this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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The what?
To oversimplify, the parties “switched” platforms in the 60s when Republicans realized that they could appeal to uneducated, racist white people.
The southern strategy was also kind of the major tactic the Democratic Party used to maintain the New Deal coalition. It essentially meant ignoring southern racism in favor of major infrastructure. Southern states just fucked over infrastructure projects where it served black people. It fell apart when, in the 1950s, the Democratic Party began to pursue racial rights.
*edit But it was Nixon and the GOP that coined it as a term I believe. It's a long standing strategy in American politics, though.
Essentially racism as a political platform developed by Nixon's campaign as a reactionary movement to the Civil Rights movement.
Jerry Falwell didn't want his whites-only college to be integrated by mandate, and started the Moral Majority, a voting bloc that didn't care how crooked a candidate was (or worked against their interests) so long as they were anti-abortion-access. And this helped Reagan win by a landslide in 1980.
And as many history analyses will show you, Reagan was the beginning of the end of the United States by an uncountable number of different metrics.