From the Southern Strategy to President Trump by Henry Mantel

     After the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, there was a schism. Southern Democrats, who had been champions of states’ rights and opposed the legislation, were at odds with President Lyndon Johnson and the rest of the party. This gap grew wider as more African-Americans joined the Democratic Party in response to the passing of the Act, pushing the party further left on civil rights issues.
     The divide did not go unnoticed. Richard Nixon, intent on winning the Presidency in 1968, saw an opportunity. In order to get disgruntled southern Democrats on his side, a group that the Republican Party never would have been able to win over otherwise, Nixon crafted a message that “emphasized… the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." This was the Southern Strategy. Too smart to apply obvious racism that might make northern Republicans uncomfortable, Nixon ran on a campaign of states’ rights and “law and order,” an early example of “dog-whistle politics.”  Nixon won in 1968 and then again in 1972. 
     In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran for president as a Republican. He ran on a platform of states’ rights and cutting taxes, railing against welfare queens, desegregation busing, and affirmative action. These stances were a conscious appeal to southern racists but too abstract to be called out credibly. Lee Atwater, a strategist for Reagan, described it like this: “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... 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... 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."
     After Reagan, the Southern Strategy persisted and spread, southern racists now a reliable voting bloc for the GOP. George H.W. Bush’s campaign for president featured the infamous Willie Horton attack ad, using the story of an African-American murderer to stoke racial fears. Republican candidates for the House and Senate also applied the strategy, like in Jesse Helms' "Hands" ad.
     Then Barack Obama was elected president. It is difficult to determine how much of the Republican Party’s unprecedented obstruction of President Obama’s agenda was racially motivated, but it was unprecedented. Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell admitted, with a smile on his face, that the GOP’s first priority would be denying President Obama a second term. The absurdity of this strategy was made clear in 2012, when McConnell was forced to filibuster a bill that he had proposed because Obama and the Democrats supported it. Meanwhile, Republicans attacked Obama’s citizenship, his character, his faith, even his fashion choices. 
     Following another electoral defeat in 2012, the Republican Party performed an autopsy. The study made several suggestions for how the party should proceed if it wished to remain relevant. Chief among them was this: do not ignore the interests of minority groups. Demographics were changing; America was becoming a majority-minority country. If the GOP continued to appeal only to white Americans, it would be electoral suicide.
     Republican voters ignored that study. The dog-whistles and abstract racism were not enough anymore. They wanted someone who “tells it like it is” and didn’t worry about being “politically correct.” In other words, they wanted someone as racist as they were and wasn't afraid to show it. Donald Trump provided that. He insinuated that Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers. He questioned President Obama's citizenship. He advocated for a ban against all Muslims entering the country. He was supported by white nationalists like Richard Spencer and David Duke. This was the candidate Republican voters nominated over sixteen others and the Republican leadership threw their full support behind. 
     Now, after fifty years of the GOP subtly pandering to racists across the country, we have a Republican president who is, undeniably, unashamedly, racist. And the vast majority of Republicans couldn't be happier.

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