A Brief Response to Dinesh D’Souza’s Cheap Partisan Rhetoric

Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968 permanently won the Segregationist vote for the Republicans.

In order to diffuse criticism of the underlying racial theme of his shows, Rush Limbaugh and his imitators have often resorted to the tactic of declaring, based on whatever flimsy premise and whatever contorted argument, that the Democrats (or Blacks) are somehow the real racists. It is doubtful that anyone born in the USA is really fooled by this, but it creates enough deniability that Limbaugh’s White bourgeois audience can continue listening, confidently armed with a readymade sophistic argument that the show is “not racist.”

Dinesh D’Souza, as an uncomprehending foreigner, takes Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s rhetoric about the Democrats being the real racists too seriously. All White people born in the United States know that this rhetoric is empty. Everybody with an ounce of sense understands that the Republican Party today is supported mainly by White people who expect the party to represent White interests, while the Democratic Party today is essentially an anti-White coalition of petulant minorities. Thus, with “The Democrats are the real racists,” Dinesh D’Souza is arguing a point that, although often stated, almost every American recognizes as absurd on its face.

Although the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s was limited to the South and counted the Republicans of that time as its enemies, the new Ku Klux Klan formed in 1915 with inspiration from D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation spread over the whole of the United States and included many Republicans.

In 1924. the Democratic presidential nominee John W. Davis denounced the Ku Klux Klan, while the Republican incumbent Calvin Coolidge avoided saying anything on the subject. The result was that the Ku Klux Klan supported Calvin Coolidge in 1924. (They even like to claim that he was a member of the Klan, but this is not clear.)

By 1948 Southern Segregationists had become so disenchanted with the Democratic Party that they formed their own splinter-party, the States Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats. The Dixiecrats made Strom Thurmond their presidential nominee.

During the 1960s Southern Segregationists like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms left the Democratic Party and joined the Republican Party. Republican strategist Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority, saw the opportunity and devised what became known as Nixon’s southern strategy.* The realignment of Southern Segregationists with the Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s has been a major source of Republican strength ever since.