Friday, April 12, 2019

Prager U Wrong On Republican Southern Strategy: Debunked by Historian Kevin Kruse

Historian Kevin Kruse thoroughly debunks the revisionist history of Dennis Prager regarding the racist Southern Strategy of the Republican Party from the 1960's onward.

This is the basic argument being put forth by Prager U: Long after the Democrats lost the South, a conspiracy of liberal academics and journalists cooked up a theory that didn't reflect what was happening at the time.

For starters, the idea that the "southern strategy" was invented after the fact is deeply ahistorical. There was considerable discussion of it throughout the 1960s, especially within the ranks of the Republican Party.

The video claims there was a conspiracy concocted later by academics, and names three central myths in this conspiracy.

None of the myths that delve into are actually central to the actual scholarship on party realignment, but are imputed to unnamed "left-leaning academic elites."

Also, in an ironic twist, Carol Swain -- the star of the Prager U video -- described the southern strategy in her own book, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (2002).

The full article is available here