For the life of me I cannot understand why so many people just don't get what's going on economically in this country. We are on our way down folks and it is going to get worse. The gap between the very well off and the poor continues to grow and our middle class continues to shrink. I always get a laugh out of so-called conservatives who shout "class warfare!" when these statistics are pointed out to them. Class warfare has been the republican strategy since Richard Nixon was president. His so-called "Southern Strategy" sought to bring southern state democrats into the fold of the republican party by appealing to their fears of integration, the civil-rights movement and the general upheaval of the country in those Vietnam war years. Here is how Kevin Phillips, Nixon's strategist put it in 1970:
Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it,[1] but merely popularized it.[2] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:
- From now on, the 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... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[3]
While Phillips sought to polarize ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and offices, for instance.
By the time Reagan was elected in 1980 the pandering of the republican party became more narrowly focused on the far right wing religious activists of the south and economic code words. As Lee Atwater said in a 1981 interview:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: 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, nigger."[6][7]
The republican movement has used the poor and racial minorities as scapegoats for selling out to prosperous whites for more than 30 years. Add to that Reagan's personal war on union's and you can see how the rising middle class has stopped rising. There seems to be no effective advocate for the average working man or women. In the 1970's the unions and the democrats were advocates, and yes they went to far. I agree that in the extreme union's are corrupt and opportunistic, but they have also increased worker safety, health benefits and fairness in the workplace all over this country. That is, they helped improve social justice, a concept any self respecting republican spits on today. But you can see from the quotes of Kevin Phillips (Nixon's man) and Lee Atwater (Reagan and George H.W. Bush's man) that the tax cutting the republicans do for the limosine and country club crowd, that put us in our current and continuing economic decline, has long roots in the republican party. The Tea Bagger's are just the latest iteration of the class warfare started by Reagan.
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