Counter-Currents
A Legacy of Betrayal at the Heart of the GOP’s White Vote Strategy
Jason Kessler
President Nixon with several top strategists including Kevin Phillips.
1,439 words
Implementation of the “Southern Strategy” by Republicans to win over disaffected white voters (particularly in the South) is the most underappreciated historical event in American history. This was when the parties “switched”, defining our current political status quo. Essentially, the Southern Strategy emerged when Republican strategists realized that focusing on the resistance of white voters to desegregation and racial entitlements for non-whites could secure them the South and thus a route to electoral victory in presidential contests.
The full significance of this event is somewhat obscured in recent discourse by reference to the markedly similar “Sailer Strategy”, so-called because columnist Steve Sailer had suggested Republicans could win by focusing on issues that maximized white turnout. However the concepts are nearly identical. The primary differences are that white working class voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Pennsylvania put states outside the South in play for Trump in 2016. The possibilities of white identity politics thus present broad opportunities for electoral success even outside the South. Additionally, mass immigration has replaced desegregation and “civil rights” as the issue of the day.
The Southern Strategy was popularized by future Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, who laid out the framework in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. But its first practical application was in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign focusing on opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Although the South had historic loyalty to the Democratic Party for resisting Reconstruction, the discontent felt regarding President Truman’s betrayals on desegregation and so-called “civil rights” entitlements for blacks led to a conducive climate for Southern revolt.
The strategy ultimately succeeded in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. However, in a pattern that would become infuriatingly familiar to white Republican voters, Nixon’s Southern Strategy rhetoric yielded little in the way of policy achievements for white voters. Nixon’s policies included the enforcement of school desegregation, the expansion of the Voting Rights Act, the initiation of affirmative action through the Philadelphia Plan, and support for minority businesses and black colleges.[1]
It’s largely taken for granted that white Southerners are prototypical “conservatives” as we understand it today: anti-big government, low taxes and the party of the rich and their corporations. Yet, before the Southern Strategy Southerners historically voted very differently. In 1932 they helped put Democrat and arch-big government progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House. The South also went for left-wing Democrat and Georgia peanut farmer Jimmy Carter in 1976, demonstrating that the political switch didn’t happen overnight but was a decades-long process.
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Over time, more explicit appeals to white voters were “coded” to invoke the passions and priorities of the white electorate without directly implicating race. Republicans, coming as they did from elite backgrounds and wanting to fit into “polite” DC society, were deeply embarrassed by the grievances of the blue collar and middle-class whites. By the time of Ronald Reagan’s successful election bid it was no longer necessary to directly talk about race. Reagan strategist Lee Atwater infamously described it in incendiary fashion thusly:
“Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”[2]
Atwater’s crass diminution of white racial grievance to saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger” is typically recalled by the political class as an indictment of the “racist” moral failings of the Southern Strategy. However, it speaks much more to the contempt that GOP operatives felt for the priorities of their own voters and provides clear insight into why pro-white policies aren’t implemented with the same aggressiveness as, say, tax cuts for the rich.
There is fierce debate over whether Reagan in fact employed a Southern Strategy in 1980, yet, given the coded terminology conceded by Atwater, it is generally felt that Reagan’s criticism of welfare queens and call for limited government were understood by racially conscious white voters as relief from the burgeoning welfare state siphoning tax dollars from hard-working white Americans to opportunistic blacks exploiting lavish government entitlements. Yet, once again, the white voters were largely betrayed. In 1986 Reagan signed a sweeping amnesty bill for illegal immigrants paving the demise of the white majority that elected him. [3]
Future Donald Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort served as the Southern coordinator for the 1980 Reagan campaign, providing a clear through line between the successful Republican campaigns 4 decades apart. Trump’s 2016 campaign marshaled the core of the Southern Strategy’s appeal to White grievance and expanded it into the Rust Belt in 2016 by making mass immigration and his promise to “Build the Wall” a central aspect of his campaign. White voters responded in near monolithic fashion, in what black commentator Van Jones famously termed the “white-lash.”[4]
It’s critically important to note that in contrast to his 2016 campaign, Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns are a repudiation of central elements of the Southern Strategy and therefore the preeminence of white Southern voters. Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips described this element of the Southern Strategy: “Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the negro vote and they don’t need any more than that…”
Donald Trump with Dwayne Michael Carter Jr., convicted felon and rapper (aka Lil’ Wayne)
However, as we have all noted, the Trump 2020 and 2024 campaigns are obsessed with the black vote and driving it over this vaunted threshold. Despite hype promising Trump might garner “record” and “historic” black votes, his actual 2020 share of the black vote was only 8%.[5] This black support comes at the expense of the white vote. Trump’s share of the suburban white vote, for instance, dropped 12 percentage points from 2016 to 2020. Yet, no one seems to have learned their lesson since the Trump 2024 campaign is once again touting the phantom black Trump vote at the expense of his core white constituency.[6]
In contrast to those who say that white voters need Trump to win in 2024, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If Trump wins, it will be seen as a permanent repudiation of the Southern Strategy and the preeminence of the white vote by Republicans. If he loses, it will be seen that way by Democrats.
It’s hard to find neutral, or even right-leaning, accounts on the Southern Strategy despite it being, along with World War 2, the central paradigm-defining event of the modern political landscape. A 2019 book, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics is a representative example. The book is co-authored by Angie Maxwell[7], a white woman specializing in “Southern Studies” who seems to hate being white and being Southern. She’s an MSNBC contributor who claims to be an expert in extremely loaded and offensive topics like “Southern inferiority” and “whiteness”.[8] Imagine if an African American studies professor deconstructed “blackness” and promoted concepts of “African inferiority.” They would be drummed out of the department. Her Twitter timeline is a nonstop stream of nauseating MSNBC wine aunt blather.
Perhaps, ultimately the Democrats had their final revenge for the success of the Southern Strategy, which helped ensure decades of GOP electoral victories. The Democrats, scorned at the loss of their once loyal white Southerners, looked to its own “Southern Strategy,” a “Far Southern Strategy.” By weakening the safeguards at the United States Southern border, and allowing the invasion of millions of Hispanic migrants, they washed the country in a flood of replacement level non-white immigration. Trump’s retreat from the Southern Strategy in 2020 and 2024 towards the black vote is an acknowledgement that, in his campaign’s view, the end of White Southern electoral dominance is nigh.
Perhaps, after decades of Republican strategies exploiting the white vote, without rewarding, or even acknowledging it, it is time that white Americans explore political strategies that leave the GOP and their rigged so-called “democracy” in the dustbin of history.
Notes
[1] Kotlowski, Dean “Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy”
[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy
[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/07/04/128303672/a-reagan-legacy-amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants
[4] https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/van-jones-trump-2016-presidential-election-231048
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/
[6] https://apnews.com/article/trump-black-hispanic-americans-voters-of-color-59acadcda6cf9cb1082d4bdd9d4c4a81
[7] https://x.com/AngieMaxwell1
[8] https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/596255/pdf
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17 comments
“Perhaps, after decades of Republican strategies exploiting the white vote, without rewarding, or even acknowledging it, it is time that white Americans explore political strategies that leave the GOP and their rigged so-called “democracy” in the dustbin of history.”
Good thinking.
“Atwater’s crass diminution of white racial grievance to saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger” is typically recalled by the political class as an indictment of the “racist” moral failings of the Southern Strategy. However, it speaks much more to the contempt that GOP operatives felt for the priorities of their own voters and provides clear insight into why pro-white policies aren’t implemented with the same aggressiveness as, say, tax cuts for the rich.”
Even more than contempt we can see in Lee Atwater’s strategy talk a total absence of any impulse toward policy follow through. Nothing that he said even hinted at doing anything good for White people.
This absence of a desire for follow through is like President Trump’s lack of follow through on freedom of speech on the Internet. Trump was well aware that his supporters were being silenced on the Internet and that they wanted him to address this big, urgent grievance. Tucker Carlsen was calling the issue to Trump’s attention and asking him to his face if he was going to act. In 2019, not before time, Trump did act. He hosted a very big, very important, White House Social Media Summit — which never produced a single policy recommendation let alone any action, any change.
Knowing that Trump’s supporters had been betrayed by their champion, antiwhites went ahead confidently with wiping out pro-White voices online.
This is like the policy that the GOP has had on Whites. They treat Whites as suckers who should never be given anything.
The catch is that ditching democracy only works if we actually invest real effort into other strategies. Otherwise its just giving up.
And we need more normies to decide the voting system is like a casino where the house always wins.
You Misspelt Synagogue.
I remember when Atwater’s utterance earned him a spot on Instauration’s “Majority Renegade of the Year” hall of shame.
You lost the plot completely by calling Jimmy Carter “leftwing.”
He was an integrationist and affirmative action supporter with a large black fan base. Sure, he was for deregulation, so maybe centrist on economic issues. Who really cares about that though? This is a race realist website.
My father did not think too highly of Jimmy Carter as a politician and representative of Georgia. He was against Carter’s stances on segregation, affirmative action, civil rights movement, etc. during his political life as: Georgia State Senator; Georgia Governor; and POTUS. My dad never voted for him once and thought his political acts a shameful betrayal of the South.
Now, years later, Atlanta, Georgia is a beacon for an ever-growing black migration.
-Jason, thanks for this article, it brought back a lot of memories. I’ve been remiss in ordering your book. I rectified that tonight!
Thanks! Hope you enjoy it.
Carter was an evil POS who sold our Rhodesian brothers into Third World slavery in order to salve (at innocent people’s expense – not his own!) his inappropriately guilty Christer liberal conscience over falsely alleged “racial injustice”. A stereotypical white libtard. A despicable man. Reagan may have been a usual GOP disappointment, but when he trounced Carter, there was pure joy in my heart.
Well, it’s true. I was there, and I remember. He was a nice guy, and never got mixed up in any corruption, but unfortunately he also was an archetypal bleeding-heart. His ineptitude and wimpiness caused a big setback for American prestige.
Mr. Albrecht: you are right on most points but you have been misled about Jimmy Carter’s supposed honesty. He also was corrupt. As well as a very petty, vindictive and untruthful person. The All-Sweetness-and-Light image of Jimmy Carter is a smokescreen.
I never heard of Carter getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Just curious, what all did he do? As for dishonesty, was it worse than the usual campaign promises that never went anywhere?
People want Nationalism
People want Socialism
Figure it out
Then again, Oligarchs aren’t “People”
Not they do not, at least not in White America. Here we (ie, non-self-hating whites generally, not white nationalists specifically, who want a lot more) want moderate racial nationalism (reductions in or halting of mass nonwhite immigration; elimination of affirmative action and race quotas; opposition to DEI crap; law & order policies for dealing with mostly black street criminals; proper patriotic – ie, truthful – school teaching about America’s glorious past; preservation of the Anglo-Occidental ethnoculture as the core American identity) plus … FREEDOM, understood as limited, Constitutional government and a prosperity-creating free market economy. Relatively few whites here are socialists (the big exception, if you call them “white”, are Jews – though socialist support is even somewhat waning among them, and becoming increasingly a nonwhite sentiment).
I have known and do know many white nationalists. I have also known a few self-identified socialists (and some “progressives” obviously mostly socialist in their outlooks; Kamala Harris, eg, is basically a socialist). None of the prowhites I know or have known are or were socialists. Every socialist I’ve known in my 63 years, OTOH, has also been a race-liberal if not outright wokester (self-hating douchebag traitor).
Scratch a socialist, you’ll find a wokester; scratch a wokester, and, unless a wealthy celebrity hypocrite, you’ll find a socialist.
Freedom, Meritocracy, Pride, Order, Progress, Justice.. They mean entirely different things to different people. That my Opponent picks a gun don’t mean I’ll pick a knife.
The purpose of the GOP and alternative cuckservative media figures is to maintain the status quo of globalism and neutralize any legit opposition. The GOP is party of corporatists, Milton Friedman type libertarians, and Zionist evangelical morons who never really cared about saving the country at all. Trump is a Northeastern Yankee Liberal Corpatist who appealing to conservative white base and use our talking points in order to benefit his own political career.
I think the Southern Strategy is basically a Libtard myth.
It’s a giant “cope” for Democrats to explain away that the Democrat Party torpedoed itself with their fallen Gods John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson who gave us the twin albatrosses of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War.
Briefly, Kennedy was a charismatic President with little legislative talent according to Joe Kennedy mentee and House Speaker Tip O’Neill. When Roman Rite Jack went into the South with his yawkish accent and Freedom Riders to lecture them on Negroes, he was not well received and he got little of his program through Congress.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was a skilled New Deal bread-and-beefsteaks kind of Texas pol, and with the canonization of his martyred predesessor to draw strength from, he had no problem passing the Kennedy legislative package plus his own vision of the Great Society.
Nixon said that LBJ was one of the shrewdest politicians that he had ever known. The Texan, LBJ knew how to talk the talk of the Southern Democrats.
The South had been Democrat since President Jefferson, who favored agricultural interests and the plantation aristocracy. President Jackson brought some more populism into it, but Jacksonian Democracy remained White.
Plutocratic Democrats FDR and his Jewish Treasury Secretary, the extreme agricultural romantic, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. considered themselves unironic Jeffersonian Democrats. They adored Negroes but they were not going to spoil the delicate electoral alliance between Northern Democrats and the Solid South tested by the Civil War.
Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) came under President Eisenhower’s watch after eight New Deal justices, some of the most odious to have ever served, plus four more appointed by President Truman.
Then JFK and LBJ torpedoed the Solid South with the double punch of Civil Rights and Vietnam ─ but like true-believers, the Democrats can’t admit that their greatest triumph was in error.
No, the disaster was because Kennedy was assassinated “by the military-industrial complex” and then anti-Communist Nixon is due sole credit for starting the war by crossing the fifty-yard line into Cambodia (in an awkward bid trying to win the war). Then Watergate.
Let us all pray for Saint Jack.
In 1964, Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. Libertarian Goldwater was hardly racist but he proclaimed States Rights, so he took his home state of Arizona plus 47 Electoral Votes from the deep South. This was no “Southern Strategy.” It just was.
The Democrats had lost the Solid South by their own devices.
In the Election of 1968, Johnson was not running for re-election due to having bungled the SE Asian “Police Action,” but he had not fallen on the sword and was still very pro-War. The last thing the establishment Democrats were going to do was countersignal their Vietnam crusade. That and the Draft and the burgeoning counter-culture and riots at the DNC in Chicago and elsewhere convinced most Americans that the Democratic Party could not govern.
Nixon won in a landslide in 1968, but there was no Southern Strategy. Nixon talked to the “Silent Majority,” but this was less a racist dogwhistle than against riots and Hippies and Commie peace creeps.
Segregationist Democrat Alabama Gov. George Wallace, running on a third-party ticket along with Gen. Curtis LeMay, took 46 Electoral Votes, winning all the states that Goldwater had in 1964 except swapping Arizona and South Carolina for Arkansas, and gaining 1 faithless Electoral Vote from North Carolina.
According to Jean Westwood, the 1972 DNC Chair, Gov. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere with his grin and his peanuts as a proverbial Dark Horse. Ted Kennedy had been discredited by the Chappaquiddick scandal ─ but the truth is that no Democrat was electable to the Presidency after 1964 who was not a bonhomme Southern White boy.
Mr. Peanut and the Arkansas Elvis were the only two Democrats who made it to the White House until Barrack Hussein Obama from Chicago in 2008. The fact that Obama’s 2008 GOP opponent, Sen. John McCain was a war-hawk after two-terms of Junior Bush’s phony WMDs and Forever Wars was very significant.
President Gerald Ford did not employ anything close to a Southern Strategy in 1976. Congressman/VP Jerry Ford was a likeable replacement to Nixon, but not very charismatic compared to Carter or Reagan (who lost the 1976 GOP nomination to the incumbent President Ford).
I was disappointed but not surprised that Ford lost to Carter in 1976. Ford TV ads showed how good he was on board a Navy ship during WWII with an anti-aircraft gun shooting down Jap Kamakazis.
Gov. Carter’s ads employed a folksy jingle ─ “We need Jimmy Carter, a leader for a change.” They were not unlike Reagan’s later “It’s Morning in America” TV ads.
President Carter handily lost the election of 1980 on his own merits, as did Gov. Dukakis in 1988. I would question how brilliant the electioneers like “Booger Man” Lee Atwater or Arthur Finkelstein really are. Lot’s of over-analysis and sour grapes.
To his credit, George H.W. Bush understood that “playing the race card” by calling out Anti-Death Penalty Mikey Dukaka on the Willie Horton scandal was a slam-dunk and a stunning set of TV ads.
George H.W. was a WW2 war-hero, while the Democrats had a soft-on-crime space cadet Dukakis awkwardly riding in a tank ─ to the guffaws of the observing press corps.
George the First then went on to lose in 1992 by his own faux pas. Democrat Bill Clinton, like Jimmy Carter before him, presented himself as something new, which was a joke.
🙂
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