Race, Health Care, and the ‘Southern’ Strategy

A website called Like the Dew has a no-hold barred analysis of the Healthcare Debate that dominated the Town Hall meetings during the summer of 2009. They call the grassroot anger of Healthcare "A Hoax" & says its all about race "pure & simple". You be the judge. Read this piece from Like the Dew.

Here's what Cliff Green of Like the Dew says:

Let’s cut to the chase: This orchestrated grass-roots anger over health care reform is a flat-out hoax, and the equally phony political debate going on in Washington is just as spurious. Neither one is about how much reform will cost, personal choice, or how many government bureaucrats will come between a patient and his or her doctor.

This is about race, pure and simple.

And since nothing scares the right-wing-nuts in the Republican Party more than the prospect of racial equality in anything, health care reform has become the latest outrage for their talk-radio stooges and, in turn, their never-ending search for higher ratings.

In the absence of facts that support the health care status quo, the radio ranters have been forced to reveal the outlines of the alternate universe in which they exist, that scary place where American voters last November elected a black Muslim born in Kenya who is using reform of this nation’s perfect-as-is medical care system as a way to usher in a Marxist-Leninist state.

Those who agree—but who want to remain socially acceptable—cloak the issue in different terms. They torture arguments into discourses on socialized medicine, cutting taxes, smaller government, market-based solutions and personal liberty. This bunch would never say aloud that President Barack Obama wants to convert Americans into Godless Communists, rather they imply that he would do something worse: turn them into single-payer-loving Canadians.

Tragically, large segments of the American public have bought into this reactionary nonsense and honestly believe that health care reform is a singular issue, a one-time thing that understandably divides the political left and the political right over the question of who should control a major sector of the American economy, private enterprise or the federal government.

But the argument is much broader and markedly more insidious. The debate has nothing to do with the cost of drugs, rationing medical care, or that constantly flogged waiting list for elective surgery. Its tap root reaches deep down into a steaming pile of racial muck dropped more than 60 years ago.

After President Harry Truman desegregated the military following World War II and the Democratic Party inserted a strong civil rights plank in its 1948 platform, southern segregationists walked out of that year’s convention and formed the States’ Rights Democratic (Dixiecrat) Party. Meeting later that summer in Birmingham, Alabama, that party picked South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond to head its ticket, and the upstart organization succeeded in winning four Southern states that November. The effort was not enough to keep Truman from being re-elected, but the wound in Democratic circles festered for years.

Observing this fracture up close was a young man from St. Matthews, S.C., named Harry Shuler Dent. A devout Southern Baptist who graduated from nearby Presbyterian College, Dent went on to get a degree from George Washington University Law School in 1957, and a master’s of law from Georgetown University in 1959. By the time he graduated, Dent had long been an aide to Thurmond, who by then was a U.S. Senator.

In addition to his expertise in the law, which he used to help his boss thwart civil rights legislation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Dent had a sensitive ear for the political stirrings of the folks back home. And they were uneasy. When the Republican Party nominated Sen. Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, Dent caught a glimpse of the future. At his urging, Strom Thurmond switched parties, which leads to the other thread of the health care reform story.

After losing the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy and the 1962 California gubernatorial contest to Pat Brown, former Vice President Richard Nixon was dismissed as a viable political candidate by pundits on both the left and the right. ABC News commentator Howard K. Smith even hosted a 30-minute, prime time television program titled “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” But while others were dismissing him as a has-been, the Dark Prince of the GOP was plotting a return.

Nixon joined a New York law firm for cover and quietly spent years traveling the back roads of America, speaking at fund raisers and kick-off rallies for obscure Republican candidates seeking the most minor of offices. Over a period of time, he appeared in countless VFW halls, addressed hundreds of small-town coffees and endured thousands of photo-ops, all the while building up a huge cache of political IOUs. More importantly, Nixon was picking up on the vibe emanating from what would soon be called The Silent Majority. He and Harry Dent were destined to get on the same page.

Meanwhile, the nation was undergoing a revolution. In response to almost constant pressure from African-Americans, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed a Democratic-controlled congress into enacting the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which gave black folks access to public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed them access to the ballot box. Federal courts were ordering school systems to abide by Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka and desegregate their facilities, even if that meant bussing students from one district to another, and Stokley Carmichael, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was talking about something new and scary called “black power:

Continue reading: Race, Health Care, and the ‘Southern’ Strategy

The GOP Southern Strategy of 1968 & beyond: What was it & how did it reshaped the Political Landscape?

I had to do a little research on this one. Let's go back in time.

In 1948, a group of Democratic congressmen, led by Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split from the Democrats in reaction to an anti-segregation speech given by Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, founding the States Rights Democratic or Dixiecrat Party, which ran Thurmond as its presidential candidate. The Dixiecrats, failing to deny the Democrats the presidency in 1948, soon dissolved, but the split lingered. The party's principles were revived by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 Republican presidential candidate.

Goldwater was notably more conservative than previous Republican nominees like Dwight Eisenhower; Goldwater's opponent in the primary election, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, was widely seen as representing the more moderate, Northern wing of the party. Rockefeller's defeat in the primary is seen as the beginning of the end for moderates and liberals in the Republican party.

Okay, now at this point, the debate begins. The facts are this: in the 1964 presidential race, Goldwater adopted an extremely conservative stance. In particular, he emphasized the issue of what he called "states' rights". As a conservative, Goldwater did not favor strong action by the federal government--for instance, though not a segregationist personally, he strongly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that, first, it was an intrusion of the federal government into the affairs of states and second, it was an interference with the rights of private persons to do business, or not, with whomever they chose. This was a popular stand in the Southern states; whether or not this was specifically a tactic designed to appeal to (at that time) racist Southern white voters is a matter of debate. Regardless, the only states that Goldwater won in 1964 besides Arizona, were five Deep Southern states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.


The Southern Strategy was deployed even more effectively by Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential election. Nixon, with the aid of the late Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican party in 1964, ran on a campaign of states' rights and "law and order." As a result every state that had been in the Confederacy, except Texas, voted for either Nixon or Southern Democrat George Wallace, despite a strong tradition of supporting Democrats. Meanwhile, Nixon parlayed a wide perception as a moderate into wins in other states, taking a solid majority in the electoral college. That is why the election of 1968 is sometimes cited as a realigning election.


In turn, the Republican Party became more and more overtly anti-intellectual, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-labor, and anti-poor much more generally, while remaining the party of big business.

The Voting Rights Act is what made it possible for Republicans to compete in the South. Once blacks could no longer be kept from voting in primaries there was no longer and reason for any whites to remain Democrats. Many found the Republican Party more attractive. Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like “law and order” is nonsense. Crime was a legitimate problem. Moreover, Nixon did more to desegregate the schools than any other president. Republicans certainly tried to make political inroads in the South for a long time prior to the southern strategy. Voters there tended to be sympathetic to Republicans on national defense, taxes, government spending and other issues.

Nixon’s pledge to preserve “law and order” looks very different in the context of urban race riots. In the short-years preceding the 1968 election, scenes from the riots in Detroit, Chicago and Washington D.C. (among others) emanated from the nation’s television screens. White Americans were more than familiar with the image of the black rioter, and when Nixon’s campaign used the “law and order” rhetoric to attack liberals, they knew exactly what he meant. Moreover, once president, Nixon continued to make inroads to the legions southern whites that supported him in the election (as well as the 1972 one). He nominated three southern conservatives to the Supreme Court — Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell (known for his pro-segregationist views), and Herschel H. Friday — and opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act in its original form.



As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights" as a play against civil rights laws grew less effective; there was a greater danger of a national backlash. Nevertheless, in 1980, when Ronald Reagan initiated his general election campaign after accepting the Republican Party nomination, he did so with a speech in which he stated his support of states' rights. He did so at a county fair in Neshoba County, Mississippi, which was also known as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan went on to make a speech praising Jefferson Davis, the strongly pro-slavery president of the Confederacy and states' rights advocate, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, site of the founding of the modern Klan. A prominent Klan leader endorsed Reagan, but he disavowed the endorsement and moved to neutralize any negative publicity by securing the support of noted Southern civil rights activists Hosea Williams and Ralph David Abernathy, which I didn't know he secured.



The Turning Point was in 1968
Racial liberalism (Civil Rights Act)
Cultural liberalism (especially limits on school prayer and restrictions on gun ownership)
Economic liberalism: (Keynes, social welfare)
Each component of liberal progress repelled Southern voters

The Republican response: A Southern Strategy by 1980
Low taxes
Small government
No social welfare (except social security)
Defense
Capital punishment
Each a persistent element of successful Republican campaigns
Replaced direct racial appeal (Basically the same things that are still being used in today's politifal climate)

It also included these other facets:

So-called fiscal conservatism, in the form of support for balanced budgets whenever it was a question of social spending, but not for the military or for tax cuts for the rich.

Immigrant-bashing

Ideological tests for judges

Demonizing and scapegoating of opponents

Opposition to Big Government, meaning social programs for the poor, for minorities, and for women, and Federal enforcement of Civil Rights laws on the states.

States' Rights, meaning the right to oppress citizens and other residents of a state without interference from the Federal government



In southern politics, race and ethnicity overshadow economic class, and both Nixon and Reagan knew this better than most politicians as the once "solid" South moved from the Democratic column to the Republican column. The Nixon "Southern Strategy" was also effectively used by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush.


On his deathbed, Lee Atwater, the famed republican strategist had a conversion and expressed remorse for the ugly tactics he used to win. He also became more candid about the role of racism in his campaigns. As he remarked in an interview:


Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.


Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps


Atwater: 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. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”


There were alot of unflattering things that came with the GOP Southern Strategy. Although that strategy has gone by the wayside somewhat, there are still elements that are still being used by the GOP. You can say some of these tactics are being used right now by the opposition like immigrant bashing, demonizing & scapegoating opponents, opposition to Big Government (Like the Healthcare Reform Bill that was passed recently). I am one one of those who were to opposed to the bill. So in a way, you can say some of these things are still being employed by the GOP.