With the hope of a new day in American politics, it seems worth considering just how we got to the current morass. Since I have that kind of time, here goes:
“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; they are the “silent majority.”
Sound familiar? It should, since those who could stomach it have watched and heard the current lame duck anointed one deliver variations on that theme for several seemingly unending years. It is phraseology Donald Trump has used to describe his own supporters, although not always in precisely those words. In reality, 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 Melania Trump’s eyelids or the Joker's smile? Of course, many of us knew in 2016 what we were getting and sadly it has surpassed our gravest concerns,
The Nixon camp had a code word for this approach, calling it the "Southern Strategy." One of the more enduring idiosyncratic features of today’s 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, grasp one essential truth. The modern Republican Party was founded on some bedrock contradictions. It had 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 forged a Faustian 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. Southern Democrats who hated the Civil Rights movement, LBJ, and both Kennedys one dead, another about to be, were more than amenable to shifting colors morally from Red, White and Blue, to Stars and Bars. In fact, the “New” Southern Republicans essentially became the reincarnation of Reconstruction era Democrats.
It took two election cycles to convert the “Solid South,” but Nixon and GOP strategists, via largely unpublicized private assurances that Republicans would discreetly retreat from their historic (Eisenhower, Brown V Board) commitment to civil rights, did it. This included the addition of a border state (Md) Governor (the loathsome Spiro T, Agnew) to the ticket. Race baiting Carolinian, Strom Thurmond, then a Democratic senator and a vile segregationist, openly broke party ranks and declared support for the Republican nominee, not only campaigning with Barry Goldwater, who ran and lost against LBJ in 1964, in the deep South but actually 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 reactionism.
Later, Lee Atwater a Gingrich co-conspirator, was far more candid in describing how this shift was accomplished (I will edit this vile diatribe only for length) “You start out in 1954 by saying ‘n*****, n*****, n***** but, by 1968, you can’t say that anymore ..... 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) 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 ‘n*****”. (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, ushering 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. Since then, four years of Donald Trump have taken us to far darker waters, but make no mistake, it’s still about “us and them” in the GOP. Dwight Eisenhower would not recognize the party he led from 1952-60.
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." It must be noted that the “powers” Reagan refers to are the federal initiatives such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aimed at assuring all citizens of equal treatment and justice under the Constitution.
Neshoba County also happens to be the same place that three civil rights activists were killed 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 sometimes refer to this shameful race baiting as "dog-whistle" politics, the coded racial rhetoric Lee Atwater was talking about and which Trump has mastered. Reagan’s Neshoba County speech remains as one of the masterworks of the Southern Strategy, a dog whistle audible to every racist reactionary within 3,000 miles. I don't feel Reagan was an inherently "evil" man, but he was guided, too easily, by some who were. Trump needs nor heeds no guidance.
It’s no fluke that Donald Trump, one of the loudest and most persistent of the Obama birthers won the Deep South states in 2016. Although many 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. Along the way Trump has essentially indicated, either overtly or by acquiescing silence, that every cop is a “good guy,” even those few who murder, and Black lives really just don’t matter all that much. this has rubbed off on others like Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham and Matt Gaetz. But, then again, that’s why the base loves him; he “feels” their rage.
The previous sentence assumes Trump actually “feels” anything other than the need to have the public fawn over him. In the face of a global pandemic, Trump ranted about his approval ratings while Americans died. One can only suppose what might have happened if Trump had actually followed actual scientific advice re: distancing and masks. The one surety is that more Americans would be alive today.
Let’s hope with all our hearts that the USSC remains intentionally aloof, refusing to both grant certiorari to review lower courts scathing denunciations of GOP fantasy or consider direct submissions as they have in the lunatic Texas case. We deserve better.
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