The Party Switch: Obvious Nonsense

There is a ritual that must be performed before making the case for The Party Switch Myth. One must pretend to be utterly astonished that anyone could deny the divine orthodoxy.

The history Youtube channel, Knowing Better, starts his video on the Party Switch by indignantly exclaiming “Everyone knows that the parties flipped during the Civil Rights movement. It’s common knowledge.”

Another history Youtuber, Mr. Beat, gives a look of disbelief and disappointment when mentioning that some people deny that “the southern strategy” is even real.

In April of 2023, Kevin Kruse summarized his chapter on the Party Switch by saying “This is an obvious story.”

The ritual is reminiscent of an attempt to overcompensate for a perceived weakness. And without exception, the ritual is followed up by the use of embarrassing scholarship, hearsay, conspiracy, or a slurred sentence from the ramblings of Lee Atwater. How could anyone possibly object?

The Party Switch Myth is obvious nonsense. The narrative categorically falls apart when going through the details (which I chronicle in my book and will do on this site) but it’s important to first look at this broadly, and point out how obtuse the entire notion is to begin with.

The irrationality of the myth is on full display in the way Kruse explains it here:

Republicans defeated slavery, defeated segregation, championed civil rights, and then once these victories were won they…retreated? …Courted resentment? When someone absolutely defeats their opponents, the reaction would be resentment on the part of the victors? This makes zero sense. And it makes less sense the more we look into it. Take the fact that the years of this supposed “swap” were years of virtual no-contest Republican landslides (1972, 1980, 1984), by both Nixon and Reagan. There was no desperation, or need to switch ideologies. There was no need for “retreat.”

If you believe the two parties switched ideologies, crossing paths around the 1960s, then you would have to think a Democratic president such as Franklin Roosevelt is some kind of a conservative, and closer to modern Republicans than Democrats.

This should immediately strike you as untrue, but one only has to look at polls from the 1930s to see that it was the South that changed its values over time, rather than the South remaining constant while the parties changed their ideologies. Poll after poll shows that the South leaned liberal compared to other regions, and was one of the most supportive of the New Deal, all while being most resistant to desegregation.

Suppose Nixon and Reagan, who were accused of using "dog whistles” to appeal to racists, in reality, have a record of speaking out blatantly in favor of civil rights and racial equality. In that case, that completely negates the conspiracy that they would be sending coded signals to racists. A racist would clearly understand the overt messaging before going to wild interpretations of “code words.”

If Democrats continuously made appeals to segregationists and had a much clearer “southern strategy,” then even if you believe Republicans also did this, it would still be wrong to ascribe this as an explanation for the parties “switching ideologies.” If both parties did it, it isn’t a “switch.” Examples of this are endless if one cares to look. In truth, the Democrats were far more guilty.

Any one of these facts alone would be enough to dispense with the entire characterization of the parties switching ideologies. At the very least, there are much more accurate ways to describe the complex changes that the parties went through. It’s actually insane to even hypothesize that two rival political parties could overall trade ideologies, but it should only take a moment’s reflection to dismiss the idea altogether.

This myth becomes more than a particularly unfounded interpretation of history. It’s about how to control a narrative to such an extent as to get people to believe the ridiculous, and perform all its rituals. The formation of the myth itself is the intriguing story. It’s the story of how a political party grapples with 130 years of evil, by twisting themselves into knots trying to one-up their opponents in an endless train of purity-tests, convincing only themselves of their own morality. It’s the story of a defunct party, constantly trying to relive their misinterpretation of the Civil Rights movement, which demands portraying their opponents as the next-in-line of every villain in history. To do this they need to string together anything they can to try to make that square narrative fit into a round hole.

Through all this delusion and intentional obfuscation, the truth is that if you strive for a colorblind society, you would be at home voting Republican in every election, in every generation, since the foundation of the party.