Nixon's Southern Strategy

Until recently, the pinnacle of Liberal Mythology was Richard Nixon’s so-called Southern Strategy. According to this narrative, Nixon orchestrated a party switch on civil rights by converting the racists in the Democratic Party — the infamous Dixiecrats — into Republicans. But, it simply isn’t true. Where was the pitch? What was the incentive? There is not one example of a racist pitch by Nixon. This is where Progressives began hearing “dog whistles”. They purport that Nixon employed racially charged coded speech. Really? Examples?*

Progressives contend that Nixon’s appeals to drugs and law and order were racist. But, the main issue in 1968 was the Vietnam War. The commentary was directed to the disruptive antiwar factions. Nixon scorned them targeting the Weather Underground and other draft dodging drug culture leaders … the vast majority of whom were white. Nixon supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and championed public school desegregation. “There’s no doubt about it — the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived and led the administration’s desegregation effort.” (Tom Wicker, New York Times). The Nixon Administration implemented America’s first affirmative action program … called the Philadelphia Plan. If Nixon was a racist, he was a very bad at it.*

Nixon recognized that the industrialization of the South was changing its political demographics. His focus was the non-racist, upwardly mobile, largely urban voters of the “Sunbelt” or “Peripheral South” from Florida to California. The Deep South vote went to rabid racial segregationist George Wallace. Among the racist Dixiecrats, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was the sole senator to defect to the Republicans — and he did this long before Nixon’s time. Only one Dixiecrat congressman, Albert Watson of South Carolina, switched to the GOP. The rest, more than 200 Dixiecrat senators, congressmen, governors and high elected officials, all stayed in the Democratic Party.*

Nixon’s Southern Strategy is another Democrat ahistorical lie.* _____________ *Chronology and analysis by Dinesh D'Souza as summarized by Frank Mulhall