“We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business.”

You’ve heard the line: “The Democrats were the party of slavery.” Or maybe: “The KKK were all Democrats.” Or my personal favorite: “The Southern Strategy is a myth invented by liberals to smear Republicans.” All wrong. All part of the most persistent historical con job in modern politics. But like all effective lies, this one has just enough truth in it to keep the rubes repeating it.

So let’s lay it out, receipts and all: the Southern Strategy is not only real—it’s one of the most consequential political shifts in American history. It remade the parties, racialized our politics, and gave us a Republican Party built on white grievance, Confederate nostalgia, and “states’ rights” dog whistles. And the kicker? They keep denying they did it, even while they keep doing it.

Let’s get this out of the way. Yes, the Democratic Party was once the party of white supremacist Southern politics. After the Civil War, the South became a one-party state under Democratic control. White Southerners hated the Republicans—the Party of Lincoln, Emancipation, and Reconstruction—with a white-hot passion. So they voted Democratic in lockstep for nearly a century, forming what historians call the “Solid South” (Britannica).

Democrats in the South pushed Jim Crow laws, voter suppression, lynchings, and segregation with giddy abandon. By 1908, they had disenfranchised almost all Black voters through poll taxes and literacy tests. Their power in Congress, thanks to seniority systems and unbroken Democratic dominance, was enormous.

They were also open about their racism. These weren’t “economic populists.” They were the Dixiecrats—segregationists who made Strom Thurmond look like a centrist. And the only thing they hated more than Black civil rights was the idea of their own party supporting it.

Which brings us to the moment it all began to crack.

In 1948, President Harry Truman decided to stop pretending. He desegregated the military, supported anti-lynching legislation, and dared to suggest that maybe—just maybe—Black Americans should have civil rights. Southern Democrats lost their collective shit.

Strom Thurmond bolted, forming the “States’ Rights Democratic Party,” aka the Dixiecrats, and ran for president on a segregationist platform. He carried four Deep South states. That wasn’t just a warning shot; it was a Declaration of White Grievance Independence (Wikipedia).

Then came Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955), Little Rock (1957), Freedom Rides, and desegregation battles. The white South was fuming. And the Democratic coalition was breaking.

By 1964, the split was complete. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and, in doing so, pulled the pin on the Southern political grenade. He knew it. According to legend, he turned to an aide and said, “We’ve lost the South for a generation” (The Guardian). He was wrong only in underestimating how long it would last—it’s been over half a century and counting.

White Southern Democrats fled their party not because of “economic anxiety” or “cultural values,” but because the party of FDR and JFK dared to support Black Americans’ right to vote, go to school, and eat at a goddamn lunch counter. That’s when the Republicans moved in like opportunistic house flippers, ready to sell the same racist policy under new branding.

The moment of transformation came with Barry Goldwater, the 1964 GOP nominee. Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act. Not because he hated Black people (he actually supported earlier civil rights bills), but because he believed in “states’ rights.” And if you think that phrase isn’t doing some heavy lifting, you haven’t been paying attention.

Goldwater got crushed nationwide but flipped five Deep South states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Republicans hadn’t won those states since Reconstruction. But Goldwater cracked the door open. Nixon would kick it wide.

Nixon’s 1968 campaign put this strategy into full gear. It had a name: the Southern Strategy. The architect? Kevin Phillips, who spelled it out in a 1970 interview:

That wasn’t a slip. That was the blueprint.

Nixon ran on “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and “cracking down on crime.” It was all a racial Rorschach test. He never had to say the n-word out loud; white Southerners already heard it in every line.

George Wallace, running as a third-party segregationist, openly said what Nixon only hinted at—and Wallace won five Southern states. But by 1972, Wallace was gone, and Nixon swept the South. Mission accomplished.

If you need proof that this wasn’t accidental, meet Lee Atwater. Reagan’s strategist. RNC Chair. And the man who, in 1981, said the quiet part loud:

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s GOP campaign strategy—on tape.

By the time Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign, he did it at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi—the very place where civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. His message? “I believe in states’ rights.” (The Guardian) Not subtle.

Add in “welfare queens,” “tough on crime” policies, and the Willie Horton ad, and you’ve got a greatest hits compilation of racially coded messages. This wasn’t about “conservatism.” It was race-based marketing for white voter loyalty. And it worked.

By 1994, the GOP had completed its Southern conquest. Congressional seats once held by conservative Southern Democrats (“Blue Dogs”) flipped red. By the 2000s, the GOP held nearly every Southern governorship and Senate seat. The “Solid South” had flipped—from blue to red.

Fast forward to J.D. Vance in 2021, who accidentally said the truth out loud:

Translation: “We’re the party of the Confederacy now, and the hillbillies are on board.” This is the same guy who ran around in 2016 warning about Trumpism like it was a disease and is now Trump’s bootlicking VP audition tape on legs.

The Southern Strategy never died. It just changed outfits—from segregationist to populist, from “states’ rights” to “stop the steal.”

So with all this documentary evidence, electoral maps, interviews, and strategy memos, why are there still people denying it?

Enter the intellectual mosquito swarm led by Dinesh D’Souza, professional con artist and Republican myth-maker. His shtick? Freeze time in 1860 and pretend parties never changed. The GOP is still “the party of Lincoln,” he says, and Democrats are the real racists because… the KKK existed in 1870.

D’Souza claims:

All of that is demonstrably false (Politifact, Washington Post, Snopes).

Thurmond was just the first. Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Mills Godwin, and dozens more followed. The idea that race wasn’t the driving factor ignores the very architects of the strategy—people like Atwater and Phillips—literally saying it was about race.

Southern Strategy denialism isn’t about history—it’s about power. If you can convince people the GOP has always been the party of civil rights, you absolve yourself of the racist political inheritance you benefit from.

It’s the political equivalent of, “Sure, my granddad built this house on stolen land with slave labor, but I didn’t do it, so why should I feel bad?”

It’s also a convenient rhetorical cudgel. Any time Democrats bring up race, conservatives pivot to: “The Democrats were the KKK!” Never mind that the modern KKK endorsed Trump in 2016, or that David Duke ran as a Republican. That’s inconvenient history.

Meanwhile, Ken Mehlman—the RNC Chair in 2005—literally apologized for the Southern Strategy in front of the NAACP:

If even the GOP admits they did it… why are we still arguing about it?

Donald Trump didn’t invent the Southern Strategy. He just turned it into a lifestyle brand.

Build the wall. Muslim bans. “Very fine people.” Confederate monuments. “American carnage.” It’s not a dog whistle anymore—it’s a damn foghorn.

Trump’s 2016 campaign was the Southern Strategy scaled to the national level. He stopped pretending to be the party of “values” or “small government.” He went straight for racial grievance, culture war, and authoritarian vibes. And it worked.

But only with one demographic: white voters. Particularly white men without college degrees. As Lindsey Graham put it: “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business.” And he said that before Trump.

After the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, GOP-controlled states rushed to pass voter ID laws, close polling places in Black neighborhoods, and purge voter rolls. The justifications are “fraud prevention” and “election integrity,” but let’s be honest—it’s the old playbook with a new header font.

As the country gets more diverse, the GOP base gets older, whiter, and angrier. So the goal becomes maintaining power with fewer voters. That’s not democracy—that’s apartheid politics with a veneer of legality.

We live in a country where the GOP is still running on the fumes of a strategy launched 60 years ago. A party whose leaders once bragged about flipping the South with racist dog whistles now claim that racism only exists in diversity training seminars.

But demographics don’t lie. The “angry white guy” base isn’t growing. The country is changing. Georgia flipped. Arizona flipped. Texas is wobbling. And every time they lose, the GOP doubles down on the Southern Strategy instead of moving on.

Eventually, they’ll run out of rope. Or run out of voters.

Until then, it’s on the rest of us to remember—and remind others—that the Southern Strategy wasn’t just a political tactic. It was a moral failure dressed up as electoral math. And it’s still haunting us.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/jd-vance-says-the-gop-is-the-party