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| Drawing by Tony Auth, June 2008. |
Another one of those Twitter lectures, presented not to display how I defeated the choad I was responding to (I didn't, really, he's impenetrable) but as a reference guide to how the evidence goes in a format I thought was pretty concise and well-pointed:
That was the beginning of the switch, when old Strom Thurmond, last of the 1948 Dixiecrats, joined the Republicans. pic.twitter.com/awSo5IJWhl— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
The Southern strategy got going as a strategy in the 1966 midterms, as the New York Times was reporting in 1970, exploiting a perceived hostility among certain whites against Jews, blacks, and "liberal Yankees". https://t.co/JHxLCVafeI pic.twitter.com/JB8lAv784D— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
Nixon campaigned on race in 1968, certainly... https://t.co/dQngQGb9yx pic.twitter.com/xl1x82DCTy— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
And kept his promises to some extent https://t.co/s1SEHuQoJj pic.twitter.com/WxRwkKhmiU— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
But also ended up giving important support to school desegregation and signing the 1970 Voting Rights Act. There were still people in the Republican party at that point willing to take risks to do the right thing. pic.twitter.com/8b0rxO6ePr— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
I forgot to document that one—it's from the Nixon Foundation
But the strategy was pretty blatant in the 1972 election, as the New York Times reported at the time https://t.co/wK3Lt46ynU pic.twitter.com/eZWdvG5ejL— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
Note that this wasn't just getting done in the South, but also in what was already becoming the Rust Belt, and cities like Boston and Baltimore, where there was a segregated "white working class" anxious about desegregation. But it took over the South: https://t.co/cZBEarv8dj pic.twitter.com/pZtKFvYUBr— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
and by 1980, when Reagan launched his presidential campaign in Neshoba County, MS (site of the 1964 murders of the voting rights activists Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney) with an appeal to "states rights", they really threw off the mask. https://t.co/4T82MCmrZa— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
And Lyndon Johnson's prophecy of 16 years later--"We have lost the South for a generation"--came true. https://t.co/0oDn9jKzDJ pic.twitter.com/MMIDZHThsi— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
So what I can is, from 1964 to 1980 and onward, the Republican Party fought for the votes of white people who feared or hated black people, and won them, and succeeded in taking over the South on the basis of those votes. Does that make it the "party of racism"?— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 9, 2019
I.e., "What I can say is...."
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