Don’t sound taps for the GOP
Rather than a temporary aberration in the long and largely honorable history of a major American political party, the rise of Donald Trump is the culmination and fulfillment of a trend in Republican politics that has persisted for more than 50 years now.
When Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson for president in 1964 he attempted to capture the southern vote. Although he couldn’t openly oppose civil rights and retain his Republican base, he suggested that some Civil Rights legislation might be unconstitutional. This marked the beginning of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” and gained Goldwater the electoral votes of five Deep South states, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. The Republicans soon secured the votes of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy plus southern-leaning Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia, creating a new “Solid (Republican) South.”
To many observers the meteoric rise of Donald Trump is attributable to the GoldwaterNixon Southern Strategy of the 1960s. Far from being an opportunistic interloper, Trump is the natural evolutionary product of Republican ideology born of the new conservatism. This is the latest manifestation of the GOP’s Southern Strategy used to gain the loyalties of former Dixiecrats with thinly-disguised appeals to latent racism.
Country club conservatives can disavow Trumpism until the cows come home, but it was their wooing of the old Democratic “Solid South” that created the movement that grew into the Trump Revolution. Republican strategists have been courting Dixie since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. And since then the GOP has taken the votes of the entire Old Confederacy in almost every election. Turning back the clock on Jim Crow is a lost cause, but there are new op- portunities to stir up resentments against Mexicans and Muslims, and Trump has taken full advantage.
Trump’s signature appeal is that he doesn’t shrink from overt racism or bigotry as have the other Republican primary candidates. He is blatantly telling his followers “Here I am, the real thing; prejudices and all!” Trump owes a large part of his success to racial politics, an integral part of the new conservatism that has taken over and reshaped the Republican Party, the former Party of Freedom.
Could the current turmoil signal the demise of the Republican Party as some have predicted? I recall watching a Sunday morning TV talk show in 1974. The panelists, all experts in politics and government, were mostly in agreement that the Watergate cover-up scandal might well spell the end of the Republican Party. Instead, in four short years Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter in a near landslide.
The Watergate debacle served as a catharsis to rid the Republican Party of some unneeded, unwanted baggage. A new “leaner and meaner” Republican Party emerged and occupied the White House for the next twelve years. It’s not yet time to sound the GOP’s death knell.
George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@bellsouth.net.