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The truth isn't pretty. Read the following quote...
" . . . In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.
Reagan followed similar dog-whistle strategies when he ran, preaching states’ rights at the Neshoba County Fair, just miles from where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964, and declaring a rhetorical war on the safety net, adding “welfare queen” to the American lexicon. Today, many benefactors of social welfare programs protest those same programs, some unaware of the racial dynamic that has influenced the current animosity.
Of course, this racial force is more unconscious today than it was when the Southern Strategy began, just as the language has changed over the years. In a candid and originally anonymous interview, Reagan’s 1984 campaign director Lee Atwater described how racial language became more coded over the years:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “n***er, n***er, n***er,” Said Atwater, “[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘n***er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Today, while there is no doubt that a large part of the population remains willfully racist, a great number of people have also become unconsciously so, buying implicitly into stereotypes about Black Americans as dependent and lazy; and thus determined to stop social programs and limit the federal government’s influence — even if it is not to their own benefit. In a sense, much of the middle class population has been hoodwinked into voting for the interests of the top one percent because of their own unconscious prejudices.
One only has to look at conservative reaction to President Obama and some of his policies, more importantly the Affordable Healthcare Act. The right wing has reacted to Obama as if he were directly targeting them because they are white. The widely popular Rush Limbaugh pretty much summed this fear up:
“Obama has a plan. Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here. And that’s why the president is lawless, and that’s why there is no prosecution of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation, because it’s not possible for a minority to intimidate the white majority. It’s not possible. It’s always been the other way around. This is just payback. This is ‘how does it feel’ time.”
It is hard to claim that racism is not involved with the current backlash against Obama. The fight against the originally centrist Obamacare is based on the fears that have been embedded in so much of the population today. It is a fear of the federal government — a fear that Thomas Jefferson once had, before his views seemed to become more pragmatic when elected president. The key word here is fear; modern conservatism is based on this this unpleasant emotion — an emotion that tends to induce irrational thinking. And what is more irrational than voting against your interests?
The quote was an extract from the following article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/anatomy_of_a_racist_revolution_how_the_gop_was_hijacked_by_southern_state_bigotry/?source=newsletter
" . . . In a truly opportunistic fashion, the Republican Party decided to exploit the racial fears and prejudices of much of the populace, and the Southern Strategy was born. State’s rights had been trampled on by the federal government, so the thinking went, and in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran an election based on anti-New Deal and states’ rights policies. His coded racism was successful, and it earned the votes from five southern states and his own, though he lost every other state to Johnson. Though not as aggressively conservative as Goldwater, Richard Nixon pursued a similar strategy 1968, and won all of the former confederate states, turning the south into the solid Republican territory that it remains today.
Reagan followed similar dog-whistle strategies when he ran, preaching states’ rights at the Neshoba County Fair, just miles from where three civil rights activists had been murdered in 1964, and declaring a rhetorical war on the safety net, adding “welfare queen” to the American lexicon. Today, many benefactors of social welfare programs protest those same programs, some unaware of the racial dynamic that has influenced the current animosity.
Of course, this racial force is more unconscious today than it was when the Southern Strategy began, just as the language has changed over the years. In a candid and originally anonymous interview, Reagan’s 1984 campaign director Lee Atwater described how racial language became more coded over the years:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “n***er, n***er, n***er,” Said Atwater, “[But] by 1968 you can’t say ‘n***er’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Today, while there is no doubt that a large part of the population remains willfully racist, a great number of people have also become unconsciously so, buying implicitly into stereotypes about Black Americans as dependent and lazy; and thus determined to stop social programs and limit the federal government’s influence — even if it is not to their own benefit. In a sense, much of the middle class population has been hoodwinked into voting for the interests of the top one percent because of their own unconscious prejudices.
One only has to look at conservative reaction to President Obama and some of his policies, more importantly the Affordable Healthcare Act. The right wing has reacted to Obama as if he were directly targeting them because they are white. The widely popular Rush Limbaugh pretty much summed this fear up:
“Obama has a plan. Obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white Europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies, and it’s about time that the scales were made even. And that’s what’s going on here. And that’s why the president is lawless, and that’s why there is no prosecution of the Black Panthers for voter intimidation, because it’s not possible for a minority to intimidate the white majority. It’s not possible. It’s always been the other way around. This is just payback. This is ‘how does it feel’ time.”
It is hard to claim that racism is not involved with the current backlash against Obama. The fight against the originally centrist Obamacare is based on the fears that have been embedded in so much of the population today. It is a fear of the federal government — a fear that Thomas Jefferson once had, before his views seemed to become more pragmatic when elected president. The key word here is fear; modern conservatism is based on this this unpleasant emotion — an emotion that tends to induce irrational thinking. And what is more irrational than voting against your interests?
The quote was an extract from the following article:
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/11/anatomy_of_a_racist_revolution_how_the_gop_was_hijacked_by_southern_state_bigotry/?source=newsletter
