This insightful essay throws water on the conventional wisdom that the rise of the Republicans from Nixon-Gingrich was predicated on attracting racist white southerners to the GOP coalition through code words.
The crux of the argument: -GOP polices consistently had intellectual merit, making it difficult to argue that they were adopted as "code." -Electoral Patterns show that early GOP success in the South was in its least-racist areas, among the peripheral Southern States and among white immigrants -GOP Electoral success in the South didn't peak until the 1990's, arguably the least-racist period in the South's history. Prior to this time, a majority of Southern whites still self-identified as Democrats -A much more plausible explanation is that expansion of the Democrats' "civil rights" agenda into ever-more radical areas (i.e. "acid, amnesty, and abortion") pushed Southerners into the arms of the Republicans moreso than any concentrated effort to attract them. http://claremont.org/writings/crb/spring2004/alexander.html JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
