When President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the once-Vice President to assassinated President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act in honor of Kennedy, the Solid South Democrats—the racist Dixiecrats—fled the Democratic Party in virtual exodus.
The Republican Party marginalized & struggling to hold onto power in the wake of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal Revolution knew that any chance they had to secure the Black vote was gone with the signing of that act.
They saw these Dixiecrats running away from the Democratic Party in leagues & got an idea.
The Republican Party opens their doors to these energetic angry racist Dixiecrats & forge a whole new coalition that can secure their grip on power while eventually allowing them to reverse the gains of FDR's New Deal Revolution.
This was the Southern Strategy.
Ironically the party that once freed the Black slaves 100 years ago is now courting the racists they once defeated.
After a few hiccups with interfering George Wallace's splitting of the Southern vote & non-racist Southerner Jimmy Carter curiously retaining the South, they locked down this strategy for good with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.
By doing this, the Republican Party doomed themselves to extinction.
It would take decades to show but you cannot last long without a moral edge.
They absorbed a base that hates everyone not like themselves in a country full of diversity.
It's illogical to function like this & one day the Republican Party would receive their comeuppance.
They not only prolonged that short-sighted dysfunctional bigotry by providing a political & social platform for the bigots.
They also reneged on the Social Contract by denying that the Rich were supposed to pay back into society that made them.
No moral edge. Greed & Hatred won't take you far in the long term.
Short-term we had to pay for their recklessness.
But once that recklessness had taken its toll, the Balance came in.
Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, & especially Bush II spent all the power of that short-term strategy.
The election & re-election of Barack Obama shows that it's now time for the long-term.
The bigots hate the Blacks.
The bigots hate the Hispanics.
The bigots hate the Asians.
The bigots hate the Muslims.
The bigots hate the Gays.
The bigots hate the Democratic Women.
The bigots hate the Democratic Whites.
The bigots hate the Poor.
The bigots hate California.
The bigots hate Massachusetts.
The bigots hate France.
The bigots hate China.
The bigots hate Europe.
The bigots hate. The bigots hate. The bigots hate.
Can't go nowhere with a bunch of haters & now the Republican Party is married to them.
To keep power they had to please these bigots.
By pleasing these bigots they lost ability to draw in any of those other groups that the bigots hate.
Purge the bigots, lose numbers. Keep the bigots, lose power.
They CAN'T change. And because of that the Republican Party will die.
If they picked a better set of people in the 1960s, that might not have had to happen.
John Lucas
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