What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few-and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry.

George McGovern, quoted in: Ian Haney López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism & Wrecked the Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27.

Ian Haney López, “Dog Whistle Politics: Coded Racism and Inequality for All” – YouTube

On the Republican side, a leading Nixon strategist had come to the same conclusion about race as a potential wedge issue—though, predictably, with a different prescription. In 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority, arguing that because of racial resentments a historical realignment was underway that would cement a new Republican majority that would endure for decades. A young prodigy obsessed with politics, Phillips had worked out the details of his argument in the mid-1960s, and then had gone to work helping to elect Nixon. When the 1968 returns seemed to confirm his thesis, he published his research—nearly 500 pages, with 47 maps and 143 charts. Beneath the details, Phillips had a simple, even deterministic thesis: “Historically, our party system has reflected layer upon layer of group oppositions.” Politics, according to Phillips, turned principally on group animosity—“the prevailing cleavages in American voting behavior have been ethnic and cultural. Politically, at least, the United States has not been a very effective melting pot.”

As to what was driving the latest realignment, Phillips was blunt: “The Negro problem, having become a national rather than a local one, is the principal cause of the breakup of the New Deal coalition.” For Phillips, it was almost inevitable that most whites would abandon the Democratic Party once it became identified with blacks. “Ethnic and cultural division has so often shaped American politics that, given the immense midcentury impact of Negro enfranchisement and integration, reaction to this change almost inevitably had to result in political realignment.”38 Phillips saw his emerging Republican majority this way: “the nature of the majority—or potential majority—seems clear. It is largely white and middle class. It is concentrated in the South, the West, and suburbia.”39

The number crunchers had spoken. The Southern strategy, incipient for a decade, had matured into a clear route to electoral dominance. The old Democratic alliance of Northeastern liberals, the white working class, Northern blacks, and Southern Democrats, could be riven by racial appeals. Beginning in 1970, Richard Nixon embraced the politics of racial division wholeheartedly. He abandoned the idea of a flat wealth transfer to the poor. Now, Nixon repeatedly emphasized law and order issues. He railed against forced busing in the North. He reversed the federal government’s position on Southern school integration, slowing the process down and making clear that the courts would have no help from his administration. But perhaps nothing symbolized the new Nixon more than his comments in December 1970. Reflecting his initially moderate position on domestic issues, early in his administration Nixon had appointed George Romney—a liberal Republican and, incidentally, Mitt Romney’s father—as his secretary of housing and urban development. In turn, Romney had made integration of the suburbs his special mission, even coming up with a plan to cut off federal funds to communities that refused to allow integrated housing.40 By late 1970, however, when these jurisdictions howled at the temerity, Nixon took their side, throwing his cabinet officer under the bus. In a public address, Nixon baldly stated: “I can assure you that it is not the policy of this government to use the power of the federal government … for forced integration of the suburbs. I believe that forced integration of the suburbs is not in the national interest.”41 That dog whistle blasted like the shriek of an onrushing train.

Lopez, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (pp. 25-26). Oxford University Press.

Nixon had mastered Wallace’s dark art. Forced bussing, law and order, and security from unrest as the essential civil right of the majority—all of these were coded phrases that allowed Nixon to appeal to racial fears without overtly mentioning race at all. Yet race remained the indisputable, intentional subtext of the appeal. As Nixon exulted after watching one of his own commercials: “Yep, this hits it right on the nose … it’s all about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”34

Lopez, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (p. 24). Oxford University Press.

Conservative dog whistling made minorities, not concentrated wealth, the pressing enemy of the white middle class. It didn’t seem to matter that the actual monetary transfers to nonwhites were trivial. If all of the anti-poverty and social welfare dollars paid to blacks during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had instead been given to low- and middle-income whites, it would have added less than three-eighths of 1 percent to their actual disposable income.59 What mattered was the sense that blacks were getting more than they deserved, at the expense of white taxpayers. The middle class no longer saw itself in opposition to concentrated wealth, but now instead it saw itself beset by grasping minorities. And note a further, related shift evident in Phillips’ phrasing: what had been liberal “programs” when they helped whites became “welfare” when extended across the colorline. Racial attacks on liberalism shifted the enemy of the middle class from big money to lazy minorities, and transmuted economic programs that helped to build the nation into welfare for undeserving groups.
Lopez, Ian Haney. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (pp. 30-31). Oxford University Press.

Fear and rage and resentment, the bread and butter of the Long Southern Strategy, often drive more people to the polls than optimism or likability or hope, no matter where they live.

Poor southern whites have long been conditioned to forfeit a personal battle in the service of winning an imagined war from which they do not benefit.

Maxwell, Angie, Shields, Todd. The Long Southern Strategy. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Protecting whiteness was tantamount to protecting an investment. Jobs, promotions, loans—all were easier for southern whites to get, free of competition from an entire oppressed portion of the population who had been denied equal access to education, indeed to everything. So perilous was the idea of a level playing field—and increasingly so as the country entered the economic downturn of the 1970s36—that “Southern White Privilege” (chapter 2) became the new lost cause for which many were willing to go down fighting. Any policy or government expenditure deemed as providing a leg up for African Americans was understood only as an attack on whites in this zero-sum game.

Over the course of the Long Southern Strategy, the coded racial mantras shifted from whites being better suited at governing, to whites having the right to protect whites-only private spaces, to whites being victims of reverse discrimination. But equality feels like an attack when privilege is all one knows. Together, the coded language provided deniability and the urgent threat of potential peril consolidated resistance. Politically malleable, whiteness has proven to be the GOP’s blank check that always clears.

Maxwell, Angie,Shields, Todd. The Long Southern Strategy. Oxford University Press.

At the base of that fear was what Smith calls the “grand bargain” of white supremacy, buttressed by paternalism and evangelicalism, whereby the southern white masses relinquished political power to the few in exchange for maintaining their social status as better than the black man.

Maxwell, Angie,Shields, Todd. The Long Southern Strategy. Oxford University Press.

Republicans had to mirror southern white culture by emphasizing an “us vs. them” outlook, preaching absolutes, accusing the media of bias, prioritizing identity over the economy, depicting one’s way of life as under attack, encouraging defensiveness toward social changes, and championing a politics of vengeance. Over time, that made the party southern, not in terms of place, but in its vision, in its demands, in its rhetoric, and in its spirit. In doing so, it nationalized southern white identity, and that has changed American politics.

The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics | Oxford Academic

In his analysis of the race, Burnham summarizes what he saw as the conditions that would give rise to a southern realignment, including the organization of interest groups based on “perceived deprivation or the threat of deprivation”; the spreading of negative attitudes toward outgroups; and a zero-sum outlook that caused “politics to be regarded by many as virtually total in character.”

Maxwell, Angie,Shields, Todd. The Long Southern Strategy. Oxford University Press.

The motivation in 2016 was equally nefarious and destructive. Trump tapped into an increasingly powerful conservative base that had been nurtured for decades on the Southern Strategy’s politics of anti-black resentment. Similar to George Wallace’s run for the presidency in 1968, Trump’s supporters bristled at the thought that public policies would provide any help to African Americans and were certain that blacks were getting much more than they deserved from the government while the “average American” was getting much less. The message was clear: They weren’t deserving and weren’t really even Americans.

Anderson Ph.D., Carol. White Rage (p. 169). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Once the GOP was seen as the protector of the southern sacraments of white privilege and patriarchy, many southern white voters flocked to it, turning the South solidly red in 1984 for the first time in history.

Maxwell, Angie,Shields, Todd. The Long Southern Strategy (pp. 1-3, 8-9, 15). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

But equality feels like an attack when privilege is all one knows.

The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics

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