The Democrats went from racist southerners in 1960s to the modern progressives who literally drafted Civil Rights laws by the end of that decade.

I’ve chosen this link about the Southern Strategy because it will both debunk the overly simplistic view of it that is normally put forth, and also will debunk the usual attempts by conservatives to say it didn’t happen.

I’ve cherrypicked this bit from its closing paragraph because I think it gets at the meat of this argument, but I also acknowledge here that the overall point of the article is that we can’t ahem blame the current state of the Republican party entirely on the Southern Strategy and racism.

While the claim that the appeal of the parties on the basis of racial issues switched following the passage of the Civil Rights Act is true enough, there is a greater truth that conservatives who resist this claim often make which deserves to be acknowledged: the South changed its racial attitudes over time. It has changed, just as America has changed. Whether its overarching racial culture has changed nearly enough to meet the higher aspirations of our ideals of racial equality today is a separate question. But the South that the Republican Party represents today is not the South of George Wallace and the neo-segregationists.

Edited to add: And also, if Republicans stop being the party of hurting people I’ll stop treating them like the party of hurting people. I stand by my original statement though. It’s so exceptionally unlikely as to be within the realm of fiction that they will do such a thing during my natural lifespan.

It’s more like parties switched bases; see Nixon’s Southern Strategy:

As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s. By winning all of the south a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.