Image: George Wallace, Democrat

 

From Part 1…There are few issues that demonstrate the intellectual dishonesty of the Left more than the issue of race.

 
The fact that race is still a major issue in 21st century America is entirely the fault of the Left. A new farce…er…piece is out in Politico magazine, written by Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, entitled “Race and the Modern GOP.”…

Johnson’s victory in the 1964 presidential election is supposed to be proof that the racist Deep South jumped into the Republican corner as revenge for the Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act.

From Politico:

Compare the 1964 map to its 1956 counterpart, showing Dwight Eisenhower’s equally lopsided win in the earlier year. In 1956 the “solid South” holds true to its historic allegiance to the Democratic Party, even in the face of Eisenhower’s sweep of the rest of the country. Eight years later, the South is out of step with the nation once again, this time in a way that no one could have imagined in 1956. The votes of the Deep South now belonged to the Republican Party and, more tellingly, to its conservative, anti-civil rights candidate, Goldwater.

Ah, the old “Goldwater was anti-civil rights” canard. So we are to believe that the man who formed the Arizona chapter of the NAACP, donated mightily to the efforts to desegregate schools, integrated the Arizona chapter of the National Guard. The Washington Post noted in their Goldwater memorial upon his death in 1998, “Goldwater ended racial segregation in his family stores, and he was instrumental in ending it in Phoenix schools and restaurants and in the Arizona National Guard.” Oops.

And as for the rest of that paragraph, if only the authors could compare more than two elections they might notice that Democrats carried the south under both Presidents Clinton and Carter. Up until 2000, Republicans didn’t sweep the South unless they swept the rest of the country (i.e. 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988). In 1968, those states were won by George Wallace (Democrat turned “independent”). Republican presidential victories in the South were only obtained once the racist Democrats started to die off. Even then, most of the Senators and Governors from that region were still fiercely Leftist.

As Kevin Williamson noted in National Review in 2012:

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.

And what Leftist hatchet job would be complete without the myth of Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy?”

We are always told that Democrats heroically threw themselves on the sword to pass civil rights legislation. We are always told that white racists were so outraged by Democrats standing up for black people that they ran into the arms of the Republican Party, who made a specific effort to appeal to such racists.

Of course, in order to believe this revision of the facts, you would have to swallow the notion that segregationists who had voted Democrat were so outraged that 63% of their elected representatives supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that they then flocked to a party where 80% of their elected representatives supported the act (if this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone).

Politico has done the yeoman’s work in racial hackery. In three pages, they’ve retreaded every left-wing lie on race in the 20th and 21st centuries.

More from the Politico hacks:

In short, the essence of today’s GOP—overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern—was evident by the late 1960s. This is not, of course, the whole of the story. The evolution of the party and the broader racial geography of American politics would continue in fits and starts over the next 45 years.

But unquestionably it was the civil rights movement, and white resistance to it, that put the Republican Party on its demographic and ideological trajectory. The following two tables underscore just how far the GOP has moved from its broadly centrist, racially liberal, geographically diverse base in the postwar period to the ideologically extreme, overwhelming white and disproportionately Southern party it is today.

This entire paragraph can be summed up thusly: white people in the south are racist. They switched their votes to the Republican Party, ergo, the Republican Party is racist.

The fact that no other issues are examined in this time period speaks to farcical nature of the Politico article. And of course there is no mention of the ideological differences in the parties.

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Concluded in Part 3

Part 1