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Over the years this meme seems to have become all-consuming and all-explaining for our Democratic friends. On the net there are hundreds of liberals for whom politics is defined by the Democrats' support of civil rights versus the Republicans' racist Southern Strategy. In Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rick Pearlstein tells us that today's divisive politics is all the result of Richard Nixon's cunning rise to power. We are the divided nation that Nixon created.

it's the problem with allowing political enemies to write the history and then imposing the lie by endless repetition. It ignores the fact that Viet Nam fractured the Democrats in that same era, southerners being more capable of seeing that anti-anti communism was pro communist than the elite classes like this guy's first boss. Go on to the divide over abortion and you have a more viable and wholly racially -free explanation of the conservative values victories in the south.

I disagree with the "southern strategy" business as it has been painted. Lyndon Johnson definitely was pro-Civil Rights, but who did he count on to help him get that stuff passed? Republicans.

Look at the 1956 Southern Manifesto, if Southerners based things entirely on race they should have looked at that document...seen that the vast majority were Democrats...and assumed that Democrats were the party they should stick with.

How the Democrats lost the South has been made into a simplistic cartoon of Republican="evil winners", Democrat="hero losers" and its a lot more complicated than that.

Republicans at the time did not have the reputation of anti-Civil Rights. Democrats were the signers of the manifesto....Democrats stood in the schoolhouse doors....Democrats sent in the National Guard.

The Democrats have done a good job of confusing the real record.