Parliamentary Procedures Do Not Explain The Southern Strategy

Richard Reeves' odd explanation of how the South went Republican really doesn't make much sense. Rather than talk about race, he claims the roots of this shift go back to Kennedy forcing a change in the size of the House Rules Committee, which placed more of his allies on it and embarrassed leading Southern Democrats.

This explanation just doesn't hold water. As a commenter on the post named Bill said:

This is bad history. Absent the Voting Rights Act and the other civil rights legislation, it would have taken much more than a rules fight to get the South to defect to the Republican Party. Race, race and race is at the heart of Southern politics. The 2008 election is a measure of how absolutely poorly Bush had performed in office and a growing small band of younger southerners for whom race is not the lynchpin of politics who joined with an omnipresent band of liberal whites of all ages that was helped by record African-American turnout.

Yes. This actually reminds me of arguments claiming the Civil War was not about slavery. Sure, you can point to other areas of tension, but without slavery, none of those other reasons were sufficient for Americans to start killing each other. Similarly, Kennedy undermining the power of conservatives in Congress allowed for civil rights legislation to pass, but it was that legislation specifically, along with Richard Nixon taking advantage of white southern discontent to push his own ambitions, that created the all-Republican South. This legislative battle is an interesting story, but Reeves puts way too much explanatory power on its shoulders.

The Southern Strategy's Last Days

In 1964, upon signing the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson famously said that he was handing the South to the Republican Party for the next generation. While this has become something of a cliché, the backlash to civil rights did significantly further the Republican dominance in American politics over the last 35 years. Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy proved incredibly successful. Many racist whites left the Democratic Party and it has been hard for Democrats to win nationally since.

This is changing. The Southern Strategy is dead as an effective political tool. It's death knell began even before it started. When Lyndon Johnson reopened America's borders with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Asians and Latinos began entering the country. While the Asian flow slowed by the early 1990s, migration from Latin America has continued unabated, as you all know. The political muscles of Latinos began to be flexed in California, when the backlash to Pete Wilson's racist regime turned California into a Democratic bastion.

Of course, Republicans, still trying to capitalize on the racism that served them so well since 1968, have ignored the lessons of California. As Paul Waldman writes at TAPPED, Republicans are going to have to answer for their anti-immigrant race baiting in the general election. Waldman notes how Latinos are already voting predominantly for Democrats. Is there any doubt this will continue in 2008. Republicans can run all the adds in Spanish they want to, but any one who follows politics at all knows where the Republicans stand on Latinos. They don't want them here. They think the United States is a white man's country, and they intend to keep it that way.

That is a losing political strategy. The Republicans are more discredited each and every day. Their foreign policy is a joke. Their economic strategies are questionable at best and are being exposed by the sub-prime mortgage collapse. And their racism is impossible to deny.

The Republicans can continue trying to be the white man's party all they want to. That's great. Given that this nation becomes less white every day, it sounds like the recipe for Democratic dominance to me.