Someone replied to one of my posts with a version of a comment I have seen making the rounds all month:
Juneteenth is the biggest victory of the Republican party. The Republicans beat the racist Democrats who wanted to own people, but the Republicans refused. The Democrats still want to control you today, and celebrating Juneteenth is a great reminder. Thank you, Republican Party, from the Black community and all communities.
Bless your heart.
Oscar Wilde gave us the line in Lady Windermere’s Fan. A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I think about that line when these comments arrive, because they run on a kind of cynicism of truth. They take real facts, strip the values out of them, and hand you back the empty labels.
In the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Republican Party was the party of emancipation, and the Democratic Party was the party of the slaveholding South. For generations after, Black Americans voted Republican, because Republicans had ended slavery and written Black citizenship into the Constitution.
These party labels remain, but the values that underpin them have shifted.
Consider what geologists call the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal: about 780,000 years ago, the Earth’s magnetic field flipped, and north became south. It did not happen in a morning. It unfolded over a span long enough that you only see it when you stand back far enough. Political parties move the same way. The name on the door stays the same while the house behind it gets rebuilt room by room.
Follow the two parties from the Civil War to Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and you watch the values trade places. The historian Heather Cox Richardson traces this arc in To Make Men Free, her history of the Republican Party.
It started to turn in 1936, when Black voters began moving to the Democratic Party after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It broke open in the 1960s. President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He is said to have told an aide that he had just lost the South for a generation. He was right.
That same year, Republican Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act as federal overreach. According to Britannica, he lost the election to Johnson in a landslide and still carried his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South, the first crack in a region that had been Democratic since the Civil War.
What followed has a name. Historians call it the Southern Strategy. Richard Nixon and his strategist Kevin Phillips sharpened an appeal to white Southern resentment of civil rights, and over the following decades the South moved from the solid Democratic South to a solid Republican one. The scholarly consensus is that racial conservatism sat at the center of that realignment, though historians still debate the finer points.
The people who built the strategy did not hide what it was. Kevin Phillips, the man who helped design it, grew disaffected and left the Republican Party to become an independent and one of its sharper critics. Lee Atwater, who went on to chair the Republican National Committee, described in a 1981 interview how the party had learned to trade open racial slurs for abstract language about busing, states’ rights, and taxes, language that did its work without ever naming race. Before he died of a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater apologized in public for the politics he had practiced.
Strom Thurmond tells the shortest version of the whole story. He ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist Dixiecrat against his own Democratic Party. In 1964, he switched to the Republican Party and stayed there for the rest of his long career. The man did not change his views. He changed his label.
So here is the thing worth noticing. When you praise the Republican Party of Lincoln’s day, you are praising a party that used the power of the federal government to end slavery, extend citizenship, and protect the right to vote. You are praising the values of liberalism.
Ain’t that something.
Take it from this independent. I care less about which team gets the trophy than about what we can agree the trophy was for.
I want the commenter above to live a rich, free, and fulfilling life. That is the same wish the people who ended slavery had for the people they freed. It is the wish I have for my sons, and the one I have for you.
Look up the Solid South. Look up the Southern Strategy. Take the deeper dive.
And bless the freedom you have to do it.
The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America — with recipes along the way. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom. Recipes for Resistance.
