If I had to pick a moment, I would say the start of Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy. The early core of the strategy was harnessing white backlash over the integration of public schools. Look at the Gray amendments in Virginia as part of massive resistance. It relied on a strategy of eliminating public education and funding private education. Compare it to more recent Republican tax and voucher schemes. At the same time the religious right became a lot more active in Republican politics following the Bob Jones University case. As they became a core voting base their longstanding distrust of education rose in prominence. At a certain point their role as a core voting base meant that Republicans couldn’t win elections without some degree of attacking the education system. Mix in a bit of anti-union politics and the fact that scholarly research has been attacking the basis for Republican policies for a while and you have our current situation.
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