Republicans need every vote. Even with Nixon committing treason in 1968 to win that election, he knew he still needed the votes of racist whites in the south -- thus his new "GOP Southern Strategy" (building on the old "state's rights" strategy in which, since Reconstruction, white politicians argued that the federal government had no business stopping southern states from literacy tests to vote to criminalizing sitting in a restaurant while black).
Reagan put it on steroids in 1980, when, as his first speech after getting the GOP nomination, he made the same pilgrimage Donald Trump Jr. more recently did to the Nebosha County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
(Reagan infamously said, there: "I believe in state's rights; ... we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.")
While this sort of racial dog-whistle politics is not new, at least prior to the election of Trump, in previous generations white supremacists wore hoods over their heads and didn't much go out in public with their hate.
As Lee Atwater, one of Reagan's main strategists and the father of the "Willie Horton" ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988, told a group of Republican activists in 1980, there was a new way to serve the rich while dog whistling to the rubes -- just use "abstract" language:
"You start out in 1954 by saying, 'n-word, n-word, n-word.' By 1968 you can't say 'n-word' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like 'forced busing,' 'states' rights' and all that stuff. 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. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the [Republican] racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the 'busing' thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'n-word, n-word.'"
This is how Republicans talked for decades when nobody outside the party was listening. "Cutting federal spending" was a wink-and-a-nod for "no more benefits to people of color" -- and still is today.
And the white racists who voted for Republicans post-1968 largely only showed their power at election time, and even then they didn't wear their robes or carry Nazi or Klan symbols to the polls.
But with the election of Trump (whose father was arrested at a 1927 Klan rally), all that changed. After he claimed that "all sides" were engaged in hatred, bigotry, and violence on Saturday, Nazis and Klan members openly celebrated.
We should have seen this coming: a year and a half ago, on CNN, Trump refused to rebuke David Duke and the Klan.
All to get elected. So he could cut the taxes of rich people and let big polluting business and banks have their deregulation. So he could cut his own taxes, for that matter.
You see, when you're running a scam and need a lot of rubes to win elections, you don't ever, ever, ever diss your rubes. This is why the GOP won't talk (other than a few who aspire to higher office) about white supremacy.
The vast majority of the billionaires behind the Republican Party don't give a rat's ass about civil rights or the Klan, one way or the other.
They don't care if working-class women can or can't get abortions/birth-control, or if Bubba can buy a gun even if he's certifiably insane (yes, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Trump did that).
They don't care if the air and water are poisoned: they have super-fancy air filters for their mansions and yachts, and their own water supplies.
They couldn't care less if Muslims are immigrating into the U.S.
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