Q: What do you do when you are a wingnut “historian” and someone asks you a hard question about history?
A: Delete the question and pretend it was never asked.
Meet Michael Zak, self-proclaimed “historian” of the Republican Party and all-around gutless weasel. He likes to paint Democrats as racists, and portrays Republicans as being invariably the friends of minorities. In comments on a recent post at his blog, I challenged Zak to define the “Southern strategy” used by the Republican Party in years past. His answer was the very incarnation of dishonesty:
Prior to Richard Nixon’s 1960 campaign, Republican presidential candidates did not campaign much at all in the South. Nixon decided to campaign in every state, thereby including the southern ones.
Democrat myth-makers call the GOP’s decision to campaign throughout the country the “Southern strategy” and imply there was something sinister about a Republican candidate campaigning in the South.
This is a blatant lie, of course. The Republican “Southern strategy” was not quite so innocent as simply campaigning in the South:
In American politics, the Southern strategy refers to the focus of the Republican party on winning U.S. Presidential elections by securing the electoral votes of the U.S. Southern states, often by exploiting racial anxiety among white voters.
Although the phrase “Southern strategy” is often attributed to Richard Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it, but merely popularized it. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:
“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent 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. 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 into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
While Phillips was concerned with polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just with winning the white South, this was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach.
I called Zak on his lie, and challenged him again to provide the correct information. At this point, Zak decided that a factual discussion was waaaaaaay too scary — so he deleted the comments I’d made. Compare the comments section of the post today with the mirror.
Scratch a wingnut, find a coward. It’s an old, old story, but somehow comforting to know that milksops like Michael Zak will always — always — choose to run from an honest debate.
Lately…