By investing in division, Republicans have clung to power for half a century, betting on having the larger half if they could split the nation in two. This is the real reason Trump and his enablers cannot accept the results of the 2020 election: to do so would reveal that the Southern Strategy has run its course.
Trump lost because his explicit appeals to fear and division increased turnout among poor Black and brown people and their white allies.
WILLIAM S DATO REPUBLICAN CRACK
When you consider that Trump improved over 2016 among Americans who make more than $100,000 a year, it’s clear that this crack in Trump’s imagined “populist” base was the real key to Biden’s victory. Four years later, he lost to Biden among the same demographic by 11.5 points – a 40% gain, representing millions of people who have seen through the lie of the Southern Strategy. Despite his promise to champion American workers as a political outsider, Trump lost to Clinton among poor and low-income Americans in 2016 by eight points. Casting themselves as the champions of everyday Americans in the Heartland, they paved the way for Trump’s faux populism.īut the most explicit repudiation of an incumbent president since FDR’s victory in 1932 makes clear that the fusion coalition the Southern Strategy was designed to crush has, nevertheless, grown in strength. Instead, they insisted that their values were the true American values. Though Republicans knew their base was reactionary white conservatives, they did not make explicit appeals to white supremacy. Strom Thurmond, who had run as a Dixiecrat candidate for president and championed “massive resistance” to the Brown v Board of Ed decision, led the march of southern Democrats into a Republican party that was ready to use “positive polarization” to pit their base against a fusion coalition of Black, white and brown voters whom Republicans demonized as “socialists”, “coastal elites” and “godless progressives”.
Indeed, the Southern Strategy made the Republican party a political home for tens of millions of white people who could not move on after the civil rights movement. Nixon intended for this “Southern Strategy” to establish a new sun belt power base for the Republican party in the south and west. Phillips predicted “a new American revolution coming out of the south and west” because of fears and objections raised by the civil rights movement’s victories. Phillips called America “the melting pot that never melted” and explained that “all you’ve got to do with American politics is work out who hates whom and you’ve got it.” Phillips advised Nixon that the Republican party could win without African American votes by painting the Democrats as the “black party”. It is a performance in keeping with the Southern Strategy that has animated the Republican party for half a century.ĭuring Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, a manuscript of Kevin Phillips’ book The Emerging Republican Majority offered a playbook for how white voters could form a winning national coalition in the post-civil rights era. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is not simply about his own psychological needs. Make America Great Again was always a thinly veiled promise that white supremacy could mount a resistance to movements that challenge systemic racism with the prospect of a genuine, multi-ethnic democracy. But Trump is not a child, and we cannot pretend that he is the only one who is not willing to move on.
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