Making Trump: Mapping the Legacy of Republican Southern Strategy to its Most Current Form
On a sunny summer afternoon in 1980, Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan stood before a crowd of ten thousand Mississippians at the Neshoba County Fair during a scheduled stop on his Southern campaign trail. He gave a few politely self-effacing remarks before getting into the real content of his speech:
“I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.”
He concluded with the populist promise that, if elected, he would “restore to state and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” To the contemporary listener this promise resembles the general message we’ve come to expect from conservative politicians, in some form or another. But the distinguishing character of the Neshoba County Fair speech is what remains largely unsaid: the racial context.
The Reagan Campaign’s choice of venue aroused suspicion among Northern liberal campaign observers; Neshoba County fairgrounds were located just seven miles away from Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town whose municipality became infamous for its involvement in the abduction and murder of three civil rights workers in 1964. The case garnered so much national attention that it helped usher in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act the following year. Yet the presidential nominee made no reference to this bloody history, nor to the historic civil rights legislation that emerged in its wake. When Reagan invoked the phrase “states’ rights,” it became clear that something quite calculated was going on; he was engaging in a type of codified political messaging that contemporary political commentators have come to identify as “dog-whistle politics.” Reagan was aligning himself ever-so-subtly with more than two decades’ of Republican Southern Strategy.
By the time of Raegan’s speech, the “States’ rights” slogan had long been a rallying cry for race-exploiting Southern Democrats –often called “Dixiecrats”– including party pioneer Strom Thurmond and presidential nominee George Wallace. When these dissidents of the Democratic civil rights agenda invoked “states’ rights,” they implied the right of individual states to resist the imposition of federal civil rights laws in favor of their own segregationist policies. Any candidate hoping to win big votes in the Dixie South would have a significant advantage if they could appeal to the not-yet-latent racial resentment of Dixiecrat supporters. Although Reagan apologists contend that his use of the phrase was racially benign –a reference to his libertarian economic beliefs, a disdain for big government– the outcome of the election suggests that the proverbial dog-whistle had been blown. When white Southerners heard the phrase “states’ rights,” they understood that Ronald Reagan was on their side. And just like that, a region once thought to be unreachable to the party of Lincoln became crucial to Reagan’s success, ushering in a change in the political tide for Southern Republicans.
While the course of Southern Strategy ends with Trump (more on that later), it certainly doesn’t start with Reagan. Our story begins with far-right provocateur Barry Goldwater, who initiated the Republican invasion of Southern politics in 1952 when he became only the second Republican senator in the history of Arizona. Many in the Republican establishment denounced Goldwater for being radically right-wing, bordering on extremist. He embraced their criticism all the way to the 1964 Republican National Convention, famously quipping in his nomination acceptance speech, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” (youtube video) In contrast to the globalist, moderate, Wall-Street-wedded GOP establishment, Goldwater’s conservatism was rooted in the South and the Southwest. His opposition to the impending civil rights legislation garnered him some of the most important allies of his career: the former Dixiecrats. After Goldwater secured the nomination, Strom Thurmond switched over to the GOP and campaigned vigorously on his behalf.
Wanting to consolidate the Southern white vote as much as possible, Goldwater dismissed the idea of reaching out to black voters entirely. At a conference with Southern Republicans in Atlanta, he counseled, “We’re not going to get the negro vote as a block in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.” In the end the campaign flopped, losing all but five state to Lyndon B. Johnson. But the four Deep South states that Goldwater won (besides his home state) would remain key Republican constituencies for years to come.
Richard Nixon had been there all along. After barely loosing to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, he had done some soul searching and emerged with a strategy to paint the South red once and for all. He would mechanize Goldwater’s ideas and make them viable on a national scale.
Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on “states’ rights” and “law and order” frames, which Southern whites properly interpreted to mean “resistance to civil rights.” He and his advisers recognized that they could not appeal directly to voters on issues of white supremacy or racism, but instead would have to devise codified rhetoric that would address these issues implicitly. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman recalled that Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.” In a move of pure calculated statesmanship, they engineered the “dog-whistle” that would later become Reagan’s weapon of choice.
The rhetoric of social division is where all of the Southern Strategy campaigns seem to merge. Trump has resurrected Nixon’s call for “law and order” by pointing a spotlight on crime (attributed to racial minorities and illegal immigrants) that mostly doesn’t exist. His defection to states’ rights on the the transgender bathroom issue resonates with Reagan-esque tact. He has taken a leaf from the Goldwater book and all but completely severed the black vote (the most favorable polls have him at 2%), focusing the broad strokes of his attention on the disaffected, white blue-collar vote in the American South. While Trump’s campaign may not be the culmination of five decades worth of Southern Strategy — only time and the result of the election will tell whether he will be the Republican to finally cash out — it at least seems to be the most current iteration.
Trump falls in a clear line of succession: the Southern Strategy was pioneered by the boldness of Goldwater, mechanized by the statesmanship of Nixon, and perfected by the charismatic tact of Reagan. Perhaps it is being packaged for reality television by Trump. This theory has already garnered some partisan traction among progressive media outlets; The Atlantic, the New Republic and The Guardian have all published articles that argue something to the same effect. The mainstream Republican Party, as it has three times before, must go back to the strategic drawing board and ask why these skeletons keep popping out of the closet.
