The latest brilliant strategy we are seeing from Yankee Republicans is to diss Southern Republicans. The former does this to the latter by joining in the feeding frenzy on everything Confederate. We see Pajamas Media running well-worn myths about the Glorious North vs the Evil South, Branco Cartoons giving the GOP credit for removing the flag in South Carolina, and common memes of how Republicans are Civil Rights Crusaders from way back, and "racism" is hard-wired in the brains of Southerners and Democrats.
Idiotic Republican Assertions:
1. The GOP has always been passionately in favor of racial equality, and therefore blacks should vote for the GOP.
2. Democrats are the Party of Slavery. That's why the Confederates were overwhelmingly Democrats prior to the Civil War.
3. Republicans are all in favor of eliminating Confederate flags, monuments, memorials, plaques and street names, wherever they are found. This policy will make blacks vote for the GOP and the Republicans will have a near-permanent majority throughout the United States.
Idiotic Democrat Assertions:
The Solid South switched from being a Democrat majority region to a Repubican one because of RACISM. The Southerners knew they could continue hating and persecuting black people with the blessings of the GOP, because the Democrats would never stand for such bigotry.
Some Common Sense to the Above:
1. The early Republican Party billed itself as "the White People's Party." The early GOP wanted to keep slavery (meaning, all blacks, slave or free) out of the new territories. This was not because they cared about the slaves, but because they despised black people as a pariah race and didn't want to live with them. The Republicans and Lincoln had no inclination to make social and political equals of blacks, and stated so publicly.
2. Of course Southerners were Democrats prior to the war. The Republican Party was a new, sectional party, pledged to the welfare of the North against the South, as opposed to the welfare of the country as a whole. The GOP wanted to increase the tariff that fell so heavily on the Southern states, to make improvements and pay for corporate welfare in the North. Why would anyone sane vote for a party that wanted to tax them to death?
3. Modern Republicans may think it's a winning strategy to piss on the Confederate graves of Southerners, but those Southerners are overwhelmingly Republicans. Many of them will just stay home on election day, rather than vote for a Republican grave-pisser. So we have Northern Republicans alienating white Southerners, who vote Republican, to curry favor with blacks, who vote for Democrats. Brilliant! This is a great strategy for electing Hillary Clinton. Way to go, guys.
4. The Democrats are not "the Party of Slavery." Slavery was introduced into America by the British, before there was a United States and before there was a Democratic Party. The generation of 1860 had inherited the system of slavery and it was entrenched into the economy and life of the South. There was no easy way to get rid of it.
5. Southerners voted Democrat for many years after the war, because there was just no way they would ever vote for the Party of Lincoln. However, as the Democratic Party gradually transformed into the Party of Socialism, High Taxes and Big Government, Southerners made the switch. Southerners, being very patriotic Americans who value personal liberty and small government, realized that the modern GOP was much more aligned with their views than the modern Democrats. They made the switch for good reasons, not for "racist" ones as the modern Democrats would have you believe.
