Republicans have, as I said, spent decades exploiting racial hostility
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How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible
In states like South Carolina, the mogul reaps the benefits of the GOP's longstanding appeal to racism.
The racist voters swarming around Trump didn’t just pop out of nowhere. The Republicans have been courting them for decades now, in a dramatic break from the party’s origins. From its creation in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery until the 1940s, the Republicans were the party of the North, and more anti-racist (albeit sometimes only marginally so) than the Democrats, whose most reliable base of support was the “solid” white South.
This pattern started breaking up in the 1930s, when Democrats began to win the votes of blacks hard hit by the Depression. Despite the compromises spawned by Franklin Roosevelt’s dependance on white Southerners, the New Deal era also saw members of his party, most notably First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, taking a vocal stance in favor of civil rights. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman—who needed the votes of Northern blacks to score his upset victory in 1948 over Thomas Dewey—was even more forthright, desegregating the military and running on the strongest civil-rights platform the Democrats had ever put forth. This immediately caused dissension in the ranks, with erstwhile Democrat Strom Thurmond of South Carolina leaving the party to run on the “Dixiecrat” ticket. But it wasn’t until 1964 that Thurmond was ready to join the Republican Party, which had to undergo its own ideological transformation before it could welcome open white supremacists.
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newrepublic.com |
