This election showed how the Republicans' racist 'Southern Strategy' is falling apart
Since Kamala Harris and Joe Biden gave their victory speeches in Wilmington, Delaware, Donald Trump has largely disappeared from public view, dispatching lawyers to file frivolous suits that will not impact the outcome of the election as he fumes about “massive fraud” and tweets without irony about an election that ended almost two weeks ago: “WE WILL WIN!”
Like parents of a child who has suffered a sudden and unexpected loss, Senate Republicans have suggested they are willing to give the president time to come to terms with reality, asserting with straight faces that he is “within his rights” to challenge election results that disappoint him. All the while, these same senators have been asking Democratic colleagues to convey their congratulations to the president-elect, their former colleague, who they assume will understand the awkward position they find themselves in.
But Trump is not a child, and we cannot pretend that he is the only one who is not willing to move on. Make America Great Again was always a thinly veiled promise that white supremacy could mount a resistance to movements that challenge systemic racism with the prospect of a genuine, multi-ethnic democracy. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results is not simply about his own psychological needs. It is a performance in keeping with the Southern Strategy that has animated the Republican party for half a century.
During Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, a manuscript of Kevin Phillips’ book The Emerging Republican Majority offered a playbook for how white voters could form a winning national coalition in the post-civil rights era. Phillips called America “the melting pot that never melted” and explained that “all you’ve got to do with American politics is work out who hates whom and you’ve got it.” Phillips advised Nixon that the Republican party could win without African American votes by painting the Democrats as the “black party”. Phillips predicted “a new American revolution coming out of the south and west” because of fears and objections raised by the civil rights movement’s victories. Nixon intended for this “Southern Strategy” to establish a new sun belt power base for the Republican party in the south and west.
Indeed, the Southern Strategy made the Republican party a political home for tens of millions of white people who could not move on after the civil rights movement. Strom Thurmond, who had run as a Dixiecrat can
didate for president and championed “massive resistance” to the Brown v Board of Ed decision, led the march of southern Democrats into a Republican party that was ready to use “positive polarization” to pit their base against a fusion coalition of Black, white and brown voters whom Republicans demonized as “socialists”, “coastal elites” and “godless progressives”. Though Republicans knew their base was reactionary white conservatives, they did not make explicit appeals to white supremacy. Instead, they insisted that their values were the true American values. Casting themselves as the champions of everyday Americans in the Heartland, they paved the way for Trump’s faux populism.
But the most explicit repudiation of an incumbent president since FDR’s victory in 1932 makes clear that the fusion coalition the Southern Strategy was designed to crush has, nevertheless, grown in strength. Despite his promise to champion American workers as a political outsider, Trump lost to Clinton among poor and low-income Americans in 2016 by eight points. Four years later, he lost to Biden among the same demographic by 11.5 points – a 40% gain, representing millions of people who have seen through the lie of the Southern Strategy. When you consider that Trump improved over 2016 among Americans who make more than $100,000 a year, it’s clear that this crack in Trump’s imagined “populist” base was the real key to Biden’s victory. Trump lost because his explicit appeals to fear and division increased turnout among poor Black and brown people and their white allies.
This is the real reason Trump and his enablers cannot accept the results of the 2020 election: to do so would reveal that the Southern Strategy has run its course. By investing in division, Republicans have clung to power for half a century, betting on having the larger half if they could split the nation in two. But increased turnout, especially among Black, brown, Native and low-income Americans of every race, not only flipped the rust belt but also broke through the sun belt in Arizona and Georgia. Despite the obstacles of a public health crisis and intentional voter suppression, a new majority engaged the democratic process in 2020 and rejected the Southern Strategy. Republicans are standing by a delusional president because they cannot yet imagine a future apart from the imagined past they promised to white America.
But on the ground, in rural communities from Appalachia to Alabama’s Black Belt, we have seen new fusion coalitions of Black, white and brown voters come together to refuse the politics of division and embrace a moral vision of shared government that works for everyone. We know that the basic need for living wages, healthcare, just immigration policies and a livable planet are not right or left issues, but moral issues that can unite people of different backgrounds and ideologies. As we watch Republicans deny reality, we remember the observation of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa: a dying mule always kicks the hardest. While we acknowledge its danger, we can’t let its braying overwhelm the united voice of a historic coalition that has stood together in this election for a new day.
The Rev Dr William Barber II is president of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. His latest book is We Are Called to be a Movement
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC, and is the author of Revolution Of Values