Can Republicans gain the Solid South post-Civil Rights without catering to racists?

They get a lot of support from the Pro-Life Movement, which embraced them after Roe vs Wade. That is a lot of their support in the Midwest Plains States too.
 
60s counterculture happens earlier, allowing the Republicans to promote a culturally conservative but race neutral agenda. The Southern Strategy made the GOP brand radioactive with black voters, and that's now costing them votes they might otherwise be getting. Black Democrats look more like Republicans than white Democrats on moral issues:

http://news.gallup.com/poll/112807/blacks-conservative-republicans-some-moral-issues.aspx

If the GOP's Southern Strategy had been strictly condemning the sexual revolution, and making a populist us (flyover country) vs them (coastal elites) argument, they would have a good chance of uniting black and working class white voters under the same banner, much as the New Deal did.
 
They get a lot of support from the Pro-Life Movement, which embraced them after Roe vs Wade. That is a lot of their support in the Midwest Plains States too.
Depends on the era. OTL Pro-lifers started to turn towards the Republican Party beginning in 1976, but most stayed Democrats until the late Reagan era at the earliest, until a combination of Ted Kennedy's coathanger speech in response to the Bork nomination and the snubbing of Casey the Elder during the 1992 Democratic Convention discredited the Democrats in the eyes of the movement. So by itself a change in stance on abortion is unlikely to affect things, by that time the Southern Strategy was in place.
 
This is not borne out by American history after any war, in which African Americans fought in be it the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War One or World War Two (hell, the Vietnam war!)/
The conventional view (which may well be mistaken!) was that African-American soldiers were treated as heroes in Europe and then came home to be treated as second-class citizens. And this jump started the Civil Rights movement.
 
There is a way for the Republicans to get African-American support in the South if they follow their 1944 platform when after they gain large majorities in Congress in 1946 they vote for a comprehensive Voters Rights Acts and the Republicans in the South go for a moderate, pro-education reform, anti-corruption candidates that can appeal to well to do whites who do not like the one party political machines that where predominant at that time.
There will be support from Northern Democrats and I doubt that President Truman would veto it.
 
The conventional view (which may well be mistaken!) was that African-American soldiers were treated as heroes in Europe and then came home to be treated as second-class citizens. And this jump started the Civil Rights movement.

I think that is fairly well documented, tho the term "jump start" may not quite be accurate. The civil-rights moment was well underway long before, but was not the sort of mass movement that emerged in the 1950s.
 

Wallet

Banned
Potentially. Eisenhower made huge gains in the South and he didn't exactly have a Southern Strategy.
Eisenhower had HUGE bipartisan appeal though. He was a moderate war hero who both parties wanted to nominate. He was literally a once in a life time candidate

(Although Colin Powell could have done this)
 
You'd have to define what "catering to racists" means. The Republicans in the 70s took a hard line on crime and this won them suburban voters for a generation. There are some who say that anti-crime appeals are fundamentally racist, although they simply reveal their own racism in doing so. These appeals worked well in areas that were both diverse, and in areas that weren't diverse. You have to keep in mind how bad the crime problem was. In 1973 alone, basically 1 in 4 households, or 37 million Americans, had suffered an assault, robbery, burglary, larceny or auto theft; in cities, the rate was around 1 in 3 households.

Opposition to busing was something that racists and non racists could agree on, but again, what constitutes catering to racists? Is it what rhetorical points to emphasize?

Same with a restrictionist immigration plan, which racists approve of, but then again, so do low wage low skilled African American workers (and what has happened to the North Carolina meatpacking industry is as clear evidence of this as anything).

So the idea of "catering" to racists needs to be better defined. The Democratic Party was restrictionist and anti-crime in the 90s, and they won half of the South in the '92 and '96 Presidential elections. Were they catering to racists? Or were their policies just more appealing to Southern people?
 

Wallet

Banned
Being against busing wasn't considered catering to racists (although sometimes it was and called out on)

A lot of pro-civil rights families were against busing. The sad fact was (and still is) that black schools were worst because they got a lot less funding. Nixon campaigned on kids going to the good school where you bought your house. Yes he used it as videoed to racist, but thousands of northern families didn't see that. I don't think the issue of busing won the south
 
Being against busing wasn't considered catering to racists (although sometimes it was and called out on)

A lot of pro-civil rights families were against busing. The sad fact was (and still is) that black schools were worst because they got a lot less funding. Nixon campaigned on kids going to the good school where you bought your house. Yes he used it as videoed to racist, but thousands of northern families didn't see that. I don't think the issue of busing won the south
In 1968 specifically, Nixon won the South because of a vote split. Humphrey's allies in Labor could not bring him southern union members in large numbers because many were going for Wallace. Wallace was winning the rural white vote and the working class vote, while Humphrey had to settle for the black (still not that large because the registration drives weren't all that successful as of yet) and liberal vote, while Nixon took a lot of moderates and suburbanites, as well as normal Democrat voters disgusted with the rioting but who abandoned Wallace at the last minute because of LeMay. Without Curtis LeMay on the ticket, Wallace probably takes a few more states. He was way more popular than people remember;way more charismatic than previous Dixiecrat type candidates like Thurmond and Byrd, and was able to utilize populism and the situation at hand to expand outside his regional base. At one point, he was polling at around 29% of the vote. Nixon wasn't some kind of crypto-Klansman who summoned the ghost of Nathan Bedford Forrest to bring him Tennessee's electoral votes. Rather, he positioned himself between Wallace and Humphrey and was able to win with his coalition. Remember also that the Republican Party in the south collapsed after Watergate. The "Southern Strategy" wasn't a lightbulb that was just turned on. Winning the South for the GOP was something that took 25 years of work after Nixon, and came into fruition in 2000 when George W. Bush was able to peel off social conservatives from the Democratic coalition.

"The Southern Strategy" is one of those things that has taken on substantially more weight in narratives than what existed in reality. The South, by and large, was still Congressionally a Democratic stronghold until 1994, and at the Presidential level, switched multiple times from the 70s to the 90s. A debatedly apocryphal Atwater quote and confirmation bias provide much of the narrative that exists today. It completely ignores the demographic changes to the South in the mid 20th century, stemming from the invention of air conditioning, which brought many Northerners who had supported the Republican Party to southern suburbs of booming Sunbelt towns. The South also was finally in the 1950s and 1960s starting to see the kind of capital formation that was bringing it out of the destitution that had existed since the Civil War, stemming from the power of Southern Congressmen and Senators under the seniority system in bringing home the bacon, as well as growth in its manufacturing and defense sectors. This allowed a middle class that had previously not really existed to start forming in the South, and the Republicans by and large did well with middle class voters.

The idea that there is a singular "racist" vote out there, just lying dormant until it hears the right dog whistles, is incorrect. Public opinion polling reveals that voters opinions change about things. America went through a rightward shift in the 1970s because of the failure of the postwar Liberal order to ensure domestic tranquility and to overcome the economic challenges that sprung up. The South, economically speaking, was a lot more eager for government spending programs when it was rising out of poverty than after it had developed a middle class. This isn't exactly abnormal.
 
demographic changes to the South in the mid 20th century, stemming from the invention of air conditioning, which brought many Northerners who had supported the Republican Party to southern suburbs of booming Sunbelt towns. The South also was finally in the 1950s and 1960s starting to see the kind of capital formation that was bringing it out of the destitution that had existed since the Civil War, stemming from the power of Southern Congressmen and Senators under the seniority system in bringing home the bacon, as well as growth in its manufacturing and defense sectors. This allowed a middle class that had previously not really existed to start forming in the South, and the Republicans by and large did well with middle class voters.

The idea that there is a singular "racist" vote out there, just lying dormant until it hears the right dog whistles, is incorrect. Public opinion polling reveals that voters opinions change about things. America went through a rightward shift in the 1970s because of the failure of the postwar Liberal order to ensure domestic tranquility and to overcome the economic challenges that sprung up. The South, economically speaking, was a lot more eager for government spending programs when it was rising out of poverty than after it had developed a middle class. This isn't exactly abnormal.

Those are good points and are borne out by data - within the South (which political scientists define as the 11 Confederate states), Republicans did better in states with higher in-migration and higher incomes, as well as more urbanized states. But they also gained more in states with larger black populations, indicating that a larger black population made white voters more conservative. (You can crunch the numbers using census data - you would need a -x^2 form of the race variable.)
 

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
As the OP says, can the Republicans gain the Solid South from the Democrats without becoming a party that allows racists and racial resentment to fester since Nixon's Southern Strategy?

Say Richard Nixon wins the 1960 Presidential Election and pushes hard for Civil Rights in his first term, the African American community particularly in the South would become a reliable voting bloc for the Republican Party. That alone would be enough for the Republicans to be competitive in the "Solid South" from the Democratic party.
 

Ian_W

Banned
You're either going to need a whole lot of re-education of the Southern whites, or deny them the vote, or get a whole lot of new voters.
Say Richard Nixon wins the 1960 Presidential Election and pushes hard for Civil Rights in his first term, the African American community particularly in the South would become a reliable voting bloc for the Republican Party. That alone would be enough for the Republicans to be competitive in the "Solid South" from the Democratic party.

It's competitive, but it doesn't win because barring terrible candidates, the white population votes as a bloc against whatever party the black population is voting for. Racism is that deep to the bone in the white South.

Basically, if you want to win the American South without pandering to racists, you need to build a new electorate.
 
I think that is fairly well documented, tho the term "jump start" may not quite be accurate. . .
I agree. A lot of early Civil Rights actions for decades before the biggest successes of the 1960s.

Birmingham '63 was pretty big. I read a book that Selma '65, in favor of voting rights, and in somewhat measurable terms of newspaper editorials, letters to members of Congress, and speeches by members of Congress on the floor was even bigger. And a strong case can be made that the Selma protests in the Spring were a major contributing factor to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in early August 1965. :)
 
Given the ingrained political system in the South at that time, with the Black vote forced to die the death of a thousand cuts at each and every election, the only "Solid South" I can envisage is one based on traditional values of white supremacy. If the Dems abandon their citadel, and the GOP doesn't move in, most of the South (maybe not all) will fall to the Dixiecrats or their equivalent. Without the mitigation and tempering of a truly national organization, such a party would grow inward, hardening positions held, holding popular programs hostage to assure its survival. The migration patterns referenced might force a few states back to the usual parties, but there would be a viable 3rd party in the Congress of the United States.
 
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