On #ThisDayInHistory in 1968, #RichardNixon won election as president. His combination of #liberal policies, #anticommunism, and the #SouthernStrategy's appeal to #racists created an easy comeback victory. Lessons learnt in the #Goldwater & #Nixon runs laid a template for Reagan.
#SouthernStrategy
#Republicans have called for greater #police crackdowns in #cities since at least the 1965 #WattsRiots in #LosAngeles.
President Richard #Nixon won the White House in 1968 after campaigning on a “law & order” agenda to appeal to #white voters in northern cities alongside overtures to white Southerners as part of his “#SouthernStrategy.”
#Trump #WhiteSupremacy #law #MilitaryState #autocracy #democracy #CivilRights #coup #TrumpCoup2
"That explains why, over time, at the national level, Republican candidates had no choice but to echo all three of those dog whistles in order to win. Those who did not or could not lost."
~ Ibid.
Maxwell and Shields are describing something that has been building a long time now. Blaming "the Democrats" and Biden and Harris for what has been building a long time now is not only misleading: it's outright dumb.
“The combination of bait the GOP used to catch southern whites was tailored to the region, but it is still bait to all who are hungry. So calls for states' rights, law and order, fiscal conservatism, colorblindness, anti-feminism, men's rights, and Christian nationalism can summon a Southern white majority, but other Americans are beckoned too."
~ Ibid., p. 336
“It is more than ‘backlash politics.’ It is orchestrated backlash politics. Campaigns made choices, set fires, and even poured on the gasoline if accelerant was needed, which is why the passage of time has not, in fact extinguished, such prejudice. It is kept aflame as long as it is stoked.”
~ Ibid., p. 31
"They could not secure the region for their party on white racial resentment alone. Realignment from solidly blue to solidly red requires tectonic shifts. The Civil Rights Movement was, indeed, a cultural earthquake for white southerners, but so too was the Women's Movement that followed."
Ibid.
#Republicans #race #gender #SouthernStrategy
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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-long-southern-strategy-9780197579039
Time now to re-read Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields on the long game the Republican party has played for years now to win voters:
“In its quest to win over white voters in the American South, the GOP played a full house of racial cards, but these were not the only cards they played."
#Republicans #race #gender #SouthernStrategy
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~ Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 2019), p. 125
Stories and Myth: Building a Progressive Storytelling Ecosystem
The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous view of the world. It needs to take lost and lonely boys and men and move them toward a sense of how to be in a gender-equal world. It needs to invite people to see their own story in the story of a pluralist America of the future. It needs to be longer on invitation, shorter on blame. It needs to meet you where you are, and be confident enough to move you, over years even, toward greater consciousness.
This recent election in the US emphasized how right-wing messaging and storytelling has permeated every facet of American life.
US Americans are among the most propagandized people in human history. The Southern Strategy, Traditional Segregationist Discourse, and Dog Whistle Politics are the default framing for most. We’ve been programmed to empty our pockets for the ruling class and think we’re saving ourselves money. LBJ and McGovern called it.
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, LBJ: ‘Convince the Lowest White Man He’s Better Than the Best Colored Man’
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6A3NQiJpH0
With 18-29 year old men voting decisively for bigotry, combating the manosphere is urgent work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4oxm7LWnEM
Rogan, Musk, Peterson, et al and the polluted ecosystems of anti-woke comedy, crypto, gaming, sports, sports betting, and podcasting have propagandized a generation of men.
https://youtu.be/4LqZdkkBDas?si=sRPbeCmPdyK4TU47
Interviews with men saying they were voting to protect the “masculine identity” underline how prevalent and powerful the stories of the manosphere are. They’ve been convinced they are victims. Resentment narratives are powerful.
Progressives need to tell better stories and hammer those stories repeatedly. We need to defuse resentment.
We need consistent and convincing story and myth scalable from a sound bite to textured storytelling. People understand the world in stories.
People are asking me for anti-propaganda advice. IDGAF so will give it: We are still a lizard brain species that needs ritual to feel safe. It’s why appeals to mythology are so effective. People’d rather believe in comforting mythology than scary reality. It’s why these movements take hold in scary times. We can’t beat it with logic. We must substitute a new mythology for theirs. Push out whatev story about pluralistic modernity also gives warm fuzzies. That’s sincerely what works.
Yup. It’s gotta be a new story, not just new facts.
@amybrownhughes • Yup. It’s gotta be a new story, not just new facts. • Threads
That’s why myth works so well. That’s why myth is so evocative and so enduring; it’s because all these diverse ignorances come together and truth emerges from that, from all those different data sets. Because the ignorance is just that: you’ve only analyzed it from one point of view. But collectively, collective analysis—ah, that’s amazing. That’s the only way it can be done.
Over the course of our movement work, we have learned that people understand the world in stories. This means organizers must be effective storytellers.
We think that the reason that humans values and belief systems and ideals are such powerful motivators is literally that they’re hooking themselves into biomechanical machinery that has evolved to keep us alive over time. So emotions are a critical piece of learning always.
Meaningful learning, learning that really matters to you, that changes who you are and that endures over time, always has an emotional component.
https://youtu.be/FUG_ATjjiw4?si=IPG6gAEXOT10lp2Y
#dogWhistlePolitics #manosphere #pluralism #resentment #segregationistDiscourse #southernStrategy #storytelling
"In his decade as the leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump has been steadily reshaping the Southern Strategy into something different than it was. It’s still about fear and resentment, but the relative importance of anti-Black resentment and anti-immigrant resentment has flipped. And there’s good reason to believe the new strategy will endure well after Trump departs."
#Trump #JDVance #immigrants #Springfield #SouthernStrategy #PoliticsofHate #racism
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“'The whole secret to politics,' Nixon aide Kevin Phillips, the architect of the 'Southern Strategy,' told author Gary Wills in 1968, is 'who hates who.' But hatred is not merely organic; while it arises on its own, it can also be cultivated and directed."
~ Paul Waldman
#Trump #JDVance #immigrants #Springfield #SouthernStrategy #PoliticsofHate #racism
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https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/the-new-southern-strategy
@VirginiaMurr
Back in the 1950s/60s, there was a term in the Deep South: "#YellowDogDemocrat"... meaning they would "vote for a yellow dog before they'd vote for a #Republican."
#Nixon & #JFK changed all that. #Nixon's #SouthernStrategy won over Southern #Racists by appealing to their #racism, while Kennedy won over Republicans by championing The Poor & Middle Class.
I'm a (new) Yellow Dog #Democrat, and apparently, those old #Dixiecrats are now #RapistDictatorFelonRepublicans.
"So while we celebrate freedom and Juneteenth today, we also must mourn the loss of the Party of Lincoln to some of the most virulent racists and xenophobes in American history."
#Republicans #Juneteenth #SouthernStrategy #race #RacialReconciliation
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"I … reflect this morning, sorrowfully, on the Party of Lincoln’s historic choice to respond to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s by abandoning its central mission of racial reconciliation and adopting a politics of exploitation of white racial fear. That decision, the purposeful adoption of what became known as the Southern Strategy, is, in retrospect, one of the great tragedies in American history."
~ Simon Rosenberg
#Republicans #Juneteenth #SouthernStrategy #race
https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/p/freedom-and-dominion-keeping-immigrant
"After signing that legislation, Johnson said in passing to one of his aides Bill Moyers, 'Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime – and mine.' And, of course, LBJ was right.
What followed was a campaign by the Republican party, specifically Richard Nixon, to appeal to the racial views of white evangelicals living in the South. This is popularly known as the Southern Strategy."
Foundational: not abortion, but race
@lolonurse
I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood & knew Zero Jewish Republicans. Even my best friend's dad who owned a biz & hated unions voted Dem
"a drift that I never understood" that occurred shortly after the launch of the #SouthernStrategy doesn't actually puzzle me at all. The animus btw Jewish folks & Black folks goes pretty far back.
@makkhorn vs the good-old-days of the GOP when it was just... racism. #SouthernStrategy
@dave before that, they were simply racists. (#SouthernStrategy)
"Republicans had better believe the United States is, in fact, a racist country. Because if it isn’t, they’ve been wasting literally the last 60 years and billions in political donations in a strangely quixotic quest to nail down the racist vote and make it their own. In fact, if this nation were not as racist as it is, there likely wouldn’t be a modern Republican party to begin with."
~ Dartagnan
#Republicans #racism #SouthernStrategy
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/22/2218792/-Yes-America-is-a-racist-country-and-for-Republicans-it-damn-well-better-stay-that-way
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