#Southern strategy

[allhailthe70shousewife]

The GOP has big plans for your future. Are you going to let them do this to you?

Vote for Kamala Harris. Vote True Blue Democrat down ballot.

[padawan-historian]

electing a brown skinned cop who uses imperial feminism to reinforce American exceptionalism all while she backs the same colonial projects and state funded violence that allows for the re-criminalization of poverty, the erasure of civil rights, and the expansion prison industrial complex is not a win.

there are a multitude of ways and workings to disrupt, divest, and dismantle the master’s house. kamala winning this election doesn’t fix this lovecraft country. kamala winning this election means a return to our communities to manifest direct action, collective liberation, and radical abolition that upRoots fascism, imperialism, and white supremacy from our gardens.

[rejectingrepublicans]

Republicans stopped being the party of Lincoln in the ‘60s when they aligned themselves with all the racists as part of their Southern Strategy. They also greedily gobbled up all the racist Dixiecrats that were expelled from the Democratic Party.

[odinsblog]

(source)

The American criminal “justice” system is deeply racist. From the police, to the jury system, to the prison system.

Mass incarceration laws and the death penalty all target Black and Brown people disproportionately. Politicians who brand themselves as “law-and-order” candidates, or as no nonsense, “tough-on-crime” politicians are fully aware of these structurally racist underpinnings of the U.S. criminal system, and they gladly use law & order as a kind of racist dog whistle: when the question is, “Who are we going to lock up?”the unspoken but understood answer is, “BLACK people!” Especially in, but not limited to, the “former” slave states (aka current Republican states.).

This kind of dog whistle politics (aka “Southern Strategy”) to appeal to conservative white southern voters is not new.

The same is true with how we treat people with drug addictions. America has two completely different views on who is deserving of compassion and who needed to be locked away in prison forever.

And if you’re reading this from a European country, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that your country is somehow different or better. HA! America is a racist country and(!) Europe is every bit as racist against Black and Brown people as anywhere else.

Universally, there is a correlation between who gets the best jobs & housing and skin color; or who gets jailed more and their skin color. These cannot be explained away without acknowledging racism.

Colorism and anti-Blackness are worldwide.

[contemplatingoutlander]

This Salon article by Ian Hanley-Lopez is well worth taking the time to read. Although it was written in Dec. 2013--BEFORE the age of Trump, it was prescient of the continued trajectory of the Republican Party towards a white nationalist agenda. The article describes:

How the indirect racist messaging of "dog whistle politics" began with George Wallace, using the language of being opposed to "arrogant federal authority," and being for "states’ rights," "law and order, running your own schools, [and] protecting property rights." Even though Wallace was a Southern Democrat (and later an Independent) the "dog whistle" strategies he employed were later appropriated by the GOP in the "Southern Strategy."

How the GOP's "Southern Strategy" slowly developed in the 1960s, when Goldwater began to push “states’ rights,” as well as “freedom of association." This strategy over time helped the Republican Party begin to appeal to those white voters who still held overt or covert racial prejudices.

How Kennedy and Johnson, by promoting civil rights legislation, turned the Democrats into the party identified with championing the civil rights of marginalized racial and ethnic groups.

How Richard Nixon fully embraced the "Southern Strategy," through his messaging of being for "law and order," and against the "forced busing" of children (to integrate public schools). As he gradually adopted this strategy, Nixon also turned against one of his own administration's earlier policies (developed by George Romney), which Nixon later derided as the "forced integration of the suburbs."

How, according to Hanley-Lopez, these changes in the racial strategies and policies of the diverging Republican and Democratic parties in the 1960s/early 1970s contributed to "the rise of racially identified parties," with a majority of white voters shifting to the GOP (which became "in fact, though not in name, the White Man's Party"), and the Democratic Party being associated with racial and ethnic minorities (as well as a smaller proportion of white voters, i.e., well-educated whites, especially white women). [color emphasis of terms, quotes added]

Echoes of Nixon's 1968 campaign ad in one of Trump's 2020 campaign ads

Hanley-Lopez mentions a 1968 Nixon campaign ad that focused on "exploiting the growing panic that equated social protest with social chaos." Above is the video of that 1968 ad: "The First Civil Right." Below is a transcript of the video:

TRANSCRIPT* (Music with snare drum and dissonant piano chords) MALE NARRATOR**: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States. [TEXT: THIS TIME VOTE LIKE YOUR WHOLE WORLD DEPENDED ON IT. . .NIXON] [Color/ emphasis added.]

This 1968 Nixon campaign ad is eerily like at least one Trump 2020 campaign ad, "Abolished," which used some out of context video footage in order to exploit the fears of many white conservative voters regarding the Black Lives Matter protests and the poorly worded "Defund the Police" slogan.

Below is a transcript of the Trump campaign's 2020 "Abolished" video.

TRANSCRIPT*** [ Phone ringing/ Answering machine beeping/ background music. ] AUTOMATED FEMALE VOICE: You have reached the 911 police emergency line. Due to defunding of the police department, we're sorry but no one is here to take your call. If you're calling to report a rape, please press 1. To report a murder, press 2. To report a home invasion, press 3. For all other crimes, leave your name and number and someone will get back to you. Our estimated wait time is currently five days. Goodbye. [ TEXT: Joe Biden's supporters are fighting to defund police departments. Fox News, 6/6/20 | Violent crime has exploded. ABC News, 6/24/20 | You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America. | TRUMP   PENCE   KEEP AMERICA GREAT   20 ] TRUMP: I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. [Color/ emphasis added.]

In conclusion, the barely covert racism in the GOP's political messaging that was so prominent during Trump's administration, and currently in the DeSantis Florida administration (among other GOP administrations) was not new. It was deliberately fostered by Republicans, starting in the 1960s, as they deployed their "Southern Strategy" to woo white voters who still had some overt or covert racial prejudices. The "Southern Strategy" relied on Republicans incorporating into their messaging strategies the kind of covert racist messaging that George Wallace used.

This strategy has unfortunately succeeded all too well.

[edited]

______________ *Transcript source (before layout changes/ edits) of the 1968 Nixon campaign's ad "The First Civil Right,"(alternatively called "Law and Order"): Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2012. **Note that the "male narrator" sounds a lot like Nixon (at least to me). ***The transcript of the Trump campaign's 2020 "Abolished" ad is based on the English auto-generated YouTube transcript, as well as the video text and sounds/music.

[seileach67]

WATCH: Right-Wing Megadonor Brags How Brutal Trump Is To Palestinians Antisemitism and Islamophobia both have roots in white supremacy. We must firmly reject both, as well as all other forms of discrimination and bigotry. 

[queersatanic]

There is a long tradition of American Christianity that can be called “the slaver’s religion”, focused on justifying and even celebrating one person’s right to dominate and possess another.

While it mostly used to be restricted to the American South (the origin of the Southern Baptist denomination, for example), when the Nixon campaign realigned the Republican Party priorities to absorb George Wallace’s segregationist supporters, that married a regional slaver’s religion to a national business religion that worshiped wealth and the personal increase of power through it.

You may have heard it said that, for example, everything in Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia is Alabama. That’s not exactly true, but you notice a lot of Confederate flags all over the USA in rural areas whose heritage either was in the Union, like Maine, or no connection, like Washington State. The regional variations have largely disappeared, and eastern California and West Texas have more in common than rural Mississippi and Jackson, or most of Idaho and Boise.

The slaver’s religion has metastasized.

It’s a Christianity not much concerned with Christ or scripture or the community of believers but rather in justifying the domination of one’s own group over others considered outside that group and therefore not fully persons. It doesn’t want to uplift the weakest and most vulnerable but try to fix them there permanently and then justify this as a moral imperative after the fact.

To do this, you need politics, and once you start worshiping power, you will find every excuse to make the expedient choice to continue aligning with the powerful and guaranteeing someone is below and worse than you.

The slaver’s religion requires control of the state and using its power to hurt and keep shackled everyone the slavers consider deserving it, so the state is worshiped as a god even when individual politicians are rejected as having corrupted it and in need of cleansing.

[thepopculturearchivist]

The "Southern Strategy," c. 1929?

WARNING: the N-word appears in this TIME magazine story from the February 18, 1929 issue

[allhailthe70shousewife]

If you are eligible to vote in the US and are still unsure if you will be voting or you are undecided about who to vote for then I think you need to see this:

Because if Trump wins none of us may ever get to vote again. Christo-fascism is not a joke. The threat is very real.

Vote against Republicans. Vote True Blue Democrat down ballot. The GOP are desperate and dangerous. Your future is at stake.

[dissent-blog]

"It was always the custom to have a muster every year. On that occasion every white man shouldered his musket. The citizens and the so-called country gentlemen wore military uniforms. The poor whites took their places in the ranks in every-day dress, some without shoes, some without hats. This grand occasion had already passed; and when the slaves were told there was to be another muster, they were surprised and rejoiced. Poor creatures! They thought it was going to be a holiday… It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation."

—Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

[emphasis mine]

[stimpunks]

Stories and Myth: Building a Progressive Storytelling Ecosystem

The pro-democracy movement needs to build its own funnel, now. It cannot and should not be a mirror image of the right’s funnel. It should be grounded in truth, not lies, and generosity, not closedness. But it needs to be a total media ecology that can meet people at any level of annoyance, curiosity, irritation, gripe, doubt, with any question — and move them toward a more humane and magnanimous…

[allhailthe70shousewife]

VOTE AGAINST TRUMP

VOTE AGAINST REPUBLICANS

VOTE AGAINST FASCISM

VOTE AGAINST NEONAZIS

🌊🌊🌊VOTE BLUE 🌊🌊🌊

Gop flat out admitting they don’t want young people to vote, tho.

They are even acknowledging she isn’t telling anyone how to vote.

Just telling them to vote makes her bad.

[calicojack1718]

Does Johnson's Withdrawal from the 1968 Election Have Anything to Teach Us About Biden's Impending Withdrawal from Election 2024

NBC News headlines on Saturday 20 July: Biden’s fixing to drop out of the race. I don’t know about you, but waking up to these headlines, leaves me feeling just a wee bit depressed. It looks like it is just a matter of time before Biden is out of the race. It defies all reasoning and logic to push Biden out of the race unless there is a VERY GOOD REASON. For the life of me, I can’t find one…

[cherryblossomshadow]

The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they're immune to conservative logic

.

My generation is dumb about sex. We're dumb about drugs. We're dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We're so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize

.

They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil

here's my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I'm 22 years old)

The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it's the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent's car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be "What if I get kidnapped" or "My parents are just trying to keep me safe"

This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don't have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents' knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they're on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were "tee hee we could get in trouble isn't this so fun and daring" in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are "If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent's car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks."

Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that's how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn't uncommon. It's wrong, but it's not uncommon.