to exhibit
cracks when the party nominated Al Smith for president in 1928.
Smith, a Catholic, lost five out of eleven southern states. While
anti-Catholic bigotry may have played a role in his disappointing
returns, Smith won only one state outside of the South. Southerners were in fact Smith’s biggest supporters.
Franklin Roosevelt was enormously popular in the South, winning every
southern state in four consecutive elections. According to today’s
liberal Democrats’ logic, I must conclude that Roosevelt was a racist;
and as a matter of fact, he kind of was—at least toward
Japanese-Americans. Is that why the solid South supported Roosevelt?
Well, no.
Race isn’t now and wasn’t then the be-all and end-all of
southern politics. The South supported FDR because they were blind
supporters of the Democratic Party and because the South benefited from
the New Deal’s transfer of wealth from rich states to poor states.
In 1948,
the South was again fractured with the Democratic incumbent Harry
Truman winning seven southern states and losing four to the Dixiecrat
Strom Thurmond. In late July of that year Truman had issued an executive
order desegregating the armed forces and still he managed to win seven
states and a supermajority of their electoral votes. Truman was less
popular in the South than Roosevelt but he was still popular. I don’t
know how this could possibly have happened unless southern politics was
not singularly focused on the issue of race as we have been led to
believe.
The solid South once again failed to live up to its name in the 1950s. In the first
of two matchups between Dwight Eisenhower and the liberal Democrat
Adlai Stevenson, the South was divided with Stevenson winning seven
states and Eisenhower winning four. Four years later,
Eisenhower fared slightly better in the South. In both elections,
Stevenson was trounced almost everywhere outside of the South.
The 1960 election
is problematic for the proponents of the Great Switch hypothesis
because their darling John F. Kennedy was the racist party’s
candidate—this being still four or eight years before the supposed
switch took place. The electoral map that year was a patchwork—six
southern states plus five faithless electors going to Kennedy, three
states going to Nixon, and two states—Mississippi and Alabama—going to
Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, who wasn’t actually a declared
candidate. Who was the racist candidate in this election? This being
pre-switch, I guess it would have to be Kennedy. How else could he have
won a majority of southern states and a supermajority of southern
electoral votes?
In 1964 the South was again split, with six states going to Johnson (who was pretty racist,
by the way) and five going to Barry Goldwater. Goldwater had voted
against the Civil Rights Act though his party didn’t. Johnson, on the
other hand, had a long history of segregationist sympathies and he
belonged to the party that filibustered the bill, though he signed it
into law. Who’s the racist here? We can’t tell simply by looking at
which candidate southerners preferred because they were divided. Also,
was this election pre-switch or post-switch? That depends on whom you
ask.
Dixieland was once again divided in 1968
when one state voted for Humphrey, five for Nixon and five for the
independent George Wallace, a former Democrat who would later return to
his party. Nixon crushed Humphrey across the map.
If Nixon had courted racist southerners in 1968, he burned them by
introducing minority hiring quotas in his first term. I don’t mean to
imply that Nixon’s support for discriminatory hiring practices (against
whites) is in any way laudable but it does seem an odd way to win the
redneck vote. And yet the South voted overwhelmingly for Nixon in 1972—just
like the rest of America. That’s right, every southern state broke for
the guy most responsible for minority hiring quotas. Southerners gave
him more support than they had four years earlier. What happened?
Things got really weird in 1976
when the South was once again solid and blue. Four years after all
eleven southern states voted for the Republican Nixon, ten switched back
and voted for the Democrat Carter. As a southerner himself, Jimmy
Carter knew how to talk to southern audiences but he was no conservative
and certainly not a a crypto-segregationist. How could this have
happened post-switch? Either the Democrats became racist again for one
election cycle or the South stopped being racist for one election cycle.
The South turned on Carter in 1980
much like the rest of America though his home state of Georgia stuck by
him. Southern support for the Democrats would continue to plummet
through the elections of 1984 and 1988 but would resurge again with the candidacy of another liberal southern governor, Bill Clinton.
The theory that the perpetually racist South suddenly changed party
allegiance because of “civil rights” reforms is simply not supported by
the facts.
A more plausible explanation is that racial issues were never
the sole driver, or even the primary driver, of southern voting trends.
Southerners did begin to leave the party in the 1960s and 1970s, though
mostly because the Democrats were well on their way to becoming the
anti-Christian party, the job-killing party, and the blame-America-first
party.
But here’s another idea—is it possible that white southerners
began to leave the Democratic Party because they found that the party
had already rejected them? It’s a theory worth exploring.
