The Weekly Screed (#604)

Is Mitt Romney the 
Southern Strategy’s last hurrah?
by David Benjamin

“My party is full of racists. And the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as Commander in Chief and President, and everything to do with the color of his skin. And that’s despicable.”
             — Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

BROOKLYN — Although its practitioners have coyly denied its existence since it was first deployed in the 1968 election, the Southern Strategy has been a Republican political staple for more than 40 years. Seized upon eagerly by GOP candidate Richard Nixon, it mobilized the resentment of working-class whites — especially in Dixie — against the liberating language — especially for African-Americans — of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Notwithstanding four decades of insistence by GOP leaders that no such thing as a Southern Strategy was ever conceived, its simple, beautiful rationale was unearthed in a diary entry by notorious Nixon aide John Ehrlichman: “He [Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

If there’s any doubt as to what Nixon meant by a “system” for winning elections, Ehrlichman explained: “We’ll go after the racists.”

To this, Nixon himself, perhaps gratuitously, later added, “It’s all about those damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.”

A more formal theory of the Southern Strategy emerged in Kevin Phillips’ landmark book, The Emerging Republican Majority. Describing the book in the New York Times, Warren Weaver wrote: “Full racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillips’s political pragmatism. He wants to see a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because this will drive into the Republican party the kind of anti-Negro whites who will help constitute the emerging majority.”

As it became fundamental to GOP ideology, racialist rhetoric absorbed euphemisms that were both obvious and “deniable.” Instead of bluntly supporting white supremacy, as old-line Dixiecrats and segregationists did, Republicans in the 1960’s and 1970’s — citing the unrest in black neighborhoods, urban crime rates and the rise of militant groups like the Black Panthers and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam — hammered at the code phrase “law and order” to ignite white fears of Negro lawlessness.

In their crusade to polarize the electorate, the Republicans mined an unlikely mother lode. Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the black family legitimized the idea that a “tangle of pathology” among poor black people was part of a “subculture” in which “welfare cheats,” drug users, pimps and whores acted as role models for black youth, establishing a vicious cycle from which most African-Americans were helpless to escape. Moynihan’s theory of “benign neglect” took the white bourgeoisie off the hook for the conditions suffered by poor black folks, and it assured poor white folks — by leaving them out of the Moynihan theory — that they were pathology-free (and just a teensy bit superior, after all).

As Thomas and Mary Edsall, in their book Chain Reaction, wrote, “the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income distribution against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged blacks… is the responsibility of those afflicted, and not the responsibility of the larger society.”

GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan refreshed this sentiment for the current election cycle in “Path toProsperity,” his paternalist budget plan. Ryan’s manifesto states that “government’s expansive reach too often undermines non-governmental institutions better suited to assist individuals in need, because it substitutes federal power in their place. Government programs should bolster — not displace — the family, civic and religious institutions that serve communities across the nation.”

This is code, of course, for shredding the safety net and letting “those damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups” fend for themselves, and if they cannot fend, well, too bad.

While Moynihan’s crackpotism helped intellectualize the Southern Strategy, the contributions of Ronald Reagan — his invention, for example, of a mythical “welfare queen” with a Cadillac, 12 Social Security cards and a $150,000 income, and his demonization of food stamps — gave it a buzzword and a cast of characters. Indeed, the term “food stamps” has became a synonym for “shiftless niggers” and a Republican rallying cry for resentful low-information working-class whites not just in the South, but throughout a harshly polarized America. More than three decades after Reagan unveiled his (obviously black) welfare queen, Newt Gingrich got mileage by calling (obviously black) Barack Obama the “food stamp president.” Never mind that the vast majority of food stamp recipients are resentful low-information working-class white folks.

The impact of the Southern Strategy, and its adoption by one of our two great parties has been heartbreaking. Nixon’s “law and order” mantra — according to Michelle Alexander in her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow (which provides a lot of the citations I’m using here) — was inspiration for Reagan to launch a needless, unending and devastating “War on Drugs.” This unwinnable and un-warlike war targets young black males disproportionately, stigmatizes them for life, and disenfranchises most of them from education, employment and citizenship. It has given the United States the dubious distinction of incarcerating more people — both in raw numbers and percentages — than any nation in the world, or in history. The overwhelming majority of America’s illegal drug users are white, but half of America’ prisoners are black.

If all of the young men stopped, frisked, arrested, arraigned, convicted, imprisoned and dehumanized for minor drug offenses in the last thirty years had not been jailed, or had been welcomed back into society with all their rights restored, African-American numbers in the upcoming presidential election would be larger literally by millions of votes. These votes would likely represent a deciding (Democratic) margin in such swing states as Virginia, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio.

The fact that millions of minority voters (as well as quite a few poor whites) were denied their voting rights by a concerted Republican strategy based on race and initiated by Richard Nixon 44 years ago under the rubric of “law and order” is a remarkable accomplishment with impressive staying power. If nothing else, it testifies to the persistent racism of American “civilization.”

However, as Pogo might have said, every snake comes to an end.

In 1968, Richard Nixon could not imagine that the American electorate would someday transition from numerical white supremacy to a majority composed of blacks, Hispanics and Latinos, Asians and a few ironic progressives. Nixon didn’t foresee the day when his Southern Strategy would become a liability to the GOP’s aspirations. Today, however, the tipping point is imminent; the Romney/Ryan campaign might very well be remembered as the Southern Strategy’s last, tubercular gasp.

Mitt Romney’s loyalty to the Southern Strategy is obvious to anyone familiar with textbook Republican electoral politics. Perhaps the clearest signature of dog-whistle racism in this race is the Romney campaign’s nostalgic invocation of the “welfare” bogeyman. Romney, in ads and debates, has persistently and falsely accused his black adversary of eliminating the work requirements in federal workfare programs.

 Romney’s TV ad reads, in part: “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check and welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare.”

Never mind that this is a barefaced lie, debunked by a veritable army of impartial fact-checkers. The inestimable value of this message for Romney is how it revives the oldest ghosts of American racism — the “lazy” vagrants of post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow — and links them to Reagan’s flashy welfare queen. Romney’s ad, in thirty seconds, repeats the word “welfare” seven times as a sort of redneck Kyrie Eleison.

The naked falseness of Romney’s welfare lie, in a campaign that has nothing to do with welfare programs, is its genius. The ad is not meant to fool undecided voters by fiddling cleverly with the facts. There’s nothing clever in this message. Romney doesn’t care if millions of voters see his ad as a lie and know he’s a liar. The only goal of the welfare ad is to signal the bigots in the electorate that they have a friend in Mitt. He knows what they believe. He knows how blindly they believe it. He knows the truth has no power against their dark passion. Mitt Romney — a politician’s politician — understands the cosmic irrelevance of the truth.

For months, Romney has been telling the bigots of America, in a litany of well-produced and oft-repeated untruths, and in the insinuations that have run constantly through his campaign like a cancer in its bloodstream, that a Southern Strategy — of fear, racism and division — can still work. It can still, if we all stick together against them, put one last small, hollow man into the most powerful job on earth.