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The party's rising prospects point toward a once unthinkable goal: a reversal of the "Great Reversal," the switch in political loyalties in the 1960s that made the South a Republican stronghold for a generation.It was not until the 1990s that the GOP solidified its dominance in the South. While Republican presidents beginning with Eisenhower did well in the South, but that realignment didn't trickle down to the state and local level until the '90s. As recently as 1994, my native Georgia had two Democratic senators and only three Republican congressmen. It wasn't until 2002 that Georgia elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
Incorrectly placing this realignment in the 1960s is part of a myth promoted by liberals, as a way of falsely suggesting that Republicans succeeded in the South because of race and civil rights. In fact, the South didn't become solidly Republican until two or three decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Civil Rights? More likely the growing realization that Progressive==Crypto-Marxist.
ReplyDeleteI have had more than one occasion in recent years to point this out to members of the Democratic party's cognoscenti, but they seem curiously waterproof to the information. A study of one or two reference books containing statistical tables on election results should suffice if they doubt its factuality, but they do not say they do.
ReplyDeleteMembers of the press corps over fifty should recall that in 1976 Jimmy Carter was thought to herald a reconstitution of the political culture of the South. You had outlets like Time offering the thesis that the Democratic Party had successfully adapted to the dismantling of Jim Crow and incorporated black voters while retaining its customary constituency. You also had characters like Tip O'Neill referring to Gerald Ford as "the last Republican President" and characters like John Rhodes speculating that the Republican Party would 'go the way of the Whigs'. Evidently the older reporters have forgotten all of this, or are not transmitting it to their younger confederates if they do remember.