LAST EDITED ON Jul-06-17 AT 04:07PM (MST)[p]Everything that is stated in that video is 100% correct. Unfortunately the video timeline ends circa 1968. Why is that important? Nixon won 49 out of 50 states including all the Southern States by employing the Southern Strategy.
"As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights", which some would have believed opposed civil rights laws, would have resulted in a national backlash.
The concept of "states' rights" was considered by some to be subsumed within a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws. States rights became seen as encompassing a type of New Federalism that would return local control of race relations.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.[56][57][58]
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 [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."
In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair. His speech there contained the phrase "I believe in states' rights" and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again.[60][61][62] Reagan's campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the "welfare state" and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action.
Dan Carter explains "Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose."
During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a "welfare queen" with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income.[63][66] Aistrup described Reagan's campaign statements as "seemingly race neutral" but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a DNC funded study conducted by CRG Communications. Though Reagan did not overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites' minds were black people and Reagan's rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.[63]
Aistrup argued that one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a "strapping young buck". Reagan, when informed of the offensive connotations of the term, defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again. According to Ian Haney Lopez the "young buck" term changed into "young fellow" which was less overtly racist. "'Some young fellow' was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization."
During the 1988 U.S. presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with traditional values. Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as George H. W. Bush's political strategists, and upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states. The subsequent ads featured Horton's mugshot and played on fears of black criminals. Atwater said of the strategy, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."
As noted, while the video is 100% correct "The South" has shifted away from the days of being Blues states some 50 years ago and transitioned itself as being solidly Red among white voters. The Southern Strategy first employed by Nixon then refined by Reagan cashed-in on issues which would strike on the very nerve of division separating voters on issues of abortion, homosexuality and racism.
So now, those very same past Democrats/Dixiecrats that were on the wrong side of history have become the staunch Republicans of today.
And that ladies, is the inconvenient truth of today's Republican Party.