We Just Witnessed the Fruit of the GOP/Nixon/Atwater/Buchanan Southern Strategy in Charleston

[McCamy Taylor]

Yes, Pat Buchanan, there really was and is a Southern Strategy. A few years ago---in 2006 to be precise--- on Countdown, Buchanan told Keith Olbermann that the Republicans could keep control of Congress by reminding voters that a Democratic victory would mean a committee chairmanship for Rangel. Even though Buchanan has denied that there ever was a Southern Strategy, he was proof of it at that moment.

For almost fifty years, the Republican Party has been hard at work trying to make sure that Southern white voters are scared shitless of their Black neighbors. The dialogue has changed, but the message is still the same.

Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.[42]

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: 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 forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. 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 busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

No, Atwater, you were not doing away with the "racial problem". You were just creating a newer, more acceptable code for your racism. A racism that blamed the mortgage crisis on the minority home owners who were (illegally) forced into high risk mortgages when they qualified for traditional mortgages. A racism that would rather see Americans deprived of health insurance than see a single Black man or woman get treated in time for cancer. A racism that, to this day, demands that young men of color prove that they are not a public menace. What more can we do? Carry crosses on our backs, like Jesus, to show that we mean no one harm? They killed Jesus and they keep killing us---and by us, I mean fellow Americans. Because some hotshot political strategist in a smoke filled room said "If we make them blame the ____s for their problems, we can split their vote and win this election." In Germany, the blanks were the Jews. In the US, the blanks are Blacks. In Burma, the blanks are Muslims.

The Charleston shooter----who does not deserve to have his name mentioned, because he is just a cog in a huge, death machine----thought he was acting in self defense. He thought he was protecting himself from all the bogey men who keep him scared and shaking at night. The joke---macabre, awful, but still a joke, as the devil's temptation of Eve was a joke---is on him. A bunch of rich, corporate fat cats will be laughing all the way to the bank as they dissuade their employees from joining unions by telling them "The unions will give your jobs to Blacks, to Mexicans, to anyone but you."

The election of President Barack Obama saw a new type of Southern strategy emerge among conservative voters. His election is utilized as evidence of a post-racial era to deny the need of continued civil rights legislation, while simultaneously playing on racial tensions and marking him as a "racial bogeyman".[57] Thomas Edge described three parts to this phenomenon saying:

"First, according to the arguments, a nation that has the ability to elect a Black president is completely free of racism. Second, attempts to continue the remedies enacted after the civil rights movement will only result in more racial discord, demagoguery, and racism against White Americans. Third, these tactics are used side-by-side with the veiled racism and coded language of the original Southern Strategy."

Strange fruit, indeed.

Now pardon me, while I cry.

[daredtowork]

1. Bill Clinton's "Welfare Reform As We Know It" Went After the Same Votes

This is why I keep saying as much as I want to vote for the first woman President, I can't vote for Hillary Clinton unless I see her overtly addressing and reversing the damage of "Welfare Reform as We Know It". However, what I see in the Welfare Policy part of her platform just quietly continues it by omitting to talk about changing it. This seems to be continuing to triangulate for those racism-based votes.

A lot of people have recently been trying to position Hillary as stronger on race than Bernie because she separates the social from the economic. However, the Southern Strategy shows how the economic was used to implement racism in the South. Whenever politicians promise to punish Welfare Queens, they are promising to punish black women. Whenever politicians promise to cut welfare, food stamps, and anything they decide is "stealth welfare" like SSI -- they are talking about withdrawing sources of support from black people. That's the code that economically stressed white men who resent paying taxes hear.

Gutting the welfare system has just made the situation worse. Now when a white person needs help and finds the government has little to nothing to offer them even though they "need" it, they figure all those black people must have a secret backdoor way of getting the welfare they aren't getting. They think that because of political grandstanding over welfare. There ought to be laws against politicians deliberately misleading the populace at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society, because at the end of the day this not only leads to people demanding budget cuts that harm them, it paints a target on their back for terrorists.

[Dawson Leery]

2. The first violent fruition of the Nixon Southern Strategy was Oklahoma City.

[struggle4progress]

3. I despised Tricky Dick, and I think he was a racist, but violence in the South

didn't begin with the 1968 presidential campaign

[Man from Pickens]

4. No we didn't

Roof's family came here from South Africa, post-apartheid. This is imported, not homegrown.

I am finding it very very very very strange that there is nothing at all about the parents out there. Why isn't every media organization beating a path to their door to figure out what their story is?

[GeorgeGist]

5. Gotta keep the racists voting R.

The elephant signs their paychecks.

[Fawke Em]

7. Is that Pickens, SC?

My first reporting job was at the Anderson Independent-Mail.

[Man from Pickens]

8. it is

[Fawke Em]

6. Nope. We witnessed what hate radio has reaped.

I grew up in the South in the 70s and 80s and never saw people waving Confederate flags. Racism was probably still afoot, but people were embarrassed to admit they were racist so it was quieter.

In fact, the South was rather sleepy until Rush Limbaugh came to stay on the AM talk stations in the 90s. That's when I started seeing the resurgence of hate.

In fact, if Nixon's strategy was so valid, why did it take until the mid-1990s for the Democratic Party to fall in the South? Because it didn't.

Hate radio came about a year or two ahead of the fall of the Dem Party - a more direct correlation.