Time for Republicans to Abandon the Southern Strategy
The “Southern Strategy” which Republicans and their think tanks have embraced since the 1968 election, is over. It served them for a time as a solid and consistent voting block but it has over stayed it’s welcome in American politics. In 2020, a watershed year like ’68, the strategy led to the downfall of one of the most highly revered among republican presidents, Donald Trump. In 2021 rigid dedication to this strategy led to an insurrection at the US Capital building.
During the previous election in 2016 Donald and his team found upon certain irrefutable political truths necessary to galvanize and hold the right wing base. One of them is centered around opposition to gay marriage and abortion. Whether Trump really believes it or not is irrelevant. What matters is that he built himself into the almighty champion of marriage and the unborn and evangelicals ate it up with a spoon. No matter how many pornstars he had affairs with or women’s privates he claimed to grab, no matter that Trump doesn’t even regularly attend Sunday church service, they have their man for the job. This point is connected to another irrefutable truth in that we need right-leaning pro-life judges in the Supreme Court on down to the lower courts. Trump delivered that in spades. “It’s all about the courts people, you want Hillary choosing your judges?” was heard repeatedly at his rallies during the 2016 election. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett were the result and one of the key achievements of the Trump presidency. Of course there are other irrefutable political truths the right embraces with vigor: unwavering patriotism, strong military, support of the police (unless they’re defending the US Capital building), and guns. The one thing they believe is true to help win national presidential elections is the southern strategy, as Nixon learned in 1968 and 1972 and Reagan perfected in 1980 and 1984.
This strategy is what got Trump in trouble in the first place and it led to his downfall. He was going to hold the right by holding the south as a solid voting block where he knew he could have instantly on election day 160 electoral votes in the bag. (I’m referencing the 13 former confederate states) although the southern strategy targets the border states as well of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. This competes solidly with Democrats who going into every election know they automatically have 84 electoral votes between New York and California.
Where it all started was Charlottesville in 2017. After Trump said his ‘good people on both sides’ piece Joe Biden claims to have decided at that moment that he must run against Trump in 2020. Therefore a democrat entered the race with the only name recognition and celebrity somewhat equal to the weight of Trump. No other democrat could have competed with Trump except Biden. Jim Clyburne, Rep. of South Carolina, who in this election can be regarded as kingmaker, attested to this fact. Had Biden remained out of the race Trump would have trounced any democratic goat tethered to the pole for sacrifice in 2020. As it was Biden at the age of 78 felt compelled for the good of the country to enter the race. Trump brought this on himself and is the only one responsible for his own downfall. November 3rd, 2020 (actually Nov 3–6th), 2020 leads all the way back to August 11–12, 2017 in Charlottesville. Trump was committed to the south as part of his base and the south loved him back. But this love came with another side to it.
There are two sides to the south, there’s the New South with FedEx, Atlanta’s airport, and states like Texas whose economy is so advanced they can stand on their own as a sovereign state. Then there’s the other side — the side of the Lost Cause. A popular mythology of the Confederacy made even more popular due to the battlefield skill and glory of great generals of monumental lore. Names such as Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, AP Hill, and Nathan Bedford Forrest percolate the southern mind. Any student of military history is wise to learn about the campaigns of these men. I’ve used the word irrefutable before and I think it’s irrefutable how great these generals were, but their greatness lies only on the field of battle and the annals of war. There was absolutely nothing great or honorable about the cause for which they fought. Yet for the views of many that doesn’t matter, for they are great generals and they deserve colossal monuments to tell southerners they came from those great men, we did not fight for a despicable cause, (we fought for states rights, etc., etc.) and therefore we have honor. Seeing their memory of battlefield heroics living on makes us feel good about ourselves and does not matter at all if it seriously offends a major segment of the southern population who is African American. When the feelings of African Americans are brought into the argument there is the canned response - ‘it’s heritage not hate.’ I believe that to be mostly true. That a southern white person can honor the memory of the Confederate leaders and almost 300,000 confederate soldiers who died for the lost cause and not have any hate in their heart towards an African American or any other person of differing race or religion. This is true and present in southern society. However there are those that use the symbols of the Confederacy for hate and intimidation. Many of those statues were built to celebrate the lost cause, yes but they were also built to intimidate Blacks into submission and fear. In modern times when someone straps a Dixie flag on their truck and drives all over town you know what you are doing. When in a mostly white neighborhood a house goes up for sale and someone proudly displays the stars and bars on their front porch you know what you are doing. The most recent example being during the US Capital building riot/insurrection with the man walking around with a Confederate flag on his shoulder.
I digress because I’m not writing about slavery vs. states rights and why the civil war was fought because we will argue that for the millennia. I’m focused on what Trump had to get into bed with in order to maintain his enthusiastic hold on the south.
There were 3 groups of protesters converging on Charlottesville that day: white supremacists, those who honored the memory of the Confederacy, and left-wing counter protesters. The problem is that there were a group of protesters in Charlottesville genuinely there to protect what they believe to be a heroic legacy, embodied in the statue of Robert E. Lee. The city council was voting on whether or not to tear it down. Yet there were also a prominent group of protesters there alongside them carrying torches, dixie and swastika flags yelling “the Jews will not replace us!” They wanted to protect the legacy of Lee as well but they were there to do so much more. They were there to reassert white supremacy, that white Anglo-American Christianity is the law of the land and that non-whites and non-Christians, namely blacks and Jews were subhuman. I want to point out many of these men were from all over the country, not just southerners. While Trump may have saw them as two different groups the media and national spotlight saw them as intertwined, some as indistinguishable from each other. When Trump said what he said he thought he was defending the honor of the south, a major part of his base, but he was just pandering to them, and in the perception of the left, and millions of moderates, he was defending overt racism. He might as well have been carrying a tiki torch in lockstep with them yelling the same thing. Whether you think Trump is a racist or not, the perception is racism and perception is just about everything in our society.
Trump didn’t know it but he stumbled into a historical web. By embracing the south, embracing the ‘good people’ who wanted to keep Lee’s statue, he was inextricably viewed as embracing hate, and he blindly dove headfirst into an American cauldron of long boiling societal ills and animosity going back generations.
However one can argue the southern strategy did work because he still took the majority of southern states. It certainly worked in 2016 but the cracks in the foundation of this strategy run deep and permanent. Florida and Texas while voting for Trump in 2020 are increasingly leaning left. There was a startling turnout for Biden in the conservative Lonestar state. Virginia voted for Biden and Georgia of all places voted democrat and has sent two democratic senators to Washington.
What does this mean for future elections? What will happen when democrats actually put forth a truly engaging and charismatic candidate? There are many black voters the republicans can gain if they just shed this extremist wing. African Americans feel sequestered to the democratic party as their only choice and Republicans are keeping it that way. Donald has done things for individual African Americans, just ask Alice Johnson, but Trump clearly put himself against Black Lives Matter and chose the memory of the southern confederacy. As president he fought tooth and nail to keep these hateful relics ingrained in our national conscious and physically in our town square monuments and names of military bases. There must be very smart republicans out there (none it seems closely affiliated with Trump) who realize how many African Americans want to truly vote conservative over issues of jobs and taxes but fail to do so because of the racial albatross the GOP elephant is dragging behind it. Cut the albatross and let the elephant charge forth.
I suspect many voters wavered in the booths. I also suspect millions would have voted for a toy monkey slapping two cymbals together as long as it wasn’t Donald Trump. It’s time to abandon the past, along with it America’s racism. Republicans and Conservatives are NOT racists or extremists. However one must acknowledge the great deal of white supremacist extremists left in this country vote republican, whether from Arkansas, Michigan, or California. It’s time to shed the horrors of the past and embrace true conservative ideals: states rights, less government, strong defense, strong economy, job creation and lower taxes.
We will look back on 2020 as we do 1968 as a year of turmoil and political watershed. This election year and the power transition was a lake of gasoline. Charlottesville, Covid-19, George Floyd’s death and the January 6th insurrection were torches of flame thrown into that lake. Donald Trump offered some buckets of water to put out the flames but it seemed with every bucket of water he also threw in three buckets of more gasoline.
The fire of this election year still burns brightly leaving searing trenches in the American landscape. It’s up to Biden and Harris to find enough water to extinguish it. It’s up to Republicans as they exit this scorched-Earth Trumpian wasteland to determine who they are as a party and their vision of the future for America.
