Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

js2

The Republican party has cynically been using race for fifty years to split the working class vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

So for someone to say they aren't Republican because they aren't racist is hyperbolic, but it isn't wrong.

What is Scary Gary?

View on HN

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...).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Literally the first person who replied to you linked to the wiki page about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...that was actually Karl Rove, his protege.

I find the idea of the “Southern Strategy” to be counter-intuitive as well as self-serving for its proponents.

First, under what circumstances would you swap political parties? This is an exceptionally rare circumstance; I don’t see how it could ever happen in any kind of significant way. People change to third parties (eg whigs to Republicans) but leftists and rightists rarely “switch sides”. Party affiliations are a big basket of beliefs, not just single issue.

It’s self serving in that the popular narrative is all the “bad” Democrats (southern racists who blocked school integration, civil rights, etc) all left for the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats racist-free. Pretty convenient.

In reality I think that there was very little party switching; racism just became politically anathema in the civil rights era (which is one of the greatest things about America) and all the OG racists - the Robert Byrds etc. - had to stop being publicly racist. This and shifting cultural norms meant that Boomers were much less racist than previous generations and Gen X even more so.

The parties did not used to be as polarized. Many southern white Democrats moved to the Republican party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats#1933%E2%80%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat

Strom Thurmond is very notable example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond

Ronald Reagan, famously, too.

> IN another area it is clear that the Republicans will raise to the surface the resentments that many white Americans have over Negroes’ moves for social equality. The San Francisco convention was blatant in its proclamation that one of our parties intended to be nothing less than lily‐white. The nation is now faced with a major candidate who feels no need of Negro votes; he is willing to stand or fall on the gains he can make within the 90 per cent of the population that is white.

> While a President of the United States can, under our Federal system, do little or nothing about street violence, the Arizona Senator will predictably call attention to such lawlessness. While earlier Republican candidates doubtless realized that white Americans have no great affection for their Negro fellow‐citizens, they refrained from exploiting those antipathies. This restraint was, indeed, part of the “Establishment” agreement on how elections were to be conducted.

> This year's experiment, then, is betting that there are many Americans — among them many who have hitherto voted Democratic — who are willing to give their votes to a man who promises to keep Negroes in their place.

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/09/06/archives/whats-the-mainst...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com