Democrats to blame for right wing takeover of GOP? That's rich!

Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong has a great little analysis of the ethnic aspect of politics today. In his recent book, so DeLong says, Krugman says the rise of the right wing of the Republican Party after the 1960s (and the passage of the Civil Rights Act) was basically due to what Nixon called “the Southern Strategy”: picking up disgruntled white Southerners.

Many commenters to DeLong say that, on the contrary, “The rise of the Republican Party, they maintain, is due to things like the Democrats ‘prioritization of identity politics.’" You hear this a lot. But the Krugman view that it is, indeed, racial politics is buttressed by statistics showing that white males outside the South, despite claims and common wisdom that the Democrats lost the white male vote generally, voted Democratic in 2004 just as much as they did in 1952. Moreover, here is what DeLong says:

It is no accident that the mayor of New York was a guy named Fiorello LaGuardia. It was no accident that the junior senator from Massachusetts was named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Identity politics was prioritized--by both parties--up the wazoo. Not a problem.

When does the "identity politics" become a problem? It becomes a problem when ethnic balancing leads to the presence of an African-American at the top of the ticket. Blaming the rise of Republican wingnuts on the fact that Democrats start nominating African-Americans for office is not an alternative to the thesis of The Conscience of a Liberal, but a confirmation of it.

Now you might argue that Democratic politicians ought to have reacted to this situation differently. They should have told their African-American voters, workers, and politicians: "This country is still too racist for conventional ethnic-balancing to work now that the 1964 Civil Rights has gotten you the vote. You have to wait another generation to see African-American faces at the top of the ticket, and in the meanwhile vote for white politicians who have your interests at heart and realize the debt that the Democratic Party is running up by making you wait by the door for yet another span of years." Perhaps that would have been the wiser course. Perhaps not. But it was a course the urban Democratic Party was unable to follow.
Seems to me that to say that Democrats are responsible for the rise of wingnut Republicans because they were unable to follow this make-African-Americans-wait-by-the-door-for-another-generation--well, this is the equivalent of blaming the victim of a drive-by for leaving bloodstains on the seats.