The decline in racism is correlated with an uncomfortable variable.

There isn't a lot of substance to Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History by Mona Charen. This is pretty well-traveled history. The party of institutionalized racism was the Democratic Party and the party of Classical Liberalism was the Republican Party.

The statement I find striking is undeniably true but I have not seen it put that way before. And once heard, it is hard to ignore.

The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That’s not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican party were suburban, prosperous New South types. The more Republican the South has become, the less racist.

Charen does provide data and backing for her history.

So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the “Southern Manifesto” in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories’ opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.

Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let’s review (since they don’t teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)

I knew all this but that stated correlation is a fresh presentation of known facts, in a fashion that forces you to think.

The more Republican the South has become, the less racist.

The correlation is certainly true. Left unaddressed is whether that correlation is specious or causal. Has the South become less racist because it has become more Republican OR Has the South become less racist because it became more economically modern. Perhaps the switch to the Republican party was an independent and unrelated event.

Both are plausible arguments but it is Charen's provocative formulation which brings the argument into focus.