4 ms·

The Republican party has cynically been using race for fifty years to split the working class vote. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy https://en.

• gustavo-fring 6y ago
  Yes and the first Jews and African-Americans that gained positions in government gained them as Republicans. Prior to the Southern strategy, the democratic party was the party of Jim Crow and lynchings and backwards ass race hatred. But they, like people, changed. It really says nothing about the potential of the parties today. If you are so ideological that you can't see that calling people you just met racists is a bad strategy, I don't know what to tell you. Want to play a game of prisoner's dilemma? Scary Gary == Gary, Indiana, a burb of Chicago. It met the same crisis as a lot of Rust Belt areas and if you watch a youtube vid of it today, you'll see why it's scary. The Jackson family was from there, left for the same reasons (well...).
  • js2 6y ago
    Except that the GOP is still cynically appealing to racism. The parties in their modern form began after their realignment with the civil rights movement. They haven't fundamentally changed since the sixties. Yes, I agree it doesn't persuade anyone to call them names. I don't excuse that behavior. But again, it isn't wrong to say that the GOP uses racism to this day to win votes.
    • gustavo-fring 6y ago
      Yes, political parties use racism and the language of demagogues to win votes. We learned that 2000 years ago. The trick is getting that there's no "party" attribute that determines that. Do you believe that the Democratic party doesn't use racist rhetoric? I don't even want to make this an us vs them whataboutism.
      • Traster 6y ago
        I think the thing you need to content with is the fact that when someone says the Republican party uses racism to win votes what they're doing is linking you to a wiki page with long and detailed documentation of the specifics of what they're doing and how. Now, in response to that you sort of just wave around and claim all parties use racism. But that's not actually true is it, there is no similar concerted strategy on the Democratic side to stir up racism to drive votes- and this is born out in the numbers where one party has a very out of the norm demographic appeal.
        • gustavo-fring 6y ago
          Nobody linked to that here, they made a lot of vague assertions. But you could, yes, and I'm sure that wiki page would be much easier to source than with the Democrats, because there are more people (many more) using overt racism in the Republican party today. That's still not an actual response to what I posted, it is what we all know to be whataboutism. Nobody wins by playing the "they do it, too, but better" card. It just makes the losing party look incompetent and a little evil.
          • Traster 6y ago
            Literally the first person who replied to you linked to the wiki page about it.
    • zackees 6y ago
      Then any mainstream media outlet and count how many tiles they talk about racial relations and how it’s dividing America. The fact that the left believes it’s anti racist demonstrates the power of mainstream media propaganda.
• qtt 6y ago
  If you read that Wikipedia page, under the Scholarly debates section, the existence of a "Southern Strategy" at all is debated. Nixon never claimed to have a Southern Strategy - he was focused on a national strategy that included the South. Notably, in his 1972 election, he carried 49 states - indicating that he did indeed have an inclusive national strategy. The more likely explanation to contemporary GOP success is that Nixon (& others) were very effective appealing to suburban demographics (where the top issue was the economy). It took decades after for the South to gradually become a GOP stronghold, and it is very debatable which specific policies were the cause of that. People point to figures like Strom Thurmond as evidence of a Southern Strategy, but there were several Democrats who did things like filibuster the civil rights act & endorse segregation. Prominent Democrats such as Robert Byrd & Richard Russell Jr. were fighting Nixon's party at the time. It's safe to say that at the very least, the existence of a "southern strategy" is not something that can be accepted at face value.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jolux 6y ago
    You should look at the political career of Lee Atwater if you haven’t, he was a Republican political consultant who was uncharacteristically candid about his methodology. At the very least, he thought Southern Strategy-style tactics were politically successful, and he may have been mistaken, but I think it’s hard to argue they didn’t exist.
    • gustavo-fring 6y ago
      He's famous for spreading racist rumors about McCain (he had adopted a darker-skinned girl) during the 2000 primaries. There's a documentary about him. Boogeyman? Something like that.
      • gustavo-fring 6y ago
        ...that was actually Karl Rove, his protege.