How Nixon's racist "Southern Strategy" led to the rise of Trump

Back in the late sixties, when the American middle class began its ongoing decline, Richard Nixon discovered a way to get blue­collar whites to join the party of their bosses: Encourage their resentment of cultural elites and racial minorities. The so­-called Southern Strategy (http://www.thenation.com/article/why­todays­gop­crackup­is­the­final­unraveling­of­nixonssouthern­strategy/) gave the GOP control over most statehouses below the Mason­ Dixon and a decisive advantage in national elections for the next two decades.

In the nineties, former Nixon aide Roger Ailes found that this formula was as good for winning cable­ news ratings as it was for winning elections (Rush Limbaugh had already deduced as much in the world of radio.) By the time shifting demographics and George W. Bush’s disastrous tenure helped Barack Obama to the White House, fear and loathing coursed through the Republican base. Right­wing media spent much of the Obama era telling its audience that the president was trying to kill their children with flu shots (http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/11/03/obama_s_swine_flu_vaccine_fiasco) and their grandparents with death panels (http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/05/17/dems­admityep­death­panels­are­coming/), that the betrayer­ in­ chief was letting (http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/05/border­meltdown­obama­delivering­290000­illegals­to­u­shomes/) unsavory elements pour across the border, and that he was weak (http://counterjihadreport.com/tag/obama­emboldening­americas­enemies/) and/ortraitorous (http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259466/time­call­obama­and­kerry­whatthey­are­traitors­daniel­greenfield) on matters of foreign policy.

At the same time, the white working class suffered through the aftermath of a recession that capped four decades of declining living standards. The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty (http://theweek.com/articles/600895/conservative­movement­become­gop­establishment­nowwhat) has written that the GOP’s response to this struggling population has been, in essence,"Let them eat talk radio shows."

So is it any wonder that voters who were once content to swallow GOP donors’ agendas with a spoonful of dog whistles are now backing a candidate who speaks the subtext? Is it surprising that they back the man who is the antithesis of everything they’ve been told to hate about Obama — a jingoistic job creator who’s tough on Muslims and “illegals”?

As Mother Jones’s David Corn (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/donald­trumpchanneling­richard­nixon) notes, Trump recently made the heritage of his toxic shtick explicit, borrowing Nixon’s very phrase for the coalition he sought to create:

“There is something happening. You know there used to be the expression, many of you have heard it … There's a silent majority out there. We're tired of being pushed around, kicked around, and acting and being led by stupid people.”

The Nation wrote:Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy

The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context.

By Rick Perlstein

 It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here, The Nation publishes it in its entirety for the very first time.

HoratioTarr wrote: