Southern Strategy

Another election is upon us and I am again reading of the horrible Southern Strategy of those evil Republicans. That awful racist, Richard Nixon broke up the old Solid South where the Democratic Party and it's armed force, the Klu Klux Klan had kept the south in the Democrat column since the aftermath of the Civil War. The Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) love to claim that he did this out of racism. After all, there is nothing that the Party of Segregation loves more than accusing the Party that was born of the opposition to slavery and that fought against segregation of racism.

In truth, Nixon's famed Southern Strategy had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the war we were fighting at the time. It was 1968 and the Democrats were fractured. There was a large fissure over race and a larger fissure over the war which was raging. Only four years earlier, Landslide Lyndon Johnson had handily won the election by painting Barry Goldwater as a wildeyed warmonger. I remember that election. There was LBJ promising, promising that "Ah weel nevah send Amurkin boahs to do the job thet Asian boahs should do".

Then by 1968 the Dems were fractured in four camps, with some mutual grounds between them. There was the antiracist northern wing versus the Klu Klux Klan southern section and there was the antiwar faction vs the prowar faction. Nixon knew that the south had always been the section of the country that was most supportive winning wars that we started. Of course the institutional memory of losing a war was much sharper then in the south. The last of those who had endured the abject poverty of the post civil war era were still around. Actually in 1968 the south was still much poorer than the rest of the country. /funny how poverty and Democrats go hand in hand.

In 1968, the Democrat-ruled south is where the poverty was. Today it's the Democrat ruled big cities. But the southern strategy was all about race. Sure. And I'm the King of Sweden.