[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.]

Campaigning for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, George W. Bush said that non-southerners, like his primary opponent John McCain, should "butt out" of the South's racial politics. In South Carolina, telephone callers asked thousands of voters if they would support McCain if they knew he'd fathered a black child. These things did not happen because Bush is a racist. They happened because Bush, like decades of Republican candidates before him, wanted to benefit from the racism of some southern voters. Today's Republican Party is made of free-traders and low-taxers, war mongers and evangelicals, yes, but it also contains the residuum of the segregationist South, which once infested the Democratic Party.

This is a simple story, and yet in the past few days, some New York Times columnists have managed to make it seem complicated. David Brooks wrote about Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, when Reagan declared, "I believe in states' rights." Now, "states' rights" was the rallying cry of racist southerners. But Brooks thinks that saying so is "a slur." The truth is more "complicated," he says, than Republicans taking advantage of "the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy." Well, there's no evidence unless you count the opinion of the actual Klan, who, as historian Joe Crespino points out, believed that Reagan's platform "reads as if it were written by a Klansman." Mississippi's white voters were, Crespino says, "a carefully courted constituency," and two-thirds of them voted for Reagan against Jimmy Carter.

This is not complicated. If you go to Mississippi and use the same words used by every redneck desirous of pulling an ever-so-thin cloak over his bigotry, you're either stupid or you're courting the bigots. In 1980 Reagan could not yet benefit from the defense of stupidity or dementia: He was courting the bigots. Just as, when he declined the Klan's endorsement, he was not acting stupid, either: He couldn't be seen as the candidate only of bigots.

Paul Krugman takes Brooks's bait by pointing out other instances when Reagan opposed civil rights. But this too makes the story needlessly complicated. We cannot know whether Reagan was personally racist, nor is it interesting or important -- no more than it is interesting or important whether the 2000 episode makes Bush a racist. What is interesting and important is the Republicans' long battle to use racism to stop class politics.

This was a tactic first used in the U.S. over a hundred years ago by the Democratic Party. In the 1890s, southern states began to amend their laws and constitutions to keep black people from voting, in part because they wanted to stop poor whites from joining the Populist Party, which sought to implement an income tax and break up business monopolies. Democrats, then the reigning political power in the South, figured that they could keep some large number of poor whites from worrying about their economic status by appealing to their racism. They proved correct. Thus the South solidified behind the Democratic Party and white supremacy....

Related Links

Joseph Crespino: Did David Brooks Tell the Full Story About Reagan's Neshoba County Fair Visit?

Carol V. Hamilton: Is David Brooks a Good Historian?

Timothy Noah: Decoding David Brooks

War of words on NYT op ed page over Reagan's 1980 visit to Philadelphia, Mississippi

Stephen Kislock - 11/23/2007

The republicans, do not need the Black and Hispanic, they just don't let the VOTE for the Democrats.

See Ohio and the 2006 Sham and Secretary of State Blackwell.

Michael Glen Wade - 11/17/2007

Southern segregationists had been wooing the Republicans since at least 1948---check any urban southern newspaper--the Jackson Daily News would do just fine--no guile there. David Brooks, of course, doesn't know any of this. It is the tip of the iceberg as far as what he doesn't know about what he purports to instruct the rest of the country on via the editorial pages of the New York Times. The guy gives new meaning to "substance abuse" in this and many other editorials and the Times is complicit in his efforts.

James W Loewen - 11/17/2007

This article is excellent, except it does not go far enough. Nixons' "Southern strategy," invented to head off Wallace from getting the white Southern racist vote, also proved attractive to the sundown towns and suburbs across the Midwest. Continued by Nixon's Republican successors, covert (wink-wink) racism tied to overt anti-affirmative action campaigns and the like have garnered much support from white voters who worry about desegregated neighborhoods and that their kids will not get the job they "deserve."