To say that the GOP is the party of white pride
jks: White fear is more like it.
is susperficial to the point of gross stupidity. Sorry, not, if you're insulted. It (Gop as white pride) is the metaphoric equivalent of saying that the National Socialists were the symbol of German pride,
jks: Only if you identify "German" with the mythical "Aryan" race, as the Nazis did. Many assimilated German Jews took pride in being German.
But in fact the GOP Southern Strategy has nothing much ro do with pride in the accomplishments of the mythical "white race," which also doesn't exist. It's jsut a marker for social superiority. The Jews and the Irish used to be nonwhite in this country. There's nothing "racial" in any quasi-biological sense about reacxe in America. As any number of literraty works mentioned (or that might have been mentioned) in recent discussion here, race isn';t even correlated with skin color -- that's the point of Puddinhead Wilson (properly praised here), Abalom, Absalom, Pinky, etc.
And there isn't a white race either in any coherent sense that one might try to specify -- including, e.g., the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but excluding the modern ones as greasy wogs, including the ancient Hebrews, including Our Lord, but not modern Jews, and so forth.White (as I bet you agree) is a complex socially constructed set of markers that involve principally being Not Black.
But that's crucial to why the Southern Strategy was to capture the Party of White Fear flag from the Dixiecrats when the Dems became the Party of Civil Rights. The presence of blacks, the colored people, the "Negro Race" was supposed to be a floor that guaranteed everyone else at least a psychological superiority, but poorer whites are always threatened in their social as well as their economic existence, and covil rights and black advancement threaten that. The Dixiecrats used to offer the guarantee that no matter what, you will never be n*gg*rs, but when the Dems gave that up, there was a market niche for the GOP, which it took with aggressive fervor. And great success.
jks
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