How the GOP Became the 'White Man's Party': Dog Whistle Politics - Coded Racial Appeals Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class

Signs of Madison's Tea Party: "Obama's Plan - White Slavery"
(Photo by cometstarmoon)

By Ian Haney-López (Book Excerpt)
In 1963, Robert Novak had written that many Republican leaders were intent on converting the Party of Lincoln into the White Man’s Party. The following year, Goldwater went down in crushing defeat, winning only 36 percent of the white vote. Even so, less than a decade later, the racial transmogrification of the Republicans was well underway.

RELATED STORY: Why the Republican Strategy to Set Working Class Whites Against the Poor is Backfiring

In 1972, Nixon’s first full dog whistle campaign netted him 67 percent of the white vote, leaving his opponent, George McGovern, with support from less than one in three whites. Defeated by the Southern strategy, McGovern neatly summed it up: “What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense of the few — and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man, appoint a few southerners to high office, and lift your spirits by attacking the ‘eastern establishment’ whose bank accounts we are filling with your labor and your industry."

McGovern erred in supposing that the Southern strategy pertained only to the South. Nixon had already learned from Wallace, and then later from the number crunchers, that coded racial appeals would work nationwide. Other than that, especially in its class and race dimensions, McGovern had dog whistle politics dead to rights.

Republican Strategist Lee Atwater

Even though he played guitar with black R&B singer Percy Sledge and Bluesman B.B. King he
didn't hesitate using racist tactics to get Ronald Reagan and
George H.W. Bush elected president.

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