The “southern switch” didn’t happen overnight, or at the same pace at different levels of government, but it happened as surely as computers replaced typewriters and slide rules.

It’s hard otherwise to deny the basic facts that southern white racists steadily moved, from the early 1960s to the 1980s, from their old stronghold in the Democratic Party to their new home in the GOP - the “southern switch” - or that Republican pols in and beyond the South pursued this development as a “strategy.”

I do not know if Owens subscribes to the fully developed right-wing theory that white racist Lyndon Johnson concocted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Great Society program as part of a white racist conspiracy to ensnare African-Americans in the “plantation” of dependency on government. Owens, who tried to diminish the rise of white nationalism as an invention by Democrats to “scare black people,” said there had never been a Republican effort to use racism to the party’s political advantage.īlack conservatives are criticized for having “the audacity to think for themselves and become educated about our history and the myth of things like the Southern switch, the Southern strategy, which never happened,” she told lawmakers. And it was enunciated again by the recently famous African-American pro-Trump activist Candace Owens, who was brought in by House Republicans to mock and disrupt a hearing Democrats convened on white nationalism, as the Washington Post reports: There is a revisionist historical theory you hear now and then among conservatives - particularly African-American conservatives who are understandably a mite defensive about their position as a minority of a minority - holding that everything we think we know about the partisan politics of the post–civil-rights era is untrue.

Why the southern strategy is fake