People are always touting how Lincoln was a republican, but when I read a bit about history it seemed that the parties switched sides after the war in terms of left/right alignment.
Maybe read more about history. Lincoln’s Republican Party was a coalition of religious fundamentalists (abolitionists) and big business. That’s still basically the modern Republican Party. Meanwhile, FDR’s Democratic Party was recognizably the modern Democratic Party. It was a coalition of labor, immigrants, northern progressives, Black people, and agricultural southern whites. George Wallace was a committed New Dealer. During FDR’s time, the whole south was relatively poorer than Mississippi was today. They had half the GDP per capita of the Midwest. These poor southerners were democrats because they wanted New Deal government programs (so long as Black people were denied access), and were opposed to big business, who supported things like tariffs that were bad for southern farmers but good for northern industry. The New Deal coalition persisted into the 1990s with Bill Clinton, even though Democrats had dropped their opposition to civil rights in 1965.
There was a realignment that happened due to economic development in the south in the 1970s and 1980. Industrial development in the south created the prosperous suburbs similar to the ones that politicians like Reagan relied on to win traditionally Republican states like Arizona. The economies of places like Georgia became reliant on low taxes and low regulation to get business to move there. You can see this even in the Democratic Party. Southern Democrats like Mark Warner and Keisha Lance Bottom are the most pro-business in the party. Lance-Bottoms (the Democratic mayor of Atlanta) and Brian Kemp (the Republican governor of Georgia) have more in common on economic issues than either do with anti-business northern Democrats like Jenny Durkin.
Nixon and Reagan’s appeal to the south is always denounced by democrats as being akin to adopting the pre-1965 Democratic support for segregation. Of course that’s ridiculous. In Congress and as Vice President Nixon had been a leading civil rights advocate, helping get through the 1957 civil rights act. (He was a racist, but he was strongly opposed to de jure discrimination.) By the time of Reagan and Nixon, the issue landscape had changed. People weren’t arguing about segregation, they were arguing about affirmative action and racial quotas. The natural conservative position on those is going to be different than on Jim Crow.
There's some historical truth in here but the overall thrust of your comment is wrong. The realignment between the Democrats and Republicans was not primarily economic, and was in fact driven by civil rights: opponents of civil rights legislation switched from the Democratic to Republican parties, leaders in the Republican party capitalized on that to realign the Solid South, which as a side effect canted the GOP more rural and the Democratic party more urban, which reinforced the Democratic racial coalition and also further shifted more conservative rural voters into the GOP.
The process was already in motion in the early 1960s, and was a key part of Goldwater's strategy in '64. Perlstein's "Before The Storm" is a good book on this.
The notion that Nixon was an advocate for anti-segregation reform in the south is especially risible. Nixon did, in fact, appeal to the pre-'64 anti-civil-rights agenda of the southern states. Last time we talked about this, I put the Nixon campaign on the record, in a contemporaneous source pursuing this strategy:
You responded with a revisionist Claremont Review article, which is approximately the same thing as me responding to one of your comments with a Robin DiAngelo article. Amusingly, one of the Claremont article's sources is... Kevin Phillips, the subject of the contemporaneous news story I cited to you.
I can make it simpler for you. Here, from the article I posted, is a direct quote from Phillips, a primary source of your Claremont article on the "Myth of the Racist Republican":
All the talk of the Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [Senator Jacob k. Javits] only gets 20 percent. From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 precent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that . . . but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
Here I pause to request that you "wait for it", and note that if we weren't buried deep in a random thread that the good play here would have been to stop before the ellipsis, wait for someone to point out the VRA thing, and then unveil the rest of the quote, Simpsons "How To Cook Forty Humans" style, but, anyways:
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide in their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.
Persiflage, this revisionist history of ideological sorting. Persiflage, I say.
Yeah, I find the reductionist "He wears the same label as me, therefore I can claim him as part of my tribe, and that he has the same views as I/my tribe does" annoying.
Lincoln wouldn't get far in today's GOP primaries...
Your wording suggests that the "flip" was caused by the civil rights issues. Yet in reality the "flip" was a gradual realignment over 30-40 years. 80% of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act and remained the worst enemies of white supremacists. Jim Crow Democrats did not flip Republican. They had nowhere to go, so they stayed Democrat for decades. There are still Blue Dog Democrats to this day. The South eventually became more Republican as the older voters died out and a new generation with different views came of age.
A good example is Robert Byrd. A former KKK leader, he is also the longest-serving US Senator in history, from 1959-2010. He remained a Democrat the entire time, and was particularly skilled at outmaneuvering Republicans. He doesn't seem to have had a real change of heart. He was just a political opportunist who didn't mind compromising his principles to gain power. He called himself "Big Daddy" due to how good he was at getting pork.
A good solid reputation runs for 10-20yr even after you stop doing whatever it was that got you the reputation.
Look how long it took the midwest to realize that the neoliberals they voted for were shipping their jobs to china. They were running on the good will of supporting unions in decades prior.
The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes. If it was just civil rights the south would have been voting blue well into the 1980s.
> The south flipped because republicans figured out that adding a bunch of religious rhetoric to their platform got them easy votes.
That’s kind of true, but also oversimplified. Republicans have always been the party of religious evangelicals. In the time of Lincoln, abolition was in large part an evangelical Christian movement. After 1965, when both parties had embraced the civil rights acts, social and religious issues took on more importance.
Apart from that, you’re overlooking the economy. Southern states were poor and agrarian during the New Deal era. The wanted government support, they opposed tariffs, they supported a weak currency. All that places them at odds with big business, which was the other leg of the Republican Party. In 1930, the median income in the south was just half of that in the Midwest. After 1960, that changed dramatically due to southern industrialization. Newly minted middle class suburbanites started voting for low taxes and low regulation, just like in the rest of the country.
