Race and Party

The idea of Barack Obama magically transforming into Theodore Bilbo is somehow hilarious to me. Beyond that interesting little turn of phrase, Matthew Yglesias does a good job of explaining why Bruce Bartlett is wrong about the Republican party being “the party of civil rights.” It’s a weird subject for conservatives to occasionally obsess about, [...]

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The Confederacy in Southern Culture

A singular incident representative of a larger theme: Some African American legislators in Alabama want to abolish a scholarship named after Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Naturally, backlash ensues, bringing along with it a particular brand of historical revisionism. If you examine the comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education blog post, you’ll even see it [...]

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Old Racist Democrats and Faux Republican Outrage

Via Matthew Yglesias comes an example of my new favorite kind of partisan historical gotcha research: The Democrats used to be really racist and affiliated with the KKK! Let’s pretend to get really upset about it so black people will stop voting for the Democratic Party now! The faux-outrage masks a certain assumption of ignorance [...]

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