The Myth of the So-Called "Party Switch"

One strategy that the Democrat Party and their toadies in the media use to erase their racist crimes from history is the so-called “Party Switch” myth. Referred to as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, the argument goes that the “non-racist” Republicans switched parties with the racist “Democrats” in the 1960’s as part of a strategy employed by President Richard Nixon. In other words, the racist Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) became the modern-day Republicans and the champions of civil rights went from being Republicans to being modern-day Democrats. That way the modern-day Democrats can argue that they have always been the champions of civil rights against their “racist” opposition.

            However, there is a problem with this myth of the “Southern Strategy” – President Nixon never made any racist appeals to the Deep South. Not one example has ever been brought forth. Oh, what is a Leftist to do?

They admit that there were no overt racist appeals made by Nixon. However, they claim that while Nixon may not have explicitly made any racist appeals to the Dixiecrats to become the Republicans – he instead gave “dog whistles.” He spoke in “code” to the racists. They claim that his appeals to law and order were examples of such racist dog whistles. According to Dinesh D’Souza:

Nixon’s references to drugs and law and order in 1968 were quite obviously directed at the antiwar protestors who had just disrupted the Democratic Convention in Chicago. His target was radical activists such as Abbie Hoffman and Bill Ayers. Nixon scorned the hippies, champions of the drug culture such as Timothy Leary, and draft-dodgers who fled to Canada. The vast majority of these people were white.^[i]

            So Nixon’s so-called “dog-whistles” were aimed at a population whose majority was white. Yet we are supposed to believe that he was baiting the racist Dixiecrats of the South to come join in a massive party shift.

            The whole so-called anti-civil rights, “Southern Strategy” makes zero sense from a historical perspective! Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. He supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. He supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He was a fierce champion of the desegregation of public schools. He personally conceived and led the administration’s desegregation efforts.

            Not only did he do more in 1970 for desegregation in the public schools than had been done in the past, Nixon also led the nation’s first affirmative action program which was dubbed the “Philadelphia Plan.” It imposed goals of racial equality and timetables to meet that agenda on trade unions starting with Philadelphia. Dinesh D’Souza asks: “Now, would a man seeking to build an electoral base of Deep South white supremacists actually promote the first program to legally discriminate in favor of blacks? This is absurd.”^[ii]

            Not only that – Nixon barely campaigned in the Deep South. According to Kevin Phillips in his classic work “The Emerging Republican Majority”, Nixon’s strategy was to target the Sunbelt – which ranged from Florida to California and included the “Outer” or “Peripheral” South. According to Phillips, Nixon’s strategy included focusing on the non-racist, upwardly-mobile, largely urban voters of the Outer or Peripheral South. He won these voters. What about the Deep South who Democrats claim he courted to the Republican Party with “dog-whistles?” The Deep South voted against Nixon and for the segregationist George Wallace – who I might add was a Democrat!

            What about the Dixiecrats? How many of them voted for Nixon? D’Souza gives the staggering number:

Turns out, virtually none. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans – and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressman, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democrat Party.^[iii]

            Democrats will point out dubious examples to try to prove their case. They will point to the late Senators Jesse Helms of North Carolina, John Tower of Texas and former Mississippi Senator Trent Loss who all switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party. While that is true, not one of these men were Dixiecrats.^[iv]

            The Big Lie of the “Southern Strategy” falls apart when one analyzes the electoral results following the so-called 1960’s “Party Switch.” Kevin Williamson of The National Review explains:

If the parties had in some meaningful way flipped on civil rights, one would expect that to show up in the electoral results in the years following the Democrats’ 1964 about-face on the issue. Nothing of the sort happened: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the 1964 act, only one would ever change parties. Nor did the segregationist constituencies that elected these Democrats throw them out in favor of Republicans: The remaining 20 continued to be elected as Democrats or were replaced by Democrats. It was, on average, nearly a quarter of a century before those seats went Republican. If southern rednecks ditched the Democrats because of a civil-rights law passed in 1964, it is strange that they waited until the late 1980s and early 1990s to do so. They say things move slower in the South — but not that slow.^[v]

            In fact, after the Republican ascendancy in the South circa 1964, the South voted in the opposite direction that Democrat Proponents of this Big Lie claim. Republicans began to win southern House seats – and in fact, the Southerners threw out the segregationist Democrats in favor of the civil-rights Republicans. For instance, one of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas’ John Dowdy who was a bitter opponent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He compared the Republican proponents of the reforms as being like Hitler.^[vi] Sound like a familiar accusation?

            What happened to Dowdy? He was voted out by Southerners in 1966 in favor of a Republican champion of civil rights: the future President George H. W. Bush.^[vii]

            What happened in the Presidential election of 1968? It was the last stand of the old Confederacy. Segregationist Democrat George Wallace ran as an Independent and only carried five states. Nixon carried a significant number of former Confederate States: North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

Why then did the South become overtly Republican – and when? The answer is largely during the 1980’s and 1990’s. It had nothing to do with Richard Nixon and everything to do with Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” which was a conservative appeal to patriotism, anti-communism, free markets, pro-life and Christianity. This is what moved the South into the hands of the GOP. It had nothing to do with race and everything to do with religious, moral and economic reasons.

            The reason Republicans dominate the South now is because the values of the South itself have changed. The racism that once defined its political views doesn’t anymore. While there are pockets of racism in the South (as can be found throughout the country), they are now the vast minority. The South shifted to Republicans as its overall values changed. Its values are conservative: pro-life, pro-gun and pro-small government.

            Lest anyone question the above information because it was provided by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza, let’s look at some actual academicians who work in places of higher learning rather than hysterical anchors on CNN. Carol Swain, professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University reveals that the so-called “Southern Strategy” is actually comprised of three myths tied together into one:

But this story of the two parties switching identities is a myth. In fact, it’s three myths wrapped into one false narrative.

Let’s take a brief look at each myth in turn.

Myth Number One: In order to be competitive in the South, Republicans started to pander to white racists in the 1960s.

Fact: Republicans actually became competitive in the South as early as 1928, when Republican Herbert Hoover won over 47 percent of the South’s popular vote against Democrat Al Smith. In 1952, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower won the southern states of Tennessee, Florida and Virginia. And in 1956, he picked up Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia, too. And that was after he supported the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools; and after he sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock Central High School to enforce integration.

Myth Number Two: Southern Democrats, angry with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, switched parties.

Fact: Of the 21 Democratic senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act, just one became a Republican. The other 20 continued to be elected as Democrats, or were replaced by other Democrats. On average, those 20 seats didn’t go Republican for another two-and-a-half decades.

Myth Number Three: Since the implementation of the Southern Strategy, the Republicans have dominated the South.

Fact: Richard Nixon, the man who is often credited with creating the Southern Strategy, lost the Deep South in 1968. In contrast, Democrat Jimmy Carter nearly swept the region in 1976 - 12 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And in 1992, over 28 years later, Democrat Bill Clinton won Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. The truth is, Republicans didn’t hold a majority of southern congressional seats until 1994, 30 years after the Civil Rights Act.^[viii]

If the so-called “Southern Strategy” is a provable lie, then why do the Democrats and their controlled media still spout it? Because it is an important point of attacking their enemies as “racists” without having to actually address the issues (ad hominem). It also protects the Democrats from their past and current racism. According to D’Souza:

Yet the myth of Nixon’s Southern Strategy endures – not because it’s true, but because it conveniently serves to exculpate the crimes of the Democrat Party. Somehow the party that promoted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and racial terrorism gets to wipe its slate clean by pretending that, with Nixon’s connivance, the Republicans stole all their racists. It’s time we recognize this excuse for what it is: one more Democratic big lie.^[ix]

            As Professor Carol Swain writes: “In short, history has moved on. Like other regions of the country, the South votes values, not skin color. The myth of the Southern Strategy is just the Democrats’ excuse for losing the South, and yet another way to smear Republicans with the label ‘racist.’”^[x]

            Projection is a strategy of the Left and an Alinsky tactic – accuse the other side of what you yourself are doing. The Democrats are experts at projecting their racism and fascism unto Republicans.

            Why is all this important? Because the Parties did not switch. The Democrat Party is still racist. They were against freedoms for blacks during and after the Civil War – and they are against the freedoms of all Americans today. They are radically subversive. Kevin Williams concludes thusly:

The Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of Communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counterculture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical Left into the Democratic party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives’ affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns — especially welfare and crime — are “dog whistles” or “code” for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was “to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.” Johnson’s crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.^[xi]

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^[i] Dinesh D’Souza, “The myth of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’,” The Hill, August 28, 2018, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP-117-JU00-20210414-SD003.pdf

^[ii] Op. cit.

^[iii] Op. cit.

^[iv] Op. cit.

^[v] Kevin Williamson, “The Party of Civil Rights,” The National Review, May 21, 2012, https://www.nationalreview.com/2012/05/party-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson/

^[vi] Op. cit.

^[vii] Op. cit.

^[viii] Carol Swain, “Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?”, Vanderbilt University, https://assets.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/4HwShLMThuei4IEgoMCwWg/7b8f0c09b9588543fa96a5d4ba21a8dc/swain-why_did_the_democratic_south_become_republican-transcript.pdf

^[ix] Dinesh D’Souza, “The myth of Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’,” The Hill, August 28, 2018, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20210414/111451/HMKP-117-JU00-20210414-SD003.pdf

^[x] Carol Swain, “Why Did the Democratic South Become Republican?”, Vanderbilt University, https://assets.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/4HwShLMThuei4IEgoMCwWg/7b8f0c09b9588543fa96a5d4ba21a8dc/swain-why_did_the_democratic_south_become_republican-transcript.pdf

^[xi] Kevin Williamson, “The Party of Civil Rights,” The National Review, May 21, 2012, https://www.nationalreview.com/2012/05/party-civil-rights-kevin-d-williamson/