southern strategy

<div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-right-wing/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-right-wing/</a></div><div>
</div><div>"We're all victims," Donald Trump claimed at his first rally after the presidential election, on Dec. 5 in Georgia "We're all victims. Everybody here. All these thousands of people here tonight. They're all victims. Every one of you." That was quite a change from his 2016 election campaign, when he promised "<a href="https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x35wrxf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">So much winning you'll get bored</a>." Liberals were supposed to be the "snowflakes," right? What happened? How did the once-proud party of masculine self-reliance and "personal responsibility" become such a bunch of whiny snowflakes?There are lots of reasons one could point to, but in truth it's pretty much a blind-men-and-the-elephant situation. We have an abundance of particular insights, with different bits and pieces of the answer. But surprisingly little is known about the role of victimhood in politics in any organized sense, even though particular examples are well-known, some of them quite broad. A passage on white Southern victimhood in the conclusion of "<a href="https://bookshop.org/a/2464/9780190265960" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The Long Southern Strategy</a>" (author interview <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/01/the-long-southern-strategy-how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trum/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">here</a>) is a case in point, drawing together some of the major themes developed earlier in the book. But there is no shared empirical framework for comparing levels of Southern victimhood with victimhood levels elsewhere — unlike with other measures, such as modern sexism, which is used to great effect in that book. All kinds of political attitudes have been measured and studied over the years—enough to <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-02216-000" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">fill a whole volume</a>, more than 20 years ago, but no one's ever studied victimhood with the same kind of rigorous scrutiny.Until now, that is — in a new paper by Miles Armaly and Adam Enders, "'Why Me?' The Role of Perceived Victimhood in American Politics" (forthcoming in the journal Political Behavior.) Given how much of a role victimhood plays in politics, it's remarkable that this appears to be the first attempt ever to develop a way to measure it, and thereby open up a whole new realm of inquiry. By measuring perceived victimhood, the authors show that it's "largely unrelated to political predispositions or sociodemographic characteristics," but is related to, but various views of government, society and the world (especially with regard to perceived corruption and conspiratorial thinking) and personality traits such as narcissism and a sense of entitlement.While the authors didn't set out to explain how Republicans became the victim party, Armaly told me in a recent interview, that makes a lot of sense in terms of what they did find. "The idea of many Trump supporters being 'victims' is borne out in our work," he said. "Inasmuch as cueing from political elites is responsible for some of these feelings, victimhood is currently manifesting in Trump supporters in large part because of 'we are the victims' messages," such as Trump's speech in Georgia.The combination of two processes — top-down elite cues and bottom-up pre-existing attitudes — is one of three major distinctions drawn in this paper that clarify our understanding of victimhood, and how it helps shape the political landscape. "It's bottom-up in the sense that many psychological traits are. It's top-down in that elites can cue feelings of victimhood," Armaly put it. Neither of those things by itself can explain how victimhood functions in politics; both need to involved. But even to begin we need the help of another distinction — between objectively-defined victimhood and a subjective sense of victimhood — in order to focus on the common psychological factors shared by differently situated political individuals and groups.Finally, "Why Me" develops a highly-clarifying twofold construct of subjective victimhood: It is egocentric, involving a tendency to agree with statements like "I am the victim because I deserve more than I get," and it involves a sense of systemic unfairness, reflected in sentiments like, "I am the victim because the system is rigged against me." The two are strongly correlated but distinct, with egocentric victims more likely to be Trump supporters, for example, while systemic victims are less likely to be.In an added wrinkle, the paper's conclusion suggests the existence of a third form of victimhood, "an other-oriented, or accusatory one," and goes on to note:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Modern right-wing rhetoric, for instance, decries liberal "snowflakes," "safe spaces," and political correctness culture. In each of these instances, victimhood is projected onto others. This mobilizes the projectors because the "victims" are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting.
</blockquote>If every accusation is a confession, this third form of victimhood offers a very big clue as to how Trump's base has turned snowflake.Each of these distinctions is worth considering in turn. But first let's note three key points from the paper's conclusion. First, the centrality of victimhood:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Victimhood is central to politics. If politics is, as Lasswell (1936) famously described, about "who gets what, when, how," there are going to be victims.Some will be perceived as victims when they are not, others just the opposite. Political communication is, in no trivial sense, tasked with making some feel like victims, and others look like victims.
</blockquote>Second, victimhood in politics isn't necessarily pernicious:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">That victimhood plays such a central role in politics is not necessarily troubling.
It is intuitive that politicians would make their case to constituents in such a way that victimhood is cued. Indeed, we want representatives that work to realize our values, fill our pockets, and facilitate a happy and healthy life.
</blockquote>Third, what's troubling is when a sense of victimhood fuels extremism:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">Rather than the mere appeal to victimhood, it is the lengths one is willing to go in order to mobilize victimhood that poses the greatest potential normative threat to a civilized democratic political system. Speaking historically, it is precisely a feeling of hypervictimization that has caused people to turn to authoritarian regimes for relief.
</blockquote><h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Subjective vs. objective</h4>Let's turn to the three distinctions described above: The objective/subjective distinction comes first. One reason perceived victimhood hasn't been systematically studied, Armaly told me, is because "there are actual political victims." In the course of getting the paper published, he said, "People were talking about 'How are Black people different from white people? How are women different from men?' Because people were stuck in the idea of genuine victims of the political process. I think that's one of the reasons that we haven't had this direct focus on perceived victimhood in political science or similar fields."In fact, the paper itself notes: "Men seem to be slightly higher in perceived victimhood across the board. … Such an observation underscores our claim that victimhood — as a self-perception — does not require relative disempowerment or subjection to injustices."In conversation, Armaly was more blunt. "It doesn't matter what's true," he said. "It matters what people think and what they feel."A broader public understanding of this could be helpful, he said: "If people understand that these are perceptions, that they can be made to feel this way — and that's a powerful source for political elites." Indeed, promoting this kind of awareness was the underlying insight behind the race-class narrative project developed by Ian Haney López, Anat Shenker-Osorio, and Demos, which I <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/06/10/a-unifying-race-class-narrative-blueprint-for-progressive-victory/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">wrote about here</a> in June 2018. I described it as a suite of narratives "that call out scapegoating by greedy, wealthy special interests, and that call on people to unify across racial lines for the common good."Armaly expressed the promise he sees in more general terms. "If an individual can recognize that perhaps they are being told they're victims when indeed they're not, maybe there's something there that people can learn from: 'Hold on, I'm not really the victim here.''"The race-class narratives didn't specifically discuss victimhood, but they did confront the dynamic. For example:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">California's strength comes from our ability to work together – to knit together a landscape of people from different places and of different races into a whole. For this to be a place of freedom for all, we cannot let the greedy few and the politicians they pay for divide us against each other based on what someone looks like, where they come from or how much money they have. It's time to stand up for each other and come together. It is time for us to vote for leaders who see all of us as equal, whether we are white, black, or brown, who respect all of our families, and who will govern for all of us.
</blockquote>Armaly's work suggests that other elite manipulations of victimhood could be countered with similar kinds of messages. Recognizing victimhood as a subjective state is the first step toward breaking its spell.<h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Egocentric vs. systemic</h4>This distinction is the most fully elaborated of the three. What both poles have in common is that victimhood is "attractive," Armaly explained, "because it's placing the blame for one's lot in life on somebody else: 'It's not my fault.' It's a psychologically pleasing thing. I don't have to be blamed, because somebody else is doing this." From there, the two types diverge. "With the systemic, people are placing the blame with specific higher entities if you will, and with egocentric, people feel this way, they have the internal feelings of victimhood, but again, it's not their fault. It's always nice to lay blame somewhere else. That's the way to eliminate psychological pressure on oneself."The difference between the two might seem subtle, and only emerged gradually over time. "We were discussing how to measure victimhood, and we have these ideas central to what we thought victimhood entailed," Armaly explained. "At a certain point we realized these are kind of tapping different things. So if you look at the items we use, four of them refer to the self, or 'me' or 'I' or something like that, and the other four are referring to outward sources."The paper itself puts it this way: "The major distinction between egocentric and systemic victimhood is blame attribution. Systemic victimhood is a manifestation of perceived victimhood whereby the self defined victim specifically attributes blame for their victim status on systemic issues and entities." By contrast, "Egocentric victimhood ... is less outwardly focused. Egocentric victims feel that they never get what they deserve in life, never get an extra break, and are always settling for less. Neither the 'oppressor,' nor the attribution of blame, are very specific."Indeed, the difference is striking: As mentioned above, egocentric victims are more supportive of Trump, while systemic victims are less likely to be. This makes intuitive sense, in terms of Trump's vague, self-centered language way — about victimization and pretty much everything else. The lack of evidence of voter fraud or any irregularities in the 50-plus election-related lawsuits Trump and his allies have filed does not matter nearly as much to egocentric victims as it potentially would to systemic victims. But the differential support could also reflect the fact that Trump was president when the study was done, Armaly noted. On top of that, "Trump is the establishment, he's wealthy, he's been around forever. So people who see wealth and maybe other systemic issues as victimizing don't support Trump."There was a similar difference with regard to a set of racial issues, including affirmative action. "Somebody who thinks that they're the victim, an egocentric victim [is] going to view something like affirmative action as taking away possibilities that they think they rightfully deserve," Armaly explained. "Whereas a systemic victim seemingly recognizes that there are systemic forces that need to be corrected, and affirmative action is a correction for that type of systemic racial issue."A similar logic applies with respect to anti-political-correctness attitudes, Armaly said. "The egocentric victim sees it like, 'I'm being told what I can and can't say. This is an infringement of My First Amendment rights.' Of course it's not. It's not coming from the government. But they perceive society as censoring them."By contrast, people with a high sense of systemic victimhood "would think you really shouldn't speak to each other the way we do sometimes. Maybe some of this political correctness language is a good thing, because it's more inclusive, It helps people not feel so bad about how other people speak about them," Armaly explained.With this more detailed understanding of systemic and egocentric victimhood in hand, we are better able to appreciate the significance of the third distinction, between the top-down and bottom-up aspects of victimhood. The primary focus of the paper (and the discussion above) is on the latter: Bottom-up aspects provide the primary data. But top-down elite messaging is central to the political process. There's no way to understand victimhood's political significance (not just potential) without it.Subjects were presented with identical victimhood narratives attributed to Trump or Joe Biden, according to their partisan identification. "One thing we know from decades of political science research is people only respond to cues from sources they trust," Armaly noted. "Republicans are going to support Trump, Democrats are going to support Biden. Let's see if they can cue victimhood in their followers." The message was simple:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background: rgb(245, 245, 245);">You, the middle class and working people, have been the victims of so much. You never seem to catch a break, and always seem to pay the steepest price. It's sad, it really is. And I'm going to keep fighting for you no matter what.
</blockquote>The result, the paper noted, was that "both egocentric and systemic victimhood increase as a result of hearing Trump or Biden describe the average people's inability to catch a break." In short, Armaly said, "This is not a Trump phenomenon. This is not a Republican or conservative phenomenon. It cuts across ideological lines and partisan lines. But Trump is very effective at it. And it seems like he's weaponizing this victimhood to adhere people to him, to the party, to certain policies. This is a powerful force and it's a powerful feeling. If people feel like victims, it's unlikely that they're going to see the other party as a way to fix victimhood."So Republicans who agree with Trump that 'Hey, we are the victims,' they're never going to turn to Joe Biden for the remedy. They're only going to turn to Republicans in the future, maybe even continuing to support Trump. So one consequence of this, we think, is entrenching polarization, furthering extremity in beliefs about politics, and making people set up more in their existing camps."Of course, Trump election loss and his subsequent behavior has further intensified feelings of victimhood: "That's precisely what the 'Stop the Steal' thing is about," Armaly said. "'We're the victims of fraudulent elections,' even though there's no evidence pointing there and they keep losing in court. But that is definitely a victimhood-cueing rallying cry."In a way, this helps makes sense of the decades-long thrust of "The Long Southern Strategy." Threatened identities — first around race, and then gender and religion — were key to the whole enterprise. As co-author Angie Maxwell told me, "They didn't have infrastructure in a lot of places for the Republican Party. So they had to create this sense of urgency, and you do that by tapping into things that people feel are fragile and are being threatened." In short, they had to promote feelings of victimhood.I asked Maxwell to comment on the theme of victimhood for this story. She responded:<blockquote style="margin: 1em 40px 1em -5px; border-left: 4px solid rgb(11, 13, 101); line-height: 32px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; width: 602.543px; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">In an effort to cut an electoral map path to victory, starting in the 1960s, Republican strategists pushed individualism against the collective — againstcollective bargaining, protest, organizing. Individualism creates blinders that can deny systemic racism, sexism and privilege. Simultaneously, these GOP strategists, in order to shake Southern whites lose from their long-term connection to the Democratic Party, manufactured a sense of urgency about everything from the "war on Christmas" to the welfare queen bankrupting the taxpayer. That combination creates a self-focused, faux victimhood, reminiscent of the Lost Cause in the South but with a national appeal.
</blockquote>This is how, under the "Stop the Steal" banner, we get a majority of House Republicans supporting an utterly frivolous lawsuit before the Supreme Court that flies in the face of decades of GOP "states' rights" rhetoric. Surprise! The Southern strategy was never about states' rights, any more than the Civil War was. (The Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act had already made a mockery of those Southern claims.)<h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On the role of narcissism</h4>It's worth highlighting how significant Trump's narcissism is in this dynamic. He is utterly incapable of ever admitting he's been wrong. When finally forced to recant his support for birtherism, he double-falsely claimed, "Hillary Clinton started birtherism, and I ended it." Now, having lost an election by more than 7 million votes he claims the election is being stolen from him.So even though narcissism is only related to victimhood statistically, it's still important to consider the role it plays. For this, I reached out to therapist Elizabeth Mika, whose chapter in "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Case-Donald-Trump-Psychiatrists/dp/1250179459" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump</a>" on "Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism" explained how tyranny is a "three-legged beast," encompassing the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole."A sense of victimhood — as opposed to real victimhood — is always based in narcissism: the erroneous, corrosive and inherently destructive belief that we are special — somehow better than others — and thus we deserve special treatment, perks and privileges," Mika said.There's a logical connection, she continued. "Narcissists are eternal victims, as perpetual victimhood is the other side of the narcissistic coin. It can't be otherwise, because if you believe yourself to be special and the world does not reflect this back to you, as is always the case sooner or later, you are going to feel victimized by the lack of special treatment."A similar logic applies to groups as well. "You can expect the members of historically privileged classes and groups to have a sense of specialness ingrained in them by the virtue of being part of that class," Mika said. "When their sense of privilege is threatened and/or eroded, by, for example, expanding the privilege to others, members of previously disenfranchised and thus 'inferior' groups, they react with anger and rage that seek suitable scapegoats, more often than not from among those who are seen as 'stealing' their privilege or otherwise responsible for its loss. For narcissists, the loss of privilege feels like oppression."This description is a near-perfect fit for Trump's white, Christian nationalist base. That base easily delivered landslide re-election victories for Richard Nixon in the 70s and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, but has only managed one popular-vote victory since 1988. Its privileged position has been eroding for at least 30 years now, and has only survived this long because of multiple anti-democratic features of our politics: the Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Senate filibuster and ideologically-stacked courts. The longer that power has been sustained on such a fragile, illegitimate foundation, the more crushing its loss would seem. Hello, snowflakes!<h4 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A third kind of victimhood</h4>As mentioned before, a third form of victimhood is proposed in the paper, an other-oriented or accusatory one typified by right-wing attacks on liberal "snowflakes" and political correctness in which victimhood is projected onto others. "This mobilizes the projectors because the 'victims' are illegitimate — they are not deserving of victim status in the eyes of those doing the projecting."This is clearly more complicated than egocentric or systemic victimhood. But more than projection is likely going on. It may be a process known as "<a href="http://minnickskleinacademy.com/module-2-2-kleins-baby-core-coping-defensive-maneuvers/splitting-and-projective-identification/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">projective identification</a>," discovered by British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, which I wrote about <a href="https://www.salon.com/2015/11/27/this_is_the_entire_gop_plan_credibility_destroyed_after_bush_debacle_their_only_strategy_is_to_scare_us/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">here</a> in late 2015. It involves "introjection (imagining another — or aspects of another — inside oneself) as well as projection—or even both, simultaneously." The first example Klein gave was a specific form known as "envious reversal," in which the projector's unwanted inner states (thoughts, feelings, etc.) are projected (into what Klein called the "container") while the projector steals some desirable state of the "container."If one is not a victim but claims to be, that's very likely an example of envious reversal. But if one is a snowflake and has spent years attacking others as snowflakes, that's also an example of envious reversal. So, too, if you believe that others are unfairly claiming victim status, when in fact that's been your go-to move ever since Brown v. Board of Education. So there's a potential for this kind of victimhood to lead into a hall-of-mirrors fantasy situation. But remember: This is still subjective victimhood. Questions about how subjective and objective realities align are incredibly important, but to fully address them we need to understand the subjective side as well as can.The first step in studying "other-oriented victimhood," Armaly said, would be to examine whether the "correlates" are "similar to egocentric or systemic victimhood, or whether we are talking about a third, totally unique type?" His intuition is that such people "would reject the idea that they're victims, most of the time," but might also "reject the idea that others are victims. Other-oriented victimhood doesn't ever seem to be saying, 'Oh yeah, those people are victims of the political process,' It's usually used as a way to say they're not."The notion of other-oriented victimhood can also have significance for the public as citizens in a democracy, helping us to see things more clearly. "The bleeding heart in me wants to talk about empathy," Armaly said. "Maybe let's not think about victimhood in terms of who is and isn't a victim. Maybe there's another way to approach it. Also, I think victimhood is not zero-sum. Multiple people can be victims — it's not mutually exclusive and not dichotomous in that way."As a big-picture thought about victimhood as whole, Armaly raised a fundamental question. "We should be asking ourselves, 'Are we comfortable giving victims increased status to make social and political claims?'" he said. "And then, similarly, 'Are we comfortable judging the veracity of different claims?' We don't have a way to do this. Society isn't cohesive. We don't have the same mores and the same norms, necessarily, across all facets of society." He went on to note that, "Elevating some claims over others incentivizes these feelings of victimhood, and that's one of the reasons people are attracted to them. I think we have to consider whether incentivizing that feeling is a good thing."Recalling the three points from the conclusion of "Why Me?" cited above, the answer may be that victimhood is inevitably central to politics and isn't necessarily pernicious, but that our capacity to deal with it without falling prey to hyper-victimization may be at a historically low ebb. That recognition could help orient us toward civic repair. Eliminating both actual victimhood and a sense of victimhood is not within our power. But continuing to be a victim of victimhood just might be. If, as Armaly argues, victimhood is not zero-sum, the best way to help any professed victims might be to help them all. Yes, even the snowflakes-in-denial who can't let go of their damaged and defeated president.<div class="around-the-web" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="from-your-site__headline" style="font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase;">FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div></div></div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/how-southern-white-women-drove-the-gop-to-donald-trump/</a>no lnxHow southern white women drove the GOP to Donald Trumpwritten by Paul Rosenberg / Salon July 1, 2019“The Long Southern Strategy,” a new book by political scientists Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, first caught my eye because there’s a long history of denialism surrounding the “Southern strategy.” People sometimes claim that it’s a liberal myth or that it’s ancient history, or that wasn’t the real reason for the Southern realignment in American politics. That denialism has only intensified and grown more significant since the election of Donald Trump.
But Maxwell and Shields’ book turns out to be more than just well-timed, as its subtitle suggests: “How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics.” Rather than simply showing that the Southern strategy was a long-term phenomenon, the book shows that it was a continuously reshaped and evolving strategy, that it was multifaceted — involving gender and religion as crucially as race — and that in remaking the Republican Party and the South, it remade American politics as well. “The Long Southern Strategy” explains this reshaping process remaking better than anything else I’ve read, and does so via a compelling multi-disciplinary combination of history, cultural criticism and social science.
In “The Reactionary Mind” (Salon review here), political theorist Corey Robin argued that conservative politics “speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.” Conservatives may have balked at Robin’s argument, but “The Long Southern Strategy” convincingly describes the specific combination of such losses on which Republicans have played, and the specific form of conservatism that resulted.The building blocks aren’t old-fashioned racism, sexism and religious fundamentalism — all have been reshaped into new forms, making new arguments for halting progress and turning back the clock, which is also a part of the book’s story. For example, as co-author Angie Maxwell told me, “Modern sexism describes feelings of resentment and distrust towards feminists and working women. Rather than believing that a woman cannot do a particular job, folks who express Modern sexism resents a woman for wanting to do that job.”“The Long Southern Strategy” also explains why Donald Trump is not such an anomaly after all, but rather the culmination of where the GOP has been headed for the past 50-plus years. “I gave a series of lectures the year before the election, called ‘The Inevitability of Donald Trump,'” Maxwell told me — but even she thought Trump would make it no further than the Republican nomination. She was concerned, however, about how close the election was going to be, because she had applied “modern sexism measures” to national polling in 2012, and found alarmingly high numbers. “I was worried we were not accounting for that effect,” she said. Perhaps not.So I thought Maxwell would be a perfect interview subject as the 2020 campaign begins in earnest. It’s an invaluable guide for making sense of what’s about to unfold, as well as how we got here. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
First I want to ask about the need to understand the Southern strategy as something long-term and continuing or evolving, not just a one-time event. In short, with the Southern strategy, the story we tell is that after the Civil Rights Act, first Barry Goldwater and then Richard Nixon really played to white racial angst, and the South flipped to red. But when you start looking at not just the electoral map, but voting trends, the South goes pretty heavily back to Jimmy Carter in 1976. And most Southern politicians don’t change their party IDs during that period of time. You see from archival work and other scholarship how worried the GOP was post-Watergate that the inroads they made in the South they were going to lose. And sure enough, they do.
Now, if they were so adamant on a backlash to civil rights, then why pick Carter? But there this notion that Carter’s one of them — he shares their Southern identity, they understand him, he’s a born-again Christian. So the South kind of goes back [to the Democrats]. Then the Reagan folks in 1980 dropped the Equal Rights Amendment from their platform. This to me is the bridge. In 1980, the Republicans are trying again to win those Southern voters back, because they’ve really based their electoral map on that. They took that fork in the road in the late ’60s, and it’s kind of hard, once you set your strategy, to say, “Oh, let’s just pick a new one.” So they dropped the ERA.This was a radical thing to do because the Equal Rights Amendment — and second-wave feminism in general — was a completely bipartisan effort. There were legions of Republican women feminists. In fact, they were some of the leaders in the movement. At the 1977 National Women’s Convention, the only national women’s convention we’ve ever had, every living first lady of both parties was there.. All the major congresswomen from both parties were there. What happened then was Phyllis Schlafly’s effort — she had written the book [A Choice, Not An Echo] that kind of inspired Goldwater to run years before — she started an anti-feminism counter rally, also in Houston, and had massive attendance at that, and their slogan was “family values.”
The GOP took notice. Schlafly was hoping it would get her a cabinet position, which it didn’t. But then the Reagan administration polls 40,000 women, an effort headed up by Richard Wirthlin, with Elizabeth Dole, and they classified American women into 64 types. They called them Nancys, Bettys — they give them names —and they realized that there were a whole lot more antifeminists out there than they realized, people who really wanted these traditional gender roles. I call them “antifeminist” because that is what they were calling themselves, a lot of times. Particularly in the South, among white women. And so that move [dropping the ERA] helped Reagan to secure a lot of those Southern white women. And that’s when you actually see people start changing their voter ID.
So what happens after that?
When Bill Clinton runs, we see the South fall back into the Democratic category. Again, he’s a Southerner who’s one of them. They were very disappointed in Carter, there was his outrage over “This is not what we thought he was,” so it’s surprising Bill Clinton gets a shot. But he wins those Southern states, and then of course his first action is about gays in the military, which did not play well in the South. Then you get the strategy of really playing to evangelicals Christians in a politicized way within the party, not running an outside person, like Pat Robertson, but running as part of the Republican Party. In the 2000s is when they put gay marriage on the ballot, driving people to the polls. Arkansas is the last southern state to flip at the state level, and that hits in 2012.
So it’s this long process, and it’s kind of two steps forward, one step back. Even that’s a simplification, because the effort to win over white voters on racial angst morphs from all-out aggressive language to coded language to a zero-sum kind of language about how white privilege and black advantages equal white losses to Reagan’s colorblindness efforts and “We need to move past race.” Those extend and overlap through the whole process.
But at every turn, there’s a fork in the road, where the parties almost match on whatever issue it is, and the GOP — always against some people within their party, by the way — goes right. And they do that on those policy positions to secure enough Southern white voters to flip that region, and give them that base. But it takes a long time, and it will take a long time to turn it back to the Democrats, who are making such an effort in places like Texas and Florida and Georgia.
One thing that strikes me is that the evolving nature you just described was dependent on conflicted identities, where the threats had to be highlighted in order to be potent politically.  In other words, threats had to be drummed up.
In order to win those Southern white voters, it wasn’t just a policy position, there had to be a sense of urgency. Getting people to change their party ID, when a region has been so solidly one-party Democrat for so long, is not an easy thing to do. They didn’t have infrastructure in a lot of places for the Republican Party. So they had to create this sense of urgency, and you do that by tapping into things that people feel are fragile and are being threatened. Of course the Civil Rights Act gives you a perfect opportunity and this is how it starts: “Your children are going to be bused across town, your whole world’s going to change.”
But once some of that has settled down — and a lot of places in the South figured out how to segregate through private academies, and kind of stabilized that hierarchy that had been threatened — then there have to be other ways of digging into that. One of the things that the GOP does is to start hitting on fiscal conservatism: “We’ve got to be careful of the amount of money the government spends.”
There’s definitely people that care about that legitimately. But it comes at a time when shutting down those programs financially equals conserving white advantages. It’s feeling like those [advantages] were slipping through your fingers, if you’re white, or the world will look different — you’re going to be on the outs. It’s something that white Southerners’ families have memories of that that have been passed down. I mean, that is what Reconstruction was.
A deeper point that I try to get across is this notion that white Southerners in particular — and this becomes adopted by the Republican Party, nationally — were looking at this history from the other side of the room, so to speak. Everything that progressives would champion as a success or progress — I mean, if you already had the ideal society you wanted, then “progress” is just chipping away at that.
So many of us, looking at the world, are constantly saying, “We can get better about this,” or “We need policies to make this more accessible.” We tend to think, “Isn’t that an American thing?” But it’s really not an American thing, and was definitely not a Southern thing. Because for many, many decades of its history it was about restoring what was lost after the Civil War and Reconstruction.
You mentioned the ERA, so I want to turn to gender. The book talks about the Southern ideal of womanhood and how incoherent and impossible that is to maintain. That struck me as a fragile, threatened identity as well.  
Southern white womanhood, that kind of archetype, antebellum historians have written about it a lot, Civil War historians, even some in the early 20th century, have talked about how that dynamic is what underscored white supremacy: Here are these Southern white elite males who have to justify their brutal treatment of African-Americans, either as slaves or as free men, with riots and lynchings and violence in the early 20th century, by saying, “We have to do this to protect these fragile Southern white women.” So the two constructs built each other; they’re completely interwoven.
Southern white women embraced that role because it was the only option they were given for a long time. I’m sure it was suffocating to some, but others very much don’t want that changed.
When the Equal Rights Amendment was coming in, Phyllis Schlafly in particular portrays feminism as a not a choice, but as “You will have to go do this, you will have to go to work, you will have to put your kids in government day care.” These women do not want that world to change. Phyllis Schlafly’s organization STOP ERA stood for “Stop Taking Our Privileges,” and they felt like this pedestal mentality overwhelmingly benefited white women in the South overwhelmingly. It’s how they asserted what little power they had. It was based on this status as morally superior but fragile. They shouldn’t be involved in public life, had to be protected and taken care of, all that.
The political implications of that are serious, particularly if you’re really trying to flip that region to your party. That’s been very much overlooked — and then when you see that 75% of white women [in Georgia] voted against Stacey Abrams, and that 78% of white women who call themselves Southern voted for Trump, yet we hear the story of the national gender gap where women favor Democrats. I have a chapter in the book called “The Myth of the Gender Gap,” because if that’s not disaggregated by region and race, then we don’t understand it. Because with Southern white women, if you pull them out of a national sample, your gender gap is way bigger.
So just among white women — more white women voted for Hillary Clinton outside the South, but inside the South that is reversed. So that gender gap is not universal at all, even among just white women. We know it isn’t universal among white women and women of color — hopefully we’re getting that message — but just among white women, there might as well be two different groups entirely. They do not track together on policy issues or on anything else, and if they’re Southern, that culture still holds really tight and feels very threatened by a woman being president.
You could see that surge up during the Kavanaugh hearings, a need to protect men. Well, you do need to protect men if you’re completely dependent on them financially and economically. And of course the Southern Baptists, where religion kicks back in, is at the same time as this feminism. Second-wave feminism is surging, and you see feminism within the Baptist denomination, women in seminaries, women starting to talk about the advanced role women can play in the church. And then you see a complete backlash to that.
Fundamentalist religion is the third aspect of the story you tell. What happened within the Southern Baptist Convention was at the heart of that story. So how does that connect, and how did it develop? 
After the civil rights movement, in the middle of the ERA fight, women’s liberation, there is starting to be what many more fundamentalist Baptists feel like is a shift towards moderation within the SBC. They feel like it’s a slippery slope, right but the fundamentalists are a small wing at that point, within the larger SBC. Moderates are definitely in the majority and in control.
So two fundamentalists — the story is they meet in New Orleans at Café du Monde, Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson. Both by the way are in big trouble right now. They start talking about what to do, and they launch a political strategy. Because in the SBC convention, you don’t really run for these things, it’s kind of seen that you’re “called” for something. So they launch a plan for how, in a campaign-less organization, to run a campaign. Well, you have one in the absence of anyone else having one. In 1979, they win the presidency and their decision is, if they can get as many fundamentalists as possible elected to what’s called the “committee on committees,” that committee appoints people to all the other committees. What happens is that you can slowly, over the course of a decade, take over that organization.
That’s exactly what they do. Moderates were really purged from that organization.  Women were kicked out of the seminaries, at the big Baptist seminaries, not outliers, but the major ones. A lot of people left the church, and really were shocked by it. There’s a book called “Exiled” which tells all the stories, these first-hand accounts of people who feel like they just been horribly mistreated in the church, and can’t quite believe it happened so quickly.
What was the political importance of the SBC takeover?
Well, the fundamentalists who took it over were very different from the old fundamentalists, the biblical literalists of the 1920s. These fundamentalist evangelicals really believed in participation in the political system, as opposed to “Well, those worldly concerns are just a distraction from our pursuit of our heavenly goals.”
So they really go all in to the American system and it’s not just “Let’s maintain the free exercise of our religion.” It is, “Let’s establish Christianity.” They fire their entire lobbying organization in D.C. and replace it.  It really is a push for no separation of church and state, and the GOP fits into that, pushing the “War on Christians” and the “War on Christmas.” It creates that sense of urgency and when you have a massive hierarchical organization, like these churches are, they end up passing out voter guides and just go all in as a very extreme organization.
What struck me was how this was a complete transformation of the Baptist faith. It was very individualistic, non-hierarchical — the individual’s relationship with God — and it was turned into the pastor telling believers what to believe, with the national organization over them. It just seemed to completely violate not just the Christian spirit, but the specific doctrinal nature of Baptism.
Absolutely. Here’s the craziest thing about it. Because when I grew up Catholic, which is very hierarchical, the Baptist church was the opposite, exactly. It was about the individual relationship with God. Each church stands separately. This is one of the reasons so many moderates are so upset. How do you do that when you’re an organization? Well you do it through social shaming. You do it because the church became the social hub of some of these towns in the South. So if you don’t believe what the preacher is telling you, if you’re one of these moderates in a time when the denomination is shifting to the extreme, you risk alienation — not just at the church, but in your social community.
So people went along with things because to not do so would end a big chunk of their life. Others didn’t, others couldn’t do it. And here’s what so strange: Turning fundamentalist and then becoming so deeply politicized is what ends up breaking down the denominational barriers between, like, Baptists and Catholics. I mean, the anti-abortion and anti-ERA movements start to create a denominational unity that’s political. Even with Mormons, who were a huge piece of the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment.
Since you mentioned the Mormons, I’d like to ask about support for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election, and the perception of Romney as a Christian vs. Barack Obama as possibly a Muslim. 
When folks were saying, “Are these Southern Baptists going to vote for Romney?”, I’m like, “Oh, they will.” They will because they are on the same side, politically. They will vote for whoever they have to vote for who will support the agenda they want, period. You saw those numbers about whether they believe Donald Trump is a Christian —they don’t care. They don’t believe he’s a Christian, but they’re still voting for him in really high numbers. More believe it in the South, but in terms of Romney, this is part of that need to make it what they want to make it. “We will look at the world the way we want to believe the world, and if he agrees with us politically, then he must be one of us.”
It seems to come in two forms. Southern fundamentalists are more likely to think Trump is a Christian. But they are also more likely to vote for him even if they don’t. 
Correct. They’re more likely to buy into the us vs. them, and go like, “Well, he’s one of us, so he must be a Christian.’ And each one of those elements adds: If you’re a fundamentalist but not Southern that’s a little bit, but then if you’re Southern but not fundamentalist you get a little bit. But if you’re Southern and fundamentalist you’re the most likely to agree with it. It’s that combo where the highest numbers believe that Obama is a Muslim. It’s just us vs. them on everything.
How else do you get Southern whites, many of them not in good economic circumstances, supporting a New York billionaire with little to any church attendance history? Because he is not what they’re not, he must be one of them. Because he’s not Hillary Clinton, so we’re going to make him one of us. We’re going to make that happen. We’re going to tell ourselves that story and believe in it. Because he makes us feel like he supports us and he’s one of us. So were just going to transfer all of that onto him. Because identity is not rational, except if you understand identity and the way it works. It makes how they vote makes sense.
You have a chapter called “The Myth of Social Conservatism” and part of what you explain there is how what conservatives are voting on goes far beyond the “family values” they’re known for. How does the reality contrast with the myth? 
When we started to see this streak of religious voters come about in the ’90s and 2000s, we would say there were conservatives and there were “social conservatives.” That’s how we talked about it. The social conservatives were very religious people, they cared about abortion issues and they cared about gay marriage, mostly, and maybe prayer in schools. And that was the reason that evangelical fundamentalists were voting Republican. Republicans were doing what they wanted on these three issues, and that was kind of the end of it.
What you start to see is that once these evangelicals are brought into the fold is they really turn into all-out conservatives. Not just on a couple of issues, they tracked differently on all kinds of what most of us will call secular issues. So I know those are constructions, too — what’s secular and what’s religious — but including on climate change and foreign policy issues. A lot of that get explained in some kind of religious way to these voters — things about Israel have to do with “If certain things happen, it will usher in the Rapture and the Second Coming.”
So it’s hard for a lot of people, looking through the long scope of history to realize how many Catholic nuns were marching in the civil rights movement, and how many ministers were working for civil rights outside the South from different denominations, And then all of a sudden to see such a strong Christian wing on all these conservative issues that just track perfectly with the GOP, and an absence from these other issues, like a living wage. We see that disappear and we see these social conservatives who really become all-out conservatives.
There was an empathy for some of these evangelicals and fundamentalists that entered the political arena. People said, “Well, we understand their religious belief makes them so pro-life.” But where is the pro-life-ness in all these other things? Even in the current moment, with children on the border? That’s because it isn’t just a religious morality at stake. It is a politicized cosmology about how the world works, and your kind of Christian place in it that is really askew from where it was 40 years ago. And that is because of this merger, this marriage between the GOP and that religious denomination.
You were not surprised by Donald Trump — at least not that he would be the nominee, and that the election would be close. The way they changed the South was mirrored in the way they changed the nature of conservatism. All Trump had to do was tick the boxes of what it had become. This struck me as a perfect explanation of Trump, so I’d like you spell it out a bit. 
What you realize when you see how the Long Southern Strategy works to split that region, is that if someone expresses high levels of racial resentment, which is one way we measure racial animus, like, “I’m ready to look past race and we don’t need any more affirmative action,” that kind of synergy, and modern sexism, which is a distrust of feminism and a distrust of ambitious women, and then a kind of Christian nationalism — if you express one of those in high numbers, you account for 95% of Trump’s support among white people, which is the overwhelming bulk of his support.
So when you start looking at the candidates, you say, who checks those boxes, right? Trump plays them to the extreme, which you can do when he’s running against a woman and is coming after an African-American president. There’s this backlash kind of narrative going on, but in general, who ticks those boxes? I remember talking to a reporter a couple weeks before what they call the SEC primary [in the Southern states], and I said it was going to be Trump. This person said, “No! It’s gonna be Cruz.” I was like, “No. His last name is Cruz.” They have alienated enough people against Latinos and against anything that’s not pure white that there are people who are not going to do that.
Now, could he have been beaten in the primary? If one person had run against him that gathered all their support, it’s possible. But not when it’s fractured. Then the question was, “Would all these people coalesce around him?” And that’s easy when the person he’s running against is a female, because those modern sexism numbers are high and the country is closely divided. So it’s not that everyone feels that way. It’s just that enough feel that way and we’re closely enough divided that it could be a difference-maker, along with a lot of other things in this election cycle.
So what’s the message people should take away from your book going forward?
I think we have some myths that have made us assess the landscape incorrectly. That myth of the gender gap is huge. There are different coalitions that if you’re a progressive need to be built, but if you think you’re going to win white women voters over, it’s a mistake. Our belief that evangelicals would not vote for someone like Trump who has been divorced twice. False! Our myth that we’re in this post-racial America. That’s pretty obviously false, right now, but there was some belief in that, and that still motivated people in really deep places.
And just the fact that Trump is not an anomaly. He is the culmination of the backlash against the fight for rights and liberties for women, for Latinos and African Americans, for religious freedom and expression and diversity of the ’60s and ’70s. He’s the culmination of that, or he’s the product of a really long counterrevolution.
What about those different coalitions?
The overwhelming majority of Southern white women are not going to vote Democratic. Anti-feminist culture is deep and strong in the Southern white community. Therefore, a progressive coalition should focus on non-Southerners who live in the South (and don’t share this culture), feminist men and women, African American men and women, etc.
What’s the most important question I didn’t ask? And what’s the answer?
You asked more about gender than anyone has, even the book’s readers along the way, and I appreciate that. But what’s the biggest contribution? I think for me — there is hardly any scholarship at all about Southern white women and their political behavior. There’s hardly anything, because overwhelmingly the political scientists who study the South are men. It’s not a criticism, it’s just when you live it, when you grow up in it, there are subtle things about identity and Southern white womanhood and how it works, you see things that to others might go unnoticed.
That’s where I started to pick up such a radical difference between Southern white women and non-Southern white women, in terms of how they talked about politics and political life. And what happened with the ERA is really the missing bridge in this story. A lot of people write about the “short” Southern strategy and a lot of people write about the Christian Coalition and the GOP. But you miss the link if you don’t understand Southern white women, and yet there haven’t been a lot of Southern white women in a position to talk about it.<div>
</div><a href="https://truthout.org/articles/paul-manafort-s-role-in-the-republicans-s-notorious-southern-strategy/" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">https://truthout.org/articles/paul-manafort-s-role-in-the-republicans-s-notorious-southern-strategy/</a>sue s
as part of the ongoing probe into Russian efforts to help Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, Special Counsel Robert Mueller last week <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/paul-manafort-indicted.html?r=0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/paul-manafort-indicted.html?r%3D0&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHRzMfePOYKa9AA3CFUY8BvhWd0dQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">handed down</a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/paul-manafort-indicted.html?r=0" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/paul-manafort-indicted.html?r%3D0&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHRzMfePOYKa9AA3CFUY8BvhWd0dQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;"> criminal indictments</a> of three Trump campaign associates, among them former campaign chair Paul Manafort of Virginia.In a 12-count indictment that also named his business partner, Manafort was charged with conspiracy to launder money, serving as an unregistered agent of a foreign power, making false statements and other crimes. The charges relate to his laundering through foreign shell companies millions of dollars made lobbying for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine — work he failed to properly disclose — and using it to buy luxury goods and property while avoiding taxes. Manafort surrendered to the FBI, pleaded not guilty and was placed under house arrest. If convicted, the 68-year-old faces up to 80 years in prison.The charges against Manafort — a Connecticut native with business and law degrees from Georgetown University — cap off a controversial career in politics. Much of it he spent <a href="https://cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBBY.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBBY.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNGU8Vef0pj3-dC3k5xBk5VhMlPBgw" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">lobbying for notorious human rights abusers</a> such as Angolan anti-communist rebel leader <a href="https://www.usip.org/publications/1999/10/angolas-deadly-war-dealing-savimbis-hell-earth" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.usip.org/publications/1999/10/angolas-deadly-war-dealing-savimbis-hell-earth&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNEviF4FV9WNQStCo_X837tDaIdjNg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Jonas Savimbi</a> and dictators <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_killings_and_forced_disappearances_in_the_Philippines#Marcos_regime" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_killings_and_forced_disappearances_in_the_Philippines%23Marcos_regime&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFMj06u1yuH_jNwYH9vrBEZpX8IKA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines</a>, <a href="https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/somalia-fall-of-siad-barre-civil-war/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2015/08/07/somalia-fall-of-siad-barre-civil-war/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFMbeWUlM7SC6FRwi6SCD0b7Yg7jQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Mohammed Siad Barre of Somalia</a> and <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-04-29/news/9704290128_1_president-mobutu-sese-seko-secret-detention-centers-laurent-kabila" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-04-29/news/9704290128_1_president-mobutu-sese-seko-secret-detention-centers-laurent-kabila&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFOKAGoHj16BWE9R4JxgbtG1_fz8Q" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire</a> (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo)....ping the Republican Party gain advantage by embracing the politics of racism at home.After launching his political career in 1976 as a delegate-hunt coordinator for the President Ford Committee, Manafort went on to <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Black,Manafort,Stone_and_Kelly" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Black,Manafort,Stone_and_Kelly&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNE3qF_WMz4EzOmbjT3cPjOkxGMBEA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">co-found a political consulting firm</a>. In that capacity he served as Southern coordinator for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, in which he exploited the GOP’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-southern.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNESdoghNk0XnbiiClMUf1o3hZiq8w" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">“Southern Strategy”</a> — an effort to build political support for the Republican Party among white Democratic voters in the South through dog-whistle appeals to racism against African Americans. It <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Roots_of_the_Southern_strategy.281963.E2.80.931972.29" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy%23Roots_of_the_Southern_strategy.281963.E2.80.931972.29&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFZ_7aElgfdjWsjNkCQBy3wK_NmAQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">can be traced back</a> to Republican Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run and was used with great success by the Nixon campaign in 1968.Two weeks after Reagan became his party’s nominee at the 1980 Republican convention in Detroit, Manafort arranged to have him speak at Mississippi’s Neshoba County Fair, a <a href="http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2004/jul/28/of-sin-and-politics/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news/2004/jul/28/of-sin-and-politics/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFl8l6LMTU7aHeK_mgYJW_MbWQWHA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">traditional forum for right-wing politics</a>. The visit was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/08/04/reagan-campaigning-from-county-fair-to-urband-league/f4aa5726-a0e6-4206-8239-cb3b4bff5ac9/?utm_term=.662666f7220a" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/08/04/reagan-campaigning-from-county-fair-to-urband-league/f4aa5726-a0e6-4206-8239-cb3b4bff5ac9/?utm_term%3D.662666f7220a&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFSwP3I3qjUJ6hGT0OcEUsO4IdLuA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">hosted by Trent Lott</a>, at the time a Mississippi congressman who would go on to serve in the US Senate only to lose his leadership position in 2002 after <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/11/lott-remarks-on-thurmond-echoed-1980-words/c613ae1c-e17d-41c1-836a-4dd0741ec7c8/?utm_term=.4525d741298d" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/11/lott-remarks-on-thurmond-echoed-1980-words/c613ae1c-e17d-41c1-836a-4dd0741ec7c8/?utm_term%3D.4525d741298d&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHy7Uk_xVU4HRx_DKYopxhjS6niVQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">praising the segregationist politics</a> of former Dixiecrat-turned-Republican US Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.The Neshoba County Fair takes place just seven miles from the county seat of Philadelphia, Mississippi. That’s where during Freedom Summer of 1964 members of the Ku Klux Klan with help from the local sheriff and police <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/freedomsummer-murder/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNEDIaY9lX6NSyYB8P-ibYGIeK2b_Q" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">murdered James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner</a>, young civil rights workers who had been registering rural black residents to vote.Mississippi declined to prosecute anyone involved in the killings at that time, so the federal government stepped in. After a lengthy battle, US prosecutors finally managed to indict 18 people on federal charges of depriving the victims of their civil rights by murder. Held before an all-white jury and a white judge with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/02/28/w-harold-cox-federal-judge-in-mississippi-dies/5e9bbbc1-b66d-49f4-9734-b05ddff6143e/?utm_term=.736a34de1e76" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1988/02/28/w-harold-cox-federal-judge-in-mississippi-dies/5e9bbbc1-b66d-49f4-9734-b05ddff6143e/?utm_term%3D.736a34de1e76&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFVjJ-NOP3JGV1CqJIUCAfvEhYXAw" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">a record of hostility</a> to the civil rights movement, the trial resulted in convictions for seven men. None served more than six years in prison, so it’s possible they attended the fair to hear Reagan speak.In that historically and racially charged setting, what was the Reagan campaign’s message to the overwhelmingly white crowd of 10,000? “States’ rights” — the rallying cry for secessionists during the Civil War and for segregationists during the civil rights movement. Reagan <a href="http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15599" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://neshobademocrat.com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s-1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15599&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNH0Kyn-ODHMhbyt5sYL6bodEHFjg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">said</a>:<blockquote style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 2rem 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3rem; border-left: 0.5rem solid rgb(159, 161, 164); line-height: 2;">I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.</blockquote>He went on to pledge to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.” As Bob Herbert of the New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFUsZnSPF3Oii8jovvezpfNXD-lrg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">wrote</a> years later in response to Republican efforts to cast Reagan’s Neshoba County appearance in a more benign light, “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.”<h2 style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 3rem 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line-height: 1.2;">A More Abstract Racism</h2>Reagan went on to win a landslide victory over incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter of Georgia and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dedrick-muhammad/the-reagan-eraturning-bac_b_2838625.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dedrick-muhammad/the-reagan-eraturning-bac_b_2838625.html&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHibs32Q17Q08zSFiuxTvr7FPnOMg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">racked up a record hostile to civil rights</a>.He cut funding for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He sided with the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina in a case over whether institutions that discriminate on the basis of race can get federal funds. He even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Restoration_Act_of_1987" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Restoration_Act_of_1987&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNE88S1o_lr0XN0fPgXcg0eP10VMFQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">vetoed the Civil Rights Restoration Act</a> requiring publicly funded institutions to comply with civil rights laws, though Congress overrode him.The day after the 1984 general election, in which Reagan won a second term in an even more overwhelming landslide, Republican political consultant and White House political aide Lee Atwater of South Carolina <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black,Manafort,Stone_and_Kelly#Others" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black,Manafort,Stone_and_Kelly%23Others&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHPSxF0Do9CcpoctCH4dN4hY2UWWw" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">became a senior partner</a> in Manafort’s consulting firm.Atwater was known for his use of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#1980_and_1984_elections" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater%231980_and_1984_elections&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNFhs9Q4igMLRzN76Db0wsEW1Nf8wg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">aggressive and racially charged tactics</a>in his work with congressional campaigns, such as fake surveys implying an opponent was a member of the NAACP. In his work with Manafort’s firm, Atwater masterminded the racially charged <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DIo9KMSSEZ0Y&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNGwNXrbDjfBO5klzt4odxFTkntXfg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">Willie Horton attack ads</a> run by the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988 accusing Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis of being weak on crime.Atwater had discussed the origin and thinking behind the Southern Strategy in a 1981 interview with a political scientist. It surfaced in an audio recording <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNEjnRFFw_mJzjj5Pw452qZP3Q7b7Q" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">obtained by The Nation magazine</a> in 2012. In it he said:<blockquote style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 2rem 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 3rem; border-left: 0.5rem solid rgb(159, 161, 164); line-height: 2;">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, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”</blockquote>Before he died in 1991, Atwater <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/13/us/gravely-ill-atwater-offers-apology.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/13/us/gravely-ill-atwater-offers-apology.html&source=gmail&ust=1510172201772000&usg=AFQjCNHFP-n6pAZx67gOMCMCV-0SWjd_8w" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">apologized</a> for the tactics he used, noting that while he didn’t invent negative politics he was “one of its most ardent practitioners.” Manafort, though, has offered no apologies.<h2 style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 3rem 0px 1.5rem; padding: 0px; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line-height: 1.2;">Making a Monster</h2>The racially divisive tactics pioneered by Manafort and his colleagues remain a feature of US politics today, though they’ve been adapted to the times by exploiting white resentment toward Latinos and immigrants as well as African Americans.After Manafort joined the Trump operation as chair in March 2016, political observers <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNHxBPczhXnJKKdRom12upW6Hpx3Qg" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">noticed a change in the campaign’s tone</a>. Trump stopped with the blatantly outrageous statements, such as saying protesters deserve to be <a href="https://www.facingsouth.org/www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/politics/donald-trump-nevada-rally-punch/index.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.facingsouth.org/www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/politics/donald-trump-nevada-rally-punch/index.html&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNGQ8Suz2abZ0QSQqG9qrO80vbGgKw" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">punched in the face</a>, and instead <a href="http://time.com/4305591/donald-trump-campaign-shuffle/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://time.com/4305591/donald-trump-campaign-shuffle/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNFHAfZoFfVm796fOYqABCeupEoCIQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">deployed new messaging</a> about threats to “our way of life,” and of crime and violence and the need for safety to “be restored.”And in a nod to history, the Manafort-led campaign had Donald Trump Jr. <a href="https://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2016/07/26/trump-neshoba-fair-geoff-pender/87561270/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/politics/2016/07/26/trump-neshoba-fair-geoff-pender/87561270/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNHx7M40BNWhyoHQ31-IvrU1SCBy1g" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">speak</a> at the Neshoba County Fair that July. The crowd chanted, “Build that wall” while some waved Confederate flags. Asked before his speech about the controversy over the Mississippi state flag with its Confederate symbolism, Trump Jr. answered, “There’s nothing wrong with some tradition.”But by August 2016, Manafort’s work on behalf of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had begun drawing scrutiny in the US press, which reported that Manafort may have illegally received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments from Yanukovych’s party. Manafort resigned from the campaign on Aug. 19, 2016. But Republican leaders continued to praise his work for Trump.“Nobody should underestimate how much Paul Manafort did to really help get this campaign to where it is right now,” <a href="https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/766819052656340993" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/766819052656340993&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNFML8biZotuZwJjnCB1jEBDxK3CJA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">said</a> political consultant Newt Gingrich, the former congressional leader from Georgia and GOP presidential candidate who served as an adviser for the Trump operation.How did the Southern Strategy as refined by Manafort work for Trump? In the end, Southern states <a href="https://www.facingsouth.org/2017/04/south-rising-regions-political-clout-growing-under-trump" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.facingsouth.org/2017/04/south-rising-regions-political-clout-growing-under-trump&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNFSQMs0Vm0djARW_yYSAEsu0GkwQA" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">delivered 160 Electoral College votes</a> to him — more than half of the 306 total that sent him to the White House. White voters favored Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton by 21 points. Trump <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNHErWCqMj8VK5OcpZkJUdB-ir4mFQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">won</a> among white men, white women, whites with and without college degrees, and whites of every voting age group.One analysis <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/maps-presidential-election-race-gender-age/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/maps-presidential-election-race-gender-age/&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNFpvns0_Ab8foJhxwhEH2mvQc38WQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">found</a> that had only white people voted in the election, Trump would have captured over 80 percent of all electoral votes — an outcome that Manafort and other Republicans helped engineer over the course of decades. As Jeet Heer <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/130039/southern-strategy-made-donald-trump-possible" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://newrepublic.com/article/130039/southern-strategy-made-donald-trump-possible&source=gmail&ust=1510172201773000&usg=AFQjCNHaB1qoo_wYcEnOfoNFUrdsMFmLkQ" style="box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; line-height: inherit; text-decoration-line: none;">observed</a> in the New Republic, “The Southern Strategy was the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.”Manafort’s trial is now tentatively set for April 2018. Regardless of what happens to him next, though, the political monsters he helped create live on.
<a href="https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-february-20-2017/">https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-february-20-2017/</a>ceo sears?The overtly racist politics of Donald Trump has been called unprecedented — a break from the Republican Party’s past rules of engagement.  But a look backward, particularly at the GOP’s Southern Strategy to woo white voters based on segregationist or racist appeals, indicates how inaccurate that assumption is. Edward H. Miller discusses the origins of the Southern Strategy in segregated Dallas, and how the ideas of Texas ultraconservatives became the national politics of the Republican Party. (Encore presentation.)Resources:Edward H. Miller,<a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo19197692.html" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none; box-sizing: border-box;"> Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy</a> University of Chicago Press, 2015https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy...As the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement(1955%E2%80%931968)" class="mw-redirect" title="African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)" style="text-decoration: none; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">African American Civil Rights Movement</a> and dismantling of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws" title="Jim Crow laws" style="text-decoration: none; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jim Crow laws</a> in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened pre-existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon" title="Richard Nixon" style="text-decoration: none; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Richard Nixon</a> and Senator <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater" title="Barry Goldwater" style="text-decoration: none; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Barry Goldwater</a> developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South to the Republican Party that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#cite_note-NY_Times_1996-4" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[4]</a> It also helped push the Republican party much more right.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#cite_note-NY_Times_1996-4" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">[4]</a>...<h2 style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3;">Evolution (1970s and 1980s)</h2>