Don’t be Nick Cannon. Get some damn KNOWLEDGE.
During an episode of his podcast in late March, Nick Cannon outed himself as MAGA. As this came right around the same time that Chilli, part of the R&B/Pop/Rap group TLC, was found to have financially supported Trump-related Conservative groups, following multiple Conservative personalities online, as well as reposting a conspiracy meme featuring former FLOTUS Michelle Obama, the Black interwebs were dragging BOTH OF THEM, and rightfully so…
But the insanity of the trash pandas we call “Black MAGA” is for a future blog post, what I think needs to be focused on is the idiocy that spilled from Cannon’s lips as his justification for his pro-Trump and pro-Conservative stance, that old saw:
“The Democrats are the party of the KKK.”
This saying, along with the equally popular “Lincoln freed the slaves” and “well back in the day, most Black people were Republican”, while being accurate and factual, completely ignore over 100 years of history. If you use these sayings to illustrate your political opinion, you paint yourself an idiot to anyone with even a passing understanding of reality.
Usually when I see this sentiment online, I simply post this meme and move-on… but clearly some of y’all aren’t paying attention.
The Republican Party was created in 1854, explicitly as a liberal and activist party that was anti-slavery. Republicans believed in using the power of the national government to prevent the expansion of slavery and to modernize the economy with infrastructure investment (railroads, land-grant colleges). By today’s standards, they looked far more like progressives.
At that time, the Democratic Party, which was founded in 1828 (and is technically the world’s oldest active political party), was the Conservative party. The party was founded by Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and others, who are probably spinning in their racist little graves seeing what the party stands for today, 198 years later.
If you look at today’s electoral maps, what we now call “Red States” would have been solidly conservative Democrat in the late-1800s, and the “Blue States” would have been Republican. And it would remain this way throughout the Civil War and well into the period we erroneously call “Reconstruction”.
This is an important point, because your average MAGA voter of today would have called the Republicans of that time “beta cucks” and “snowflakes” and would have identified themselves as staunchly Conservative and Democrat.
So what happened?
The people didn’t change….the PARTIES did.
For the 80+ years after 1860, the “Solid South” was reliably racist, reliably Conservative and reliably Democratic — but these were deeply conservative Democrats who championed states’ rights, opposed federal intervention, and enforced racial segregation.
Cracks started to form around 1896 when William Jennings Bryan ran for President under the Democrat flag, and started pulling the party leftward. This was the start of Democrats positioning themselves as champions of ordinary working people against banks and big business. This was a critical early step in Democrats adopting economic liberalism, even as the party remained racially regressive in the South.
Meanwhile, the early 1900s saw a fracturing of the Republican Party into “progressive” and “conservative” factions. Teddy Roosevelt actually broke from the Republicans because he wanted a more progressive party that championed labor unions, trust busting and environmental protection. Roosevelt’s ideals lost out to the more conservative, business-friendly Republicanism of Taft and eventually Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The party’s progressive wing was effectively pushed out, and the GOP hardened into a party of fiscal conservatism and capitalist economics.
Then along came FDR.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression was the single biggest ideological rebranding in American political history. Democrats became the party of big government, the welfare state, labor unions, and federal intervention in the economy. The Democrats, under the idea of “The New Deal”, united Northern liberals, urban ethnic immigrants, labor unions, Black Americans (in the North), and Southern whites into a powerful majority.
Yet the Southern (WHITE) wing of the Democratic Party remained segregationist, creating enormous internal tension. And they were PISSED.
The final straw for the racist Democrats in the South was President Truman desegregating the military and adding a civil-rights plank to the Democratic Party platform. Staunch racist Governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, who was probably born in a white sheet under a burning cross, and a bunch of his equally racist political buddies created their own group from within that they called the “Dixiecrats” or “States Rights Party”, a party committed to segregation and white supremacy. They ran Thurmond for President against Truman, and actually got 39 electoral votes by carrying 4 Southern states.
The party was disbanded after Thurmond’s loss, but much like the “Tea Party” had a massive effect on the Republican Party in the early to mid-2000s, the Dixiecrats had an effect on the Democratic Party of the 50s and 60s.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – President Lyndon B. Johnson
In 1964 LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law, and that was another nail in the coffin for Southern Democrats, they were looking for any other group to be a part of, because they wanted to maintain the racial status quo in the South and enforce Jim Crow laws. They also opposed federal interference in Southern affairs, specifically rejecting federal anti-lynching laws, anti-poll tax legislation, and the abolition of segregation.
The Republican party which was floundering because its liberal and progressive base had been moving away towards the Democrats saw an opportunity. They could make a play for these disaffected southern Democrats and possibly gain power. Barry Goldwater, who was running for President, and was opposed the Civil Rights Act courted the Southern vote. Goldwater was a Libertarian and thought the Act was Federal overreach, but was still willing to play the racist card if it won him votes. Goldwater lost in a landslide nationally but swept the Deep South — a dramatic reversal of the old political map.
1964 Presidential election map. Republican is now represented in red. Notice the change? It’s looking a lot more like it does today than it did back in the late 1800s.
Because the realignment of these two parties was closer to where we are today, if you were capital C “Conservative”, or Southern and used words like “states rights”, or were just plain racist…the Republican party felt like home. If you were “Liberal”, or progressive, or used words like “civil rights”, you were most likely a Democrat.
It took good old Tricky Dick to drive the final nail in the coffin…or platform…as it were.
When former VP, former Senator, former POTUS candidate Richard Nixon decided to run for POUTS again in 1968, he and his team created what we now call “The Southern Strategy”. His campaign explicitly and deliberately used coded racial appeals and dog whistles — “law and order,” opposition to busing, attacks on the “liberal elite” — to peel the remaining white Southern and working-class voters away from the Democratic Party.
Political strategist Kevin Phillips, who worked on Nixon’s campaign, openly described the strategy in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. He told a reporter in 1968 that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who”. He argued that white resentment would keep Republicans in the winning column with Southern voters and more than offset the losses of support in Northern states.
“The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” – Kevin Phillips, 1970
And the parties became how we recognize them today. You don’t have to like it…facts don’t care about your feelings.
So, this realignment wasn’t a single moment — it was a multi-decade process driven by the New Deal, racism, the civil rights movement, white supremacy and deliberate electoral strategy.
The parties didn’t simply “switch” overnight; rather, their coalitions slowly reorganized around new fault lines, primarily racial animus, but also the role of the federal government.
This is why folks like Nick Cannon look idiotic when they trot out the “Democrats created the Klan” or “Lincoln freed the slaves” arguments.
Because they willfully choose to remain ignorant of what actually happened in history.
Don’t be like Nick.
