Politics
Out of context: Reply #11967
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- ukit0
The interesting thing is that when the Republican party was formed, they went to war against the South to defend modern progressive values. Now, they represent the South and go to war against modern progressive values.
The point when the Democrats and Republicans traded places was during the civil rights debate in the 60s. Many of the racist Southern Democrats were so mad that Lyndon Johnson signed the law giving black people equal rights that they left and became Republicans. At that point, Republicans decided they would base a large part of their campaigning strategy around white resentment of blacks.
Lee Atwater, who ran campaigns for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, described it in the following quote.
"You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".In 2005, Ken Mehlmann, the former RNC leader who is widely believed to be (yet another) closed gay conservative, went and spoke at the NAACP and publicly apologized for the racist tactics the Republican party used. I wonder how many years from now we'll see him and other gay Republicans apologize for how they treated the first Black President.
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