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In 1984, Reagan won every state in the union, except Democratic candidate Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, which Reagan lost by only 3,761 votes out of more than 2 million votes cast—the closest presidential race in Minnesota history since 1916. Reagan’s margin in the popular vote was nearly 16.8 million votes, second only to Nixon’s 18 million popular-vote margin in 1972. It was the largest electoral vote total in history. (No one at the New York Times could bear to write the story on Reagan’s historic victory, so the article giving these figures is bylined “Associated Press.”)36

A party that attributes Nixon’s and Reagan’s landslide victories to a secret Republican plan to appeal to racists has gone stark raving mad. Democrats disdain Americans, so unlike the Europeans they fetishize (Why can’t we be more like the Netherlands?). So they dismiss these “flyover” people as racists. The entire basis of liberals’ “Southern Strategy” myth is the sophisticated belief that anyone who votes Republican must be a racist.

According to liberals’ theory, racists like Orval Faubus should have become card-carrying members of the Republican Party once Nixon came along—or at least by Reagan’s time—and that’s how Republicans swept the South. In fact, however, Faubus never became a Republican. He was finally defeated for governor in 1966 by Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in a state with only 11 percent registered Republicans. Rockefeller’s “Southern Strategy” against Faubus involved running as a strong integrationist, and he immediately desegregated Arkansas schools and rapidly integrated the draft boards.

In addition to being a ferocious segregationist, Faubus was, naturally, a liberal, and an admirer of Socialist presidential candidates Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs, from whom he got his middle name, “Eugene.”37

Years later, Bill Clinton invited Faubus to his gubernatorial inauguration, where he warmly embraced Faubus, to the disgust of Southern Republicans. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Paul Greenberg, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials advocating racial integration and opposing George Wallace’s presidential candidacy, called it a shocking moment for those Arkansans “who had fought—not just for years but for decades—against all that Orval Faubus had stood for, this willingness to exploit racial hatred.”38

So what else might explain the South gradually voting more and more Republican, starting with Eisenhower in 1952? What else was going on in the last half century?

In the mid-sixties, the Worst Generation burst onto the scene and took over the Democratic Party.

That was the decade that launched legalized obscenity, the birth control pill, student riots, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Black Panthers. The crime rate skyrocketed as the courts granted ever more elaborate rights to criminals. Prayer and Bible-reading were banned from the public schools. The most privileged, cosseted generation in history began tearing apart the universities. One of every ten universities would be hit. The Aquarius generation turned into a drugged-out hippie cult of Manson family murderers.

In other words, the South began to go Republican about the same time as the Democratic Party went insane.

Another minor issue, even in the fifties, was the Cold War. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was growing admiration in the South for the Republicans’ belligerent approach to national security. Southerners are hawks: Sooner or later they were going to join the patriotic party. How long were Southerners going to tolerate a party that ran a peacenik like George McGovern for president in the middle of a war? Name a Southern university that’s ever banned ROTC before answering that question. (Even Duke has an ROTC program.)

Moreover, if it was hostility to civil rights that drove Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, that shift should have come to a screeching halt by the mid-seventies, when segregation was no longer an issue—thanks to Richard Nixon. But in fact, the South only gradually