The Southern StrategyMustering the Might of the “Silent Majority”

By the late 1960s the Republican Party sought to regain dominance over the Democratic Party and end the New Deal consensus through what became known as the Southern Strategy. This strategy sought to win disaffected white votes angered by the Civil Rights Movement and the end of segregation away from southern democrats and put them at the center of the Republican base.

This strategy relied on “dog whistle” politics that not so subtly hid racist messaging behind a veneer of getting tough on crime and tax reform.

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.

Republican strategist Lee Atwater, on implementing dog whistle politics in 1981

Richard Nixon would become the first Republican presidential candidate to pursue the Southern strategy. Leaked internal memos reveal how Nixon’s campaign team cynically used race-baiting to bring white voters into the Republican fold. In a 1970 memo campaign advisor Kevin Phillips advised Republican politicians to push to strengthen the Voting Rights Act because:

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

Kevin Phillips,Nixon campaign advisor 1970

White House advisor Pat Buchanan proposed an equally cynical race-baiting strategy in a 1971 memo where he suggested a strategy for “dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in the Democratic base, it recommended that the White House

“exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social

liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare.

Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the

Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

It seems to me that a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration of blacks and whites -- but, even more so, poor and well-to-do, is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction -- as the incapable are played consciously by government side by side with the capable.

Pat Buchanan,1971 memo to Nixon

Basically, it demonstrates that heredity, rather than environment, determines intelligence -- and that the more we proceed to provide everyone with a 'good environment,' surely the more heredity will become the dominant factor -- in their intelligence, and thus in their success and social standing. It is almost the iron law of intelligence that is being propounded here -- based on heredity. The importance of this article is difficult to understate. If correct, then all our efforts and expenditures not only for 'compensatory education' but to provide an 'equal chance at the starting line' are guaranteeing that we wind up with the intelligent ones coming in first. And every study we have shows blacks 15 IQ points below whites on the average.

Pat Buchanan summing up an article by Richard Herrnstein in The Atlantic

The Southern Strategy was a stunning success bringing the great majority of white voters into the Republican fold. Using the same strategy and advisors as Nixon, Ronald Reagan completely reversed positions on abortion going from advocating the most lax abortion laws in the country while governor of California to calling for severe restrictions on women’s reproduction rights on the presidential campaign trail. He created and popularized the myth of the “welfare queen.” While campaigning for his party’s nomination—unsuccessfully—in 1976 Reagan told of a woman on Chicago’s south side who,

The Reagans and Atwaters at Christmas

[She] has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.

Ronald Reagan,creating the myth of the “welfare queen” in 1976

The story was completely fabricated by Reagan and his campaign advisors, but it worked to reshape the public’s perception of poverty, before seen as a multi-racial rural phenomenon it was now recast as a particular problem of urban black neighborhoods with black mothers playing the role of chief folk devil. A role that had been prepped by the

Moynihan Report years earlier.

Democrats eager to win back white voters played their own version of the Southern Strategy. In 1976 the party nominated a southern governor who vowed to oppose any federal program to integrate housing while on the campaign trail. Again in the 1990s the Democrats found success with a southern governor in Bill Clinton who vowed to “end welfare as we know it”—a dream of the Reagan administration that was realized under the Clinton administration. When President Obama ran as the first black presidential candidate in 2008 he was compelled to give his famous “race speech” in which he hammered home the old culture of poverty arguments first proffered in the Moynihan Report. Despite running as a “non-threatening” black man Obama still lost every age category of the white vote in 2008 and 2012.

The split of the white vote in the 2012 election shows the extent to which the Republican Party has become the “white party.” In that year 56% of Democratic support came from white voters, while 89% of Republican support came from white voters. More importantly the Southern

Strategy has caused a race to the right among both parties as they pursue race-baiting strategies that both encourage and reify white racism in the United States while slashing programs for the poor.

Reasons for Pursuing the Southern Strategy

• Between 1932-1968 Democrats held the office of the president for 28 of 36 years.• It took a victorious WWII general to get a Republican into office in 1952

• A growing re-alignment of social forces• As the social movements of the 1960s grew, a declining rate of profit for

business meant more corporate leaders (those member of the NAM and US Chamber of Commerce that we learned about in the Powell Memo and Crisis of Democracy) pushed to rollback the New Deal• But the New Deal consensus was too popular to attack head-on. The

Southern Strategy was a method that allowed these corporate leaders to associate New Deal programs with the black population, racialize them and then cut them back• So instead of attacking welfare itself, politicians and the media

would attack black “welfare queens” and wait for the white reaction to cut back the program.

Main Points of Nixon’s Campaign

• Nixon appealed to the “silent majority” in a famous 1969 speech on the war in Vietnam (a buzzword used during the rest of his presidency)• The “silent majority” were those he assumed resented the people in the streets protesting

the war and fighting for Civil Rights• Nixon painted a picture of America where this brave "silent majority" was being persecuted

by a volatile mob made up of effeminate academics, feminists, and minorities who all lived off of the largesse of the productive white middle class. (Mitt Romney would parallel this argument in 2012 with his talk of "job creators" and the takers who just live on government spending.)

• The other major leg of Nixon's campaign was to push a "law and order" agenda. In this he was heavily influenced by a 1966 party meeting in South Carolina where southern organizers pushed for tougher laws and enforcement with the obvious subtext that by tough on crime they meant tough on black. Nixon painted urban uprisings and social justice protest as lawlessness that pit urban "thugs" against the good people of the silent majority (white suburbanites). • In 1971 Nixon would declare a war on drugs tasking police with aggressively prosecuting

petty drug use. It was of course no coincidence that black neighborhoods were singled out in the drug war leading to an increasingly disproportionate amount of black people in American prisons. Ronald Reagan would expertly play on this implied war against black people by declaring a war against crack-cocaine with the help of mandatory sentences that were heavily weighted against crack possession (perceived to be a "black drug") versus the much lighter sentences given for cocaine possession (believed to be a "white drug").

Main Political Points of Southern Strategy

• Repeal of AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) benefits--commonly known as welfare. • Even though AFDC aid makes up a miniscule portion of the federal budget it

presents a sticky political problem for business leaders in that it implies that there is some sort of social obligation to take care of those that fall between capitalism's cracks.

• This idea implies that there is something inherently unfair with the American economic system and the inequality it produces. In order to increase that inequality business leaders would need to legitimize it by destroying the social safety net.

• Ending food stamp program• For the reasons listed above, but also• Food stamps set up a special problem where agricultural interests that

benefited mightily from the subsidies provided by food stamps went up against the rest of the business community.

• Privatizing Social Security• Same problem as those in AFDC, and• As an added bonus the Social Security trust-fund is a massive cache of money

that finance capitalists have long wanted to get their hands on.

• Reduction of taxes• Since the Progressive Era the United States had moved toward a more

progressive tax system where those who received the most from society were tasked with paying the most taxes. • Beginning with Nixon Republicans and later Democrats have made

reducing taxes for corporations and top earners while increasing taxes on those at the bottom through sales taxes among other schemes (see graph on next slide).

• Keep in mind that within the income tax total the portion paid by the top 5% has declined significantly since 1970 meaning that despite seeming stagnant the majority of people have actually seen their taxes increase. (see graph on second to next slide)

• Tough on crime• And the further development of “dog whistle” politics that would racialize

crime

This graphic shows the shifting of the tax burden off the shoulders of business, and onto the shoulders of workers (through higher income tax and even payroll taxes which are often paid indirectly by workers)