Nixon and the GOP's Racist Strategy

With the release of more tapes from the Nixon White House, the image of Richard Nixon only gets worse.  A number of the foul aspects that plague the GOP of today had their seeds planted in the Nixon era and have grown to full bloom with the rise of the Christofascists and Tea Party within the party.  Both groups, to the extent that they are no one and the same under different monikers, take to heart the racism that was the heart of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" that focused on winning white Democrats over to the GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this ugly Nixon legacy.  Here are excerpts:

It was Nixon who devised and pursued what came to be called the Southern strategy. This was, in the admirably concise wording of Wikipedia, an appeal “to racism against African-Americans.” Nixon was hardly the first Republican to notice that Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation had alienated whites both in the South and elsewhere — Johnson himself had forecast that Southern whites would desert the Democratic Party. But Nixon was the GOP’s leader and, in January 1969, the president of the United States. The White House, it seemed, would not do a damned thing for African Americans.

Nixon was a complex figure — virtually a screaming liberal compared to today’s tea party types. He was, above all, a pragmatic, cynical politician. Johnson and the Democrats had wooed the black vote; Nixon would do the same for the white vote. Even-steven, you might say, except the Democrats were expanding rights while the Republicans wanted to narrow them or keep them restrictive. Nixon was being politically clever but morally reprehensible. That was, you could say, his MO.

After Nixon, though, there was no turning back. In 1980, Ronald Reagan — ever the innocent — went to Mississippi and the Neshoba County Fair to tastelessly proclaim his belief in “states’ rights.” Nearby, three civil rights worked had been killed just 16 years earlier, protesting one of those bogus rights — the right to segregate the races. Reagan never acknowledged any appeal to racism. Racists took it as a wink anyway.

The damage Nixon did to his own party, not to mention the rights of African Americans and the cause of racial comity, has lasted long after the stench of Watergate dispersed. It not only persuaded blacks that the Republican Party was inhospitable to them, but it, in effect, welcomed racists to the GOP fold. Dixiecrats moved to the right. 

Excuse me for extrapolating, but segregationists are not merit-scholarship winners. Racism is dumb and so are racists. The Democratic Party showed racists the door. The GOP welcomed them and, of course, their fellow travelers — creationists, gun nuts, anti-abortion zealots, immigrant haters of all sorts and homophobes. Increasingly, the Republican Party has come to be defined by what it opposes and not what it proposes. Its abiding enemy is modernity.

 The worst thing Richard Nixon ever did was tell racists they had a point and welcome them into the party of Lincoln. The best thing he ever did for the Democratic Party is give its racists a place to go.

If you doubt the lasting poison sowed by Nixon, look no farther than Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) (pictured below) who is claiming that the Democrats are "waging war on white people."   Here is a glimpse from the Huffington Post:

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) doesn't think that the hardline stance Republicans have taken on immigration could hurt the party’s standing with Hispanic voters. Instead, he thinks Democrats are hurting their prospects with white voters.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during an interview Monday with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. "It's part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

As I have said before, I sometimes wonder when the GOP will start handing out KKK robes before their city and county committee meetings get underway.