Home
This is no accident ....
But, particularly over the past two months, Trump’s campaign seems less like a haphazard effort, and more like a deliberate and conscious attempt to resurrect these discarded GOP tactics, recasting them for the current moment.
One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. Since the 1980s, Manafort’s business partners have included Charles Black, who helped launch the Senate career of outspoken segregationist Jessie Helms, and Lee Atwater, who was behind the infamously racist Willie Horton ads run by the George H. W. Bush campaign.
And it was Manafort who arranged for Ronald Reagan to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. In his relatively short speech, Reagan declared, “I believe in state’s rights…And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
To the all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair, still simmering about a host of federal civil rights interventions, the location of the speech and the language of “states’ rights” sent an unmistakable message about restoring an imbalance of power in their favor.
Given this background, Manafort’s presence also helps explain the somewhat abrupt turn Trump took in his convention speech to claim the mantle of “the law and order candidate.” Early in his sprawling 75-minute convention speech, Trump talked about threats to “our way of life” and made this dramatic claim: “I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.” These messages could have been ripped almost directly from the speeches of Richard Nixon, the original “states rights” and “law and order” candidate, who polished George Wallace’s overtly racist appeals for mainstream use in the Republican campaign playbook.
And here is one more clue about just how much life this resurrected strategy may yet have in it, at least among Trump’s core supporters. A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, of which I’m the CEO, conducted just after Trump declared his candidacy in the fall of 2015, asked Americans whether they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride or as a symbol of racism. More than three-quarters of Republicans, including 83 percent of white working-class Republicans, reported that they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride, compared to more than six in ten Democrats who said they see it more as a symbol of racism.
To be sure, Trump has not simply exhumed and dusted off the old Southern Strategy. He has characterized illegal immigrants rather than black Americans as a threat to white women’s safety. And he has redirected the Christian Right’s focus away from its preoccupation with a “godless Communism.” In its place, Trump has exploited the perception of Islam’s growing power abroad against a backdrop of genuinely declining white Christian influence at home, where the U.S. finds itself for the first time a minority white Christian nation. And, significantly—in a demonstration of just how successful the old strategy was—he’s discarded the dog whistle in favor of a bull horn.
Despite the efforts of RNC leaders to move on, Trump’s campaign is demonstrating how difficult it may be to disavow decades of cultural investment. Trump’s unlikely success with these old tactics is demonstrating William Faulkner famous aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/
But, particularly over the past two months, Trump’s campaign seems less like a haphazard effort, and more like a deliberate and conscious attempt to resurrect these discarded GOP tactics, recasting them for the current moment.
One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. Since the 1980s, Manafort’s business partners have included Charles Black, who helped launch the Senate career of outspoken segregationist Jessie Helms, and Lee Atwater, who was behind the infamously racist Willie Horton ads run by the George H. W. Bush campaign.
And it was Manafort who arranged for Ronald Reagan to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. In his relatively short speech, Reagan declared, “I believe in state’s rights…And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
To the all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair, still simmering about a host of federal civil rights interventions, the location of the speech and the language of “states’ rights” sent an unmistakable message about restoring an imbalance of power in their favor.
Given this background, Manafort’s presence also helps explain the somewhat abrupt turn Trump took in his convention speech to claim the mantle of “the law and order candidate.” Early in his sprawling 75-minute convention speech, Trump talked about threats to “our way of life” and made this dramatic claim: “I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored.” These messages could have been ripped almost directly from the speeches of Richard Nixon, the original “states rights” and “law and order” candidate, who polished George Wallace’s overtly racist appeals for mainstream use in the Republican campaign playbook.
And here is one more clue about just how much life this resurrected strategy may yet have in it, at least among Trump’s core supporters. A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, of which I’m the CEO, conducted just after Trump declared his candidacy in the fall of 2015, asked Americans whether they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride or as a symbol of racism. More than three-quarters of Republicans, including 83 percent of white working-class Republicans, reported that they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride, compared to more than six in ten Democrats who said they see it more as a symbol of racism.
To be sure, Trump has not simply exhumed and dusted off the old Southern Strategy. He has characterized illegal immigrants rather than black Americans as a threat to white women’s safety. And he has redirected the Christian Right’s focus away from its preoccupation with a “godless Communism.” In its place, Trump has exploited the perception of Islam’s growing power abroad against a backdrop of genuinely declining white Christian influence at home, where the U.S. finds itself for the first time a minority white Christian nation. And, significantly—in a demonstration of just how successful the old strategy was—he’s discarded the dog whistle in favor of a bull horn.
Despite the efforts of RNC leaders to move on, Trump’s campaign is demonstrating how difficult it may be to disavow decades of cultural investment. Trump’s unlikely success with these old tactics is demonstrating William Faulkner famous aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/
