1968 Redux,The Party of Nixon

        “We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home.” I stand for “the forgotten Americans – the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators. They are not racists or sick. They are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land; ” the “silent majority.”

        Sound familiar? It should, since those who could stomach it watched and heard the GOP's anointed one  deliver almost exactly those same words in a rambling and somewhat disjointed 75 minute speech Thursday evening.  It is phraseology Donald  Trump uses to  describe his own supporters. Truth told, the words are Richard Nixon's from 48 years ago. Ain't it amazin' how time flies, yet the GOP's public persona seems frozen like Callista Gingrich or the Joker's smile? Of course with the GOP's coronation of their  Dark Knight,  maybe we should have expected as much.

        The Nixon camp had a code word for this approach, calling it the "Southern Strategy."  One of the enduring  idiosyncratic features of  GOP is that they revel , wallow,  actually, in referring to themselves as the "Party of Lincoln."  In truth, Abe wouldn't recognize the mean spirited bigots who now wear his tee shirt. To understand  the GOP’s current strategy,  it is necessary to grasp one basic truth:  The modern Republican Party was founded on some bedrock  contradictions. It has frequently been a "strange bedfellows" task to form an electable  coalition melding  the East Coast Republican establishment (think Rockefeller, Romney, Lindsey) with  hate filled and reactionary  segregationists of the white South.  The Nixon strategy team  made a deal with the devil (aka "Dixiecrat" leader Strom Thurmond) at the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, wherein states of the old slave-holding Confederacy would join the "Party of Lincoln."

         Ideologically they were already antithetical to the Northern Democrats, therefore Southern Democrats, hating the Civil Right movement, LBJ  and both Kennedys one dead, another about to be, were amenable  to   shifting  colors, morally from Red, White and Blue, to Stars and Bars.  It took two election cycles to convert the “Solid South,” but Nixon and GOP strategists made it clear with unpublicized  private assurances that Republicans would discreetly retreat from their historic commitment to civil rights, as recently evident as 1954's  "Brown V. Board"  during the Eisenhower years.  Strom Thurmond, then a Democratic senator and a vile segregationist a la George Wallace et al., openly broke party ranks and declared support for the Republican nominee, not only campaigning with Goldwater in the deep south but switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in the middle of the race. The GOP nominee,  Barry Goldwater, ended up capturing 55% of the white southern vote, making him the first Republican ever to win a majority of white southerners, and the party of Lincoln was transformed, for one election at least, into the party of southern reaction.

       Later,  Lee Atwater a Gingrich co-conspirator,  was far more open in describing how this shift was accomplished  (I will edit this vile diatribe only for length) "You start out in 1954 by saying ‘nigger, nigger, nigger’. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ .....  So you say stuff like,  'forced bussing', 'states’ rights' and all that stuff. You’re getting  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.(italics are mine)  And subconsciously maybe that is part of it....... But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? – because obviously sitting around saying ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the bussing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger’". (I loathe the above usage of the "n" word, but Atwater, Gingrich and fellow GOPers  were/are  apparently very comfortable with it.)

       So for some, at least, the race issue had/has  simply become a marketing problem: How to make racism less visible and more suitable for prime time?  Lee Atwater's  mentor Harry Dent, a former adviser to Strom Thurmond,  helped Richard Nixon smooth the worst wrinkles in the southern strategy, tutoring the future president in the kinder, gentler vocabulary of the new racial politics. This unstated racism in GOP politics delivered the White House to Republicans in five of the next six presidential elections. Goldwater discovered it; Nixon refined it; and Reagan molded it into the darkest of the modern political dark arts.

        In August 1980, The Republican party’s newly anointed nominee, Ronald Reagan,  spoke at  the Neshoba County fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and said:    "I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to be given to that federal establishment. And if (elected), I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

        Neshoba County also happens to be the same place that three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 with the connivance and  inactivity of local law enforcement.  James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner  were murdered for daring to try and register eligible black voters. After the state government refused to prosecute, the United States federal government charged 18 individuals with civil rights violations in 1967. Seven were convicted and received relatively minor sentences for their actions. This was the "Mississippi Burning" case.

        Thirteen years later, that’s where Reagan went to speak the words “I believe in states’ rights”, in his first appearance as the Republican nominee. Today we call this shameful race baiting  "dog-whistle" politics, the coded racial rhetoric Lee Atwater was talking about. Reagan did not, by the way, mention Chaney, Schwerner or Goodman, whose bodies had been found a few miles away. That intentional silence,  was a dog whistle too, and  Reagan and his speech writers surely knew what they were doing in resurrecting the Nixon  Southern Strategy. Reagan's  Neshoba County speech stands as one of the masterworks of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle audible to every racist   reactionary within 3,000 miles.

        It’s no fluke that Donald Trump, one of the loudest and most persistent of the Obama birthers won the deep south states on Super Tuesday. Although most  other Republican contenders fine tune their bigotry within the bounds of acceptably cruel political discourse, Trump lets it all hang  out: his racist rants play like full-fledged symphonies when  compared to the dog-whistle stuff, amplifying  the finely tuned  code that’s served the GOP establishment for so long and so well. But, then again,  that’s why the base loves him; he feels their rage. Even better, he’s beyond the establishment’s control. Nobody is the boss of Trump, not the Kochs, not Sheldon Adelson, and certainly not Reince Priebus, chief functionary of the Republican National Committee. Priebus' smile these days looks rather more like the grimace seen just before having a  spinal tap. 

        Trump's acceptance speech would have made paranoid and insecure Tricky Dick smile like a proud uncle.