WAS THERE NO SOUTHERN STRATEGY?

I've seen this argument before, but I can't figure it out (from Poliblog):

the Republican party in the 1960s was the Party primarily responsible for passing the Civil Rights Bills, given the obstructionism of many Southern Democrats. Now, racial politics are part of the reason for the realignment in the South, but to focus solely on that issue to wholly miss the point. The bottom line is that conservative Southern Democrats were actually a better fit in the Republican Party, but Reconstruction-linked resentment had made it impossible to be a Republican in the South. However, over time it became clear that Southern states favored the Republicans in national elections for ideological reasons (not racism) and a slow transformation began that really only recently has been complete

I'm in fundamental agreement with the recent comments by Jack Balkin and Ted Rall (via Free Pie) that Dems need to learn how to play the game of political nastiness if they want to counter the Republican tide of the past few decades. At the very least they will need to learn to remind Republicans, continually, that there was such a thing as a southern strategy, and that this really did represent the Republican party's voluntary renunciation of the honor of being the heirs to "the party of Lincoln," and that it was Democratic willingness to take on the segregationist wing of their* party that drove the major civil rights bills of the 1960s. With all due respect to my political science colleague at Poliblog, it is emphatically not to miss the point to focus on these facts, facts that are within the living memory of my parents' generation.

I agree that the Republican party became a better "fit" for conservative Southern Democrats, but this is not simply because "resentment" over reconstruction magically disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s. It's because national-level Democrats tried to steal away black voters from Republicans among the growing minority populations in the north; by enacting civil rights legislation and winning enough northern votes to offset their southern losses, Democrats forged a new governing coalition in the 1950s and 1960s. Republicans responded by stealing the previously Democratic constituencies in the South through more or less explicit appeals to race, often mixed in with claims about "states' rights" and "law and order." Southern Democrats didn't just suddenly forgive Republicans for reconstruction and realize that there was an ideological kinship there, any more than northern black voters suddenly forgave Democrats for being the heirrs of Stephen Douglas and the confederacy. Both parties changed their tunes and reshuffled their constituencies. You may not like the tune that Republicans were singing in the 1970s -- the whole affair with Trent Lott indicated not that Democrats are unfair, but that Republicans know that they have an exposed flank here -- but you can't just wish it away. And Democrats sure as heck shouldn't let you!

*Apparently it's not sufficiently clear that I meant "their own" party, i.e., southern democrats, who overwhelmingly opposed the civil rights bills. Sorry for the unclear possessive pronoun (but really it should be pretty clear given the context; everyone knows that there was a big split in the Democrats over segregation, and that the southern Democrats lost and then defected to the Republican party).