Race card misplayed

A myth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism and has spread to the 2004 campaign trail. It goes something like this: The Republican Party assembled a national majority by winning over Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist; therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, and Republicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: The GOP is the party that became willing to pander to racists.

Now to be sure, the GOP had a Southern strategy. From the 1950s on, virtually all national and local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages that could compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. This record is incontestable.

The new myth is much bolder than this. It insists these events should decisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modern Republican Party.

Of course, earlier generations of openly segregationist Southerners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson’s and Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stances accordingly. The mythmakers hold racism and liberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any common values. While accidental events must have led racists to vote for good men like Franklin Roosevelt, after 1964 racists voted their conscience. How convenient.

The mythmakers argue the GOP appealed to Southern racism not explicitly but through “coded” racial appeals. Yet, these critics, in effect, want to have it both ways: They acknowledge that opposition to busing and affirmative action could in principle be nonracist (otherwise they wouldn’t be a “code” for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is their claims are tautological: These views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist.

Liberal commentators also overlook how little the GOP had to “offer,” so to speak, segregationists for their support, even according to the myth’s own terms. Segregationists wanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settle for relatively race-neutral policies. The reason these policies aren’t plausible codes for real racism is that they aren’t the equivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Why did segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue to vote Democratic? The GOP’s appeal was mightily aided by none other than the Democratic Party itself, which lurched leftward in the 1970s, becoming, in Spiro Agnew’s immortal phrase, the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion.” The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Party drove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in the country, not least the South.

The myth’s proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts. Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites.

But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP’s advance. We can distinguish between two subregions. The Peripheral South — Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas — contained many growing, urbanizing areas and much smaller black communities. Race loomed less large in its politics.

In the more rural, and poorer, Deep South — Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana — black communities were much larger, and racial conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and ’60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater and George Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost it in the Peripheral South.

By contrast, Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, like Richard Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep South whites. But Eisenhower won four states in the Peripheral South. This marked their lasting realignment in presidential voting.

From 1952 to the Clinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Florida and Tennessee twice, and Texas — except when native-son Lyndon B. Johnson was on the ballot — only twice, narrowly. Since 1952, North Carolina has consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentage points of doing so.

In other words, states representing more than half the South’s electoral votes at the time have been consistently in play since before the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court desegregation decision, before Goldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay of civil rights bills.

The GOP’s congressional gains followed the same pattern. Even controlling for larger Democratic-leaning black electorates in the Deep South, the GOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in the Periphery. Goldwater’s 1964 performance in the Deep South was an aberration, not a model for the GOP.

The point of all this is the GOP finally became the region’s dominant party in the least racist phase of the South’s entire history. And it got that way by attracting most of its votes from the region’s growing and confident communities — not its declining and fearful ones.

The myth’s shrillest proponents are as reluctant to admit this as they are to concede most Republicans genuinely believe a colorblind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law. The really tenacious prejudices here are the mythmakers’.

Gerard Alexander is a University of Virginia associate professor of politics. A longer version of this article appears in the spring 2004 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.