Richard Nixon’s evil political trick, his Presidential campaign’s 1968 Southern Strategy, lives on even more destructively than ever! The Southern Strategy was, and remains, the work of the ‘Rancid Old One’ dwelling in the brains of Nixon and his campaign managers that made race-mongering the focal point of the campaign. The ‘Southern Strategy’ was, and remains, a life-threatening piece of political poison - dangerous skullduggery that easily can, did and continues to hurt and kill both target and users. It let bad stuff out of the bottle.
America’s current political-social turmoil, especially its extremes of public destructiveness and ‘shoot-to-kill’ reality, can be arguably credited to the extremist, manipulative, opportunist, venal, power hungry ... yet fragile ego of our incumbent president, Donald Trump. Likewise, the accompanying, intense racial discordance seems strongly linked, again, to the coded and overt public exhortations of Donal Trump to his 35% ‘base’ supporters - the ‘Maga Hatters’, religious southern evangelicals, right-wing conspiracy theorists, race-war proponents, gun culture 2nd-amendment right-ists, and so on, including several other fringe groups sheltered under the Trump tent.
This blogger proposes that the above, current civil distress, and especially its root racism, goes back to 1964, when the ‘libertarian’ presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater was devastatingly rejected by the voters,...and, from that political failure, left the Republican Party with neither message nor person of substance to carry its banner forward. (In retrospect, the Goldwater ‘message’ was actually a subliminal brain-mirage left by clever-sounding ‘media bites’ that upon repeating and further contemplation evaporated into meaningless Sophomoric quips.)
‘Goldwater’ shocked the 1964 Republicans to the reality that they were ‘running on empty’ as far as message ideas and far worse, they realized themselves their messaging lacked a basic meaning. But, they also saw they had fallen into a trap of their own making - the Republicans had rejected so much in competing with the Democrats, there was nothing of real substance left for them ... they had even rejected science and technology in favor of evangelicalism, creationism, international isolationism and more.
But the political obverse was that aided by the willing assistance from the backwards looking-and-longing Republicans, the Democrats had cruised by default (and by their own predilections) to near-exclusive ownership of ‘messaging’ the new American reality - youth, education, urban needs, American diversity (race, gender, age, etc).
In brief, the 1964, Goldwater-costumed, Republican Party had ‘achieved’ a near-overall rejection of reason and was regressing to a feudal condition ... while the Democrats were equally going full-blast in the opposite direction - upwards and onwards on the reality path to the future.
(And though the Democrats were surfing high on the crest of ‘what’s happening now’, there was the classic human ‘glitch’ written about by the ancients such as Aeschylus - ‘no picture is so perfect that it paints itself.’ Thusly so, with the Dems, even in a world with so many riches and open doors, just how does one start, use them, program them, message about them, unify behind them, etc... too much of a plentitude of riches. In other words, the classic, seemingly omni-present, Democratic Party ‘angst’ was opening fissures that allowed Republican presidential wins - the two terms of Reagan followed by the three terms of Bushes.
While the ‘Old Guard Republican conservatives, in their vow not to repeat the ‘Goldwater Error’, were guiding the Party to the center - with some success, they were not totally successful in that struggle.
After Goldwater, the Old Guard, conservative Republican ‘tide’ was always fighting against an ‘ebb’ tide of reactionary sentiment from the Republican base whose center was in the old South - ruralist (at least in cultural leaning) and religiously evangelical Protestant. They made a good struggle to keep the Party ‘aucurant’ with a changing America, but there weren’t enough remaining rationality-messaging hand-holds to save the Party from regressing the ‘rest of the way’.
But meanwhile, since 1964 and Goldwater, the American voter had grown a bit and was not so easily impressed (tricked) by the ‘quick-slick-worded one-liner’, vapid, behind-the-curtain, dismalness that Republican messaging had become. This was a tough situation - how and where could Republicans find a new hand-hold on their worn-slick, skeletal bones to message something to appeal to the newer voters, or even to hoodwink them.
These post-Goldwater challenges ideally required breadth and subtlety of thinking and problem-solving talents and skills, not ideological ‘magic and believing’ - tricks of self-deception that quickly evaporated under ‘second order’ examination into ... nothingness. Republican ideology, though, excelled in ‘faux-argumentation’ which was (is still) based largely on the rejections of classical rationality and Reason mixed with a strong measure of authoritarianism, and was thus automatically incapable of adapting and addressing these challenges. (Once more, as exampled by Goldwater in 1964, Republican ideology had that tendency to ‘crash and burn’ before takeoff.)
But the Republican messaging gap had to be overcome. A ‘fix’ had to be found.
Then, in 1968, there appeared from the dark imaginings of Kevin Phillips, a young political consultant to Richard Nixon’s campaign, a new plate of Republican messaging magic - the race-baiting slogans, trigger phrases and graphic race-hate images now known as ‘The Nixon Southern Strategy’, which has become the core of all subsequent Republican Party messaging. (Mr Phillips has since, after maturation, left the Republican Party.) The Republican’s race-baiting often enough hit a mark - it did offer simple-concept reality-substitutes, i.e., hate and authoritarianism which easily satisfied the southern White majority and eventually a major segment of the working class (arguably aided by Democratic defocusing from the exceptionally strong relationship that had existed between the Democratic Party and labor unions.)
The current race-baiting, white nationalist messaging from Trump’s Republican Party is then the direct descendent of the 1968 Nixon “Southern Strategy” which was dreamed up to save that near defunct Party by stealing from the Democrat Party the southern White, conservatives (Dixie-crats) ... and Donald Trump is the current legacee of that terrible 1968, Republican wrong-turn-at-the-crossroads.
At the core of what Pericles21 suggests was the ‘Republican Problem’ in 1964, and that remains now, is that in 1964, they realized that largely through their own fault they had guided themselves, or allowed themselves to be guided, into irrelevance to American issues. And they hadn't found a way out. And althoughhemselves be g they saw from the 1964 ‘Goldwater Affair’, that their conservative ideology, even when embellished with ear-catchy phrases, invariably if not too quickly, collapsed on itself and thus offered nothing useful to resolving the real American problems that were evolving on several challenging fronts - social, international, technological and more, there was not much Republicans could do to mask that inadequacy except to “double down” on a losing bet’
The Democrats, by their natural alliance (it seems) with scientific rationalism, have been near-perfectly aligned with modern problem analytical methods and thinking and thusly have been comfortable with America’s new technology base and are especially coherent with AMERICA’S ‘NEW DIVERSITY’ (a historically preexistent racial diversity that in 1964, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was taken out from behind the ‘Jim Crow’ curtain and became a legitimate, ‘full-rights’ picture of America... and was subsequently complemented by gender-rights laws and social acknowledgments.)
In comparison to the above evolving America, and to the Democrats’ easy adaptation to those mentioned changes, the Republicans, largely through Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy which relied on race hatred at its core, had self-isolated from America’s reality, and also from the international world.
By 1968,The Republican campaign messaging had become an almost-empty bag of emptier-sounding clever quips that actually scared voters when read or heard spoken a second time (Goldwater, 1964 campaign).
(COMMENT: it is worth noting that, imho, there is in 2020 a Goldwater heir of sorts the clever-phrase wonder, Rand Paul (Republican Senator, Kentucky)
So, even after a debatably illegal 2016 ‘Trumpism’ electoral college ‘win’ (although Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million), America and the Republican Party, were faced with the problematic ‘realty’ of Donald Trump as President because the Trump ‘success’ ‘came with’ (not ‘because of’) an all-embracing alliance with the empty leftovers from the 1964 Goldwater debacle. But it was all about the Goldwater ‘leftovers’, anyway.
Predictably, within weeks after the 2017 inauguration, Trump turned full-on rogue, and aided by an increasingly complicit Old Guard, rapidly began regressing America to a feudal, autocratic, oligarchic-fascist status ...complete with walled borders, hunched shoulders rejecting centuries-old allies and treaties - all of the inappropriate formats for 20th century world leadership.
So now, in 2020, with Trump, the Republican Party finds itself again regressed to a 1964 Goldwater ‘poseur’ status with nothing to offer except empty words and phrases drooling from the mouth of an authoritarian, con-artist (who is also alleged to a paper-marche puppet of an foreign state enemy -a true nightmare for that super-patriotic party.
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