The Roots of Today's Republicans: It all goes back to Nixon.

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-10-23-roots-of-todays-republicans/



“The whole secret of politics,” Kevin Phillips told Garry Wills in 1968, is “knowing who hates who.”

For a time—particularly during the 1960s—Phillips was likely the nation’s foremost expert on who hated who. As a young scholar of what we might call political demographics, Phillips had noted that the states of the Deep South had forsaken the Democratic Party to vote for Barry Goldwater in the presidential election of 1964, largely due to Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act on the Senate floor earlier that year. Phillips had also noted the votes that George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, had racked up against President Lyndon Johnson in that year’s Democratic presidential primaries in Wisconsin and Maryland, pulling down a third or more of the votes, chiefly from white working-class voters.

In a memo to 1968 Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon, on whose campaign he worked, Phillips wrote, “The fulcrum of re-alignment is the law and order/Negro socio-economic revolution syndrome, and [Nixon] should continue to emphasize crime, decentralization of federal social programming, and law and order.” Republicans had generally written off the South since the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s. But in his memo to Nixon and in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, Phillips, who died earlier this month at age 82, called upon Republicans to pursue a “Southern strategy” by pandering to the region’s anti–civil rights backlash. In time, this not only turned the white South into the Republicans’ base but also, decades later, turned Northern state Republican parties into bastions of Southern white values, such as they were.

While Goldwater had run on those themes in 1964, it’s important to realize that at the time the Republican mainstream had yet to embrace them, and in many cases, even consider them. Unlike Goldwater, nearly every other Republican senator had voted for the Civil Rights Act, in keeping with its image as the party of Abraham Lincoln. When Nixon, the very personification of the Republican mainstream, embraced Southern values as well, managing to capture some Southern states and win more Northern Democratic white working-class votes than a Republican normally captured, the template was set for the party’s future strategy, which in many ways is also the party’s current strategy.

But not in all ways. Nixon wasn’t an enemy of government as such; he was, after all, the man who signed the Environmental Policy Act into law and indexed Social Security benefits to changes in the cost of living. He did, however, try to implement “the decentralization of federal social programming” (i.e., give the white South and other white communities a way to curtail Black advancement), which under Ronald Reagan morphed into opposing federal social programming altogether. At which point, Phillips got off the train.

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[AllaN01Bear]

1. ding.

[Wounded Bear]

2. If Ford hadn't pardoned Nixon, we'd have had this fight in the 1970's...nt

[Hotler]

3. Remember the christian right (dominionist) has a hand in shaping the morels repug party. nt

[Hugin]

8. Also the Ross Perot vein of libertarianism...

Which I am convinced accounts for the rudderless Qeew. A cult without a cause or a clue.

[NBachers]

4. I am a crook

[CrispyQ]

5. "At which point, Phillips got off the train."

Which was the same time a lot of dems I knew climbed on the train. They hated Carter's message of conservation (I thought they were conservatives?) & they embraced his message that government & Cadillac queens were the problem.

[Thunderbeast]

6. The radical racist wing of American Polity is WAY older than Nixon

It has reared it's ugly head many times through our history.

If you have not listened to Rachael Maddow's "ULTRA" podcast, I highly recommend it. The parallels to current times are uncanny.

[czarjak]

7. My Daddy turned R because of The Civil Rights Act.

Racism then. Racism now. Racism tomorrow. Kanye was right about W.

[NotVeryImportant]

9. It's always the racism.

Always.

[czarjak]

10. But, racism is dead according to Chief Justice John Roberts.