Ronald Reagan and the Southern Strategy

For those who haven’t been paying attention, quite a little infighting is going on over at the New York Times Op/Ed pages. It all started with David Brooks, one of the more conservative writers there, echoed a theme that many on the right are trying to make “common knowledge” – that is, that Ronald Reagan never did things to cater to the racist Southern white that comprises the basis of the ‘Southern Strategy.’

This despite the fact that Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a place known ONLY for the civil rights murder of three activists fighting for African-American’s rights. The fact that he pledged in that speech to support ‘states rights’ was code everyone could easily crack – states rights, of course, is a term that only started being used when those in the South wanted to be able to make slavery legal in their state, regardless of federal policy.

But Reagan is considered by his fans to be one of, if not THE greatest modern president. (A preposterous claim, but let’s leave that on its own.) That’s why David Brooks can utter such nonsense as:

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

To his credit, Brooks also writes about what things Reagan could have done but didn’t in his speech, but his his column is largely devoted to the above two paragraphs, which close his piece.

One would think his fellow columnists disagree with him, and one would be correct. Over the weekend, Paul Krugman chimed in via his blog, The Conscience of A Liberal:

When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that “I believe in states’ rights,” he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

…

Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been “humiliating to the South,” he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

Today, Bob Herbert responds on the Op/Ed page itself:

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you.

…

He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record.

To see Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in its proper context, it has to be placed between the murders of the civil rights workers that preceded it and the acknowledgment by the Republican strategist Lee Atwater that the use of code words like “states’ rights” in place of blatantly bigoted rhetoric was crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy. That acknowledgment came in the very first year of the Reagan presidency.

Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.

There you go.

Look, the reality is that the Republicans have been very successful at winning elections and the Southern Strategy - that is, catering to racist whites in the South - has been effective. This is not saying that all whites in the South are racist, of course, but it's an effective strategy, as evidenced by the fact that folks still keep catering to these folks and using the same code phrases. If you vote Republican, you have to do so with that on your conscience. There's plenty to be ashamed about voting for Democrats, but supporting and catering to racists isn't one of them.

And Ronald Reagan, hero to many (including our current president), did this as good as anyone. It's time for everyone to just deal with that.