A Second Look At The Southern Strategy

Reviewing Steven P. Miller's Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, Ross Douthat says there are two ways of looking at RN's success in turning Deep South blue to red:

In one story, Sun Belt Republicanism was a coalition forged in cynicism and denial: it perpetuated real injustices while denying they existed and relied on the votes of bigots to achieve political dominance. In another telling, though, the majority that Nixon built managed to achieve something that seemed impossible at mid­century — using the rhetoric of Christianity and colorblindness to reconcile the white South to a legal and social revolution, and confining the once-ubiquitous support for segregation to a lunatic fringe.