Once upon a time, I directed my political fire at Republicans. The hypocrisy, slavish devotion to their corporate masters, and wanton disinterest in little “d” democracy (see, e.g., “Garland, Merrick”) were both manifest and abhorrent. There are days, particularly when the latest budget deficit information is released, that I pick at those scabs, but like the parable about the scorpion who stings the frog who helps it cross a river, that is who they are. We should not expect them to change.
Lately, and perhaps this is the Twitter talking, my mind has changed. Republicans, to borrow from Dennis Green, are who we thought they were, but the real failing has been by “the media” writ large (and yes, I realize this is an oversimplified term to describe an industry that encompasses a wide swath of views, but for the purposes of this essay, I am speaking primarily of large-scale television/cable news and print media).
In 1969, a guy named Kevin Phillips published a book entitled The Emerging Republican Majority, which became short-handed, thanks to a May 1970 article about Phillips in the New York Times as Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy.” The idea was pretty simple – prey on the racial fears of white people, particularly in the South, but also in blue-collar pockets elsewhere, generated by the mass social upheaval of the 1960s. It was not hidden, it was not coded, it was very clearly intended to stoke white resentment. And it worked. It became one of the three legs of the stool Republicans have used ever since to run campaigns at the national level (the other two being lower taxes (Laffer Curve) and a bottomless well of money for the military).
Reagan took Nixon’s model and perfected it. Where Nixon was gruff and conspiratorial, Reagan was “sunny” and “optimistic” except when it came to race. There, he knew that coded language and symbolism were more effective than Nixon’s bald-faced appeals. So it was no coincidence that Reagan’s first speech after he became the Republican nominee for President in 1980 was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place where three civil rights workers were murdered by racists during the Freedom Summer of 1964. But Reagan did not visit Philadelphia to call for racial harmony, he went there to support “states’ rights,” a term understood by Southerners as a hall pass for undermining the progress made by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the dismantling of Jim Crow by the Supreme Court.
Reagan went on to win in 1980, but his victory was actually a lagging indicator for where the country was moving. Just thirteen years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court was already trimming its sails. In 1978, a thin majority upheld the use of race as a factor in college admissions (Bakke) and the Boston school system had nearly collapsed in the mid-1970s in the face of federally-mandated school busing. Reagan’s nurturing of racial grievance was spun by the media in a positive way – these were “Reagan Democrats” who had abandoned their party because it had become too liberal, not that Republicans had become too racist.
By 1988, after eight years of harping on “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” gaming the welfare system and a war on crack cocaine infiltrating black neighborhoods, this “othering” of African-Americans was so pervasive it was like the atmosphere – you did not even notice it. So when George H.W. Bush ran that infamous Willie Horton ad, you know the one featuring a grainy black and white mug shot of a black man who skipped out on a parole furlough and raped and murdered a white woman, it did not boomerang against Bush, but his Democratic opponent, Mike Dukakis, a dreaded “card-carrying” member of the ACLU who refused to say that someone who raped his wife should be given the death penalty.
By 2000, a conveniently timed purge of tens of thousands of voters by Jeb Bush helped his brother “win” that state by less than 600 votes. The same Supreme Court that had used the equal protection clause to guarantee the franchise now used it as a justification to stop a recount that might have handed Al Gore the presidency. Under W, the racial animus was still against people with dark skin, but instead of African-Americans, it was now Muslims and anyone with a funny name or a weird head garment.
Obama’s election unleashed a torrent of blatant racism, from Obama-as-a-bone-in-the-nose African witch doctor to birtherism, comparisons of Michelle Obama to an ape to images of the President with a noose around his neck, this was as subtle as a sledgehammer. After Obama was re-elected, Republicans feigned at soul searching. A so-called “autopsy” report stated the obvious – the Republican Party was radioactive among non-white Americans, whose demographic diversity and strength would only grow stronger in the future. Republicans, this report argued, needed to be more inclusive, to, essentially, jettison the strategy Nixon had employed all the way back in 1968.
So what happened? Trump did something counter-intuitive. While it was true that non-whites would continue making up more of the electorate, instead of appealing to them, Trump goosed white supporters with his anti-immigrant rhetoric. He “found” low turnout white voters in rural parts of the country and increased his share of the slowly dwindling white vote. Put differently, instead of adopting the inclusive post-2012 message, he doubled down on a version of the southern strategy.
In some ways, this was the perfect storm. Trump was aided by a 2013 Supreme Court decision (Shelby County) that did away with pre-clearance requirements when states wanted to change their voting laws, opening the floodgates for a variety of laws, from voter ID to restrictions on early voting, that were engineered to tamp down the Democratic vote. Trump was also aided by a variety of other factors (the Comey Letter, Russian interference, media antipathy toward Hillary, etc.) but the bald-faced appeals to race – Trump, after all, embraced birtherism at its height in 2010 and 2011 – was often ignored or minimized. These white voters, media members argued, were simply economically anxious, not racist.
Of course, things have only gotten worse. From Trump’s embrace of “very fine people” in Charlottesville to his “go back to your country” tweets, he is not saying the quiet racist thing out loud, he has a bullhorn and screaming it.
So why did I just spend 1,000 words telling you all this? It is not to criticize Republicans – again, they are who we thought they were – instead, it is to point out that this history has been readily apparent for decades. It was never hidden. It was sometimes wrapped in coded language, but often was done in bold-face type. Books were written about it (Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s The Matter With Kansas may be the most prescient) and political strategy memos discussed it (a recently-unearthed document from a guy who helped guide DOJ arguments for a citizenship question on the 2020 census openly talked about how it would hurt Democrats and benefit Republicans).
What has allowed all of this to happen is largely a media failure. Republicans have so thoroughly worked the refs that most reporters – even in 2019 – refuse to call out racism even when it is right in front of them. And those that do mysteriously omit Republican politicians from their critique, as if this is something unique to Trump and not a defining feature of the party for the past half century. This is a problem for a few reasons. First, it excuses, oh, to take one example, a guy like Steve Scalise, who has spoken in front of white supremacist groups, from this narrative. Second, it ignores the fact that the Republican party is overwhelmingly white, has almost no minority representation in Congress (its dearth of women is a whole other story), and continues to stoke racial, ethnic, and religious resentment as part of its electoral strategy. Third, it presumes that once Trump is gone, all of this vile language and conduct will magically go with him. It won’t. It was there the whole time, he simply exploited it. Finally, it minimizes the overt efforts to subvert democracy. Framing stories about voter ID laws or census counts in the binary “winners and losers” narrative that the media employs results in the belief that these are just political battles between the parties and not attempts by one party to undermine the core tenets of constitutional form of government.
The media has sacrificed its obligation to report the news objectively at the altar of the “one side says this, the other side says that” form of journalism. Republicans have been the party of overt (and covert) racists for the past 50 years. Burying your collective heads in the sand so you do not offend someone at a Georgetown cocktail party or hoping this all blows over once Trump leaves does not change this fact or the media’s collective failure to report this fact accurately.
