#southernstrategy

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The important thing is that the path to a Republican majority and a solid Republican South really began in 1974 after Nixon left office. The Watergate babies were essential to pushing southern Democrats out of the party of their fathers, grandfathers, and great grandfathers, into the party of Lincoln. But in the process, the South did more to conquer the GOP than it did to conquer the South.

Bruce Bartlett

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Crediting the Nixon campaign with the flight of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party dismisses the role Southerners themselves played in that transformation. In fact, Republicans had very little organizational infrastructure on the ground in the South before 1980, and never quite figured out how to build a persuasive appeal to voters there. Every cynical strategy cooked up in a Washington boardroom withered under local conditions. The flight of the Dixiecrats was ultimately conceived, planned, and executed by Southerners themselves, largely independent of, and sometimes at odds with, existing Republican leadership. It was a move that had less to do with politicos than with pastors.

Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned Dixie Republican

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The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

John Ehrlichman,

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I don’t believe Trump was an accident, because the Republican Party has been seeing and grasping the political power of white supremacy.

Nell Painter

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Most Democrats believe that the so-called southern strategy originated with Richard Nixon in 1968. It will surprise them that John F. Kennedy could be considered its true originator. And Newt Gingrich is the one who really implemented it.

Origins of the “Southern Strategy”

[wqueens7]

Unethical Journalism Sonnet

It’s journalistically unethical

To report Republican Politics

Without The Southern Strategy Racial

(That has brought us this bumper crop of pricks)

tRump has cleaned the floor with Republicans

By singing the proud song of racism

That Mitt only dog-whistled in the wings

(Hatred can only lead to fascism)

& the papers & the networks “of record”

Are failing to do the due diligence

Of connecting-the-dots most untoward

(Which is reportorial negligence)

(Hire Angry Black Reporters to question

& point out how Jim Crow is in session)

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How Trump adopted Nixon’s Southern Strategy

The president’s ‘base’ didn’t come from nowhere.

For right-wing pundits, Nixon’s presidency is a mere relic, safely dead and buried. So, too, is his Southern Strategy. Most fair-minded conservatives admit that one of Donald Trump’s regular gambits is to demagogue about racial and cultural issues. But, they tell themselves, Trump’s ploys are nothing compared to Nixon, who created a whole campaign in 1968 based on rallying Southern whites who were reliable Democratic voters until the Democratic Party supported Civil Rights legislation for African Americans.

These whites had voted for politicians like Strom Thurmond, a Democrat who vociferously opposed the Civil Rights Act and desegregation policies. As the Democrats made these initiatives a priority, Thurmond became a Republican, and his supporters followed. The good people of South Carolina elected him to the Senate from 1954 to 1996. They probably would’ve continued voting for him had he not retired in 2002. He died in 2003.

Nixon recognized that a huge chunk of Americans was incurably infected with racism. They were overflowing with gnawing resentment toward the coalition of college students, urban liberals, intellectuals, and black activists who dared to fight white supremacy. Understanding this reality, Nixon saw a clear path to the White House. He coined slogans that the Republican Party has routinely used since: law and order; the silent majority; states’ rights.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Nixon was absolutely right. His two successful elections are evidence of that. Appealing to the prejudices and resentments of the Confederacy’s grandchildren works as an electoral strategy. And no Republican presidential candidate has ever forgotten that.

(via slacktivist)