A political strategy ideologically rooted in whiteness strategically devised by Republicans to secure the electoral victory of President Richard M. Nixon that rested on convincing the white ignorantsia in the South[1] —by appealing to their racism in the context of the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s—that their objective interests lay with the Republican Party. [2] This strategy, in various forms, continues to be wielded to this day (consider that the majority of white males in this country have consistently voted for the Republican Party since the days of Nixon). The White Southern Strategy was originally devised by one of Nixon’s election strategist Kevin Phillips (which is most ironic indeed considering that over the years Phillips has become one of the most trenchant critics of the Republican Party) that sought to electorally realign the Southern white working class voter toward the Republican Party and away from his/her traditional and unquestioning support of the Democratic Party—a tradition that was an outcome of the gratitude felt for the Democrats for helping to alleviate, under the leadership of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the misery of the Great Depression through Roosevelt’s “New Deal” set of anti-laissez-faire and pro-working-class economic and social programs. (Note, however, that until the arrival of the Kennedy/Johnson presidencies the Democratic Party, especially in the South, had also been a strongly racist Jim Crow-supporting party.) Phillips—who claimed that he originally got the idea for the strategy from his observations in the New York city borough of Bronx where he grew up of the rising whiteness-inspired resentment against racial minorities among working class whites with the passage of civil rights legislation and the launch of President Lyndon Johnson’s exemplary antipoverty “Great Society” programs (to which the racist white working class ignorantsia felt racial minorities had no right)—explained the strategy to James Boyd (1970) in an article for the New York Times Magazine, which tellingly had labeled him as a “self-taught [perverse] ethnologist,” thus:
All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even “Jake the Snake” [Senator Jacob K. Javits] only gets 20 percent. 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. (p. 106—bracketed interpolation in the original)
The strategy was not a short-term device targeted only at securing Nixon’s victory but a long-term device, aimed at permanently effecting the realignment and it depended on exploiting the ideology of whiteness—by playing on the racist fears of the white working class, both in the South and in the North, in the wake of racial desegregation brought about by the civil rights movement—as well as jingoism, machismo-inspiring militarism, and anticommunist hysteria of the cold war. And even though, the objective interests of the white working class dictated that they remain aligned to the Democratic Party given that the Republican Party had slowly evolved toward an unrepentant and cult-like champion of the interests of capital (relative to the Democratic Party) the Nixonites were shrewd enough to realize that race (in combination with a melange of other ultrareactionary proclivities that have, through the agency over the decades of subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle relentless corporate media campaigns masterminded by right wing think tanks funded by U.S. capital, become ingrained in the psyche of the white ignorantsia in the United States, such as jingoism, militarism, “states’ rights,” right wing Biblicalism, anti-gun-control sentiments, patriarchal beliefs, homophobia, and the like) could be parlayed to subjectify the objective interests of the white working class. Not surprisingly, since the election of Nixon, to date the majority of the white working class males have never voted for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. At the same time, despite voting consistently for the Republicans the poverty rate among working class white Southerners has remained the highest in United States. However, even at the national level, the fact that a party that has so unashamedly groomed itself over the years to be the loyal tribune of U.S. capital continues to win the presidency time after time by exploiting the racist and other phobias of the white ignorantsia has meant a concerted attack on democracy—both procedural and authentic—to the detriment of the objective interests of all the citizenry (which range from poverty-rate wages and the absence of universal health care to a broken and underfunded public educational system and overflowing prisons; from a highly-skewed tax structure that steals from the poor to give to the rich to a bloated and immensely wasteful military-industrial complex; from a pampered pharmaceutical industry that has little regard for the welfare of consumers to a health-compromising-additives-polluted agro-food industry; from a Congress that has been virtually bought by the lobbyists of U.S. capital to a presidency that has no compunction in expending seemingly limitless quantities of life and treasure in pursuit of protecting the interests of U.S. capital abroad; from the egregious violations in favor of the interests of capital of the intent of the U.S. constitution to a relentless assault on the civil rights of both the white working class and the racially marginalized; from tax-payer funded bailouts of U.S. capital to turning a blind-eye to the relentless assault on the environment wrought by the activities of capital; and so on).
Four additional points need emphasis: first, that although credit has been usually given to the Nixonites for developing the Southern strategy, it already had a progenitor in the shape of the politics of the Alabama governor George C. Wallace who had established his fame as a stalwart racist with the line in his 1962 inaugural speech “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In fact, one can argue that the germ of the strategy is to be found in the slave era where the slave-owning plantocracy, by means of the manipulation of the ideology of whiteness, convinced the majority of white Southerners, the poor, that supporting the slave order was in their objective interest—whereas in reality the reverse was true. Following the abolition of slavery, this strategy was again used to bind the South and the North once more; requiring in the process, the obscenely hasty termination of Reconstruction (symbolically typified by, among other things, the adoption by Northern whites of no less a scoundrel than the Confederate General Robert E. Lee as a native son[3]). Second, the concept of “states’ rights,” while of long pedigree dating back to the Civil War era (where the issue was the abolition of slavery) is essentially a white Southern strategy concept where under the ruse of protecting the states from undue federal interference the effort is to permit the Southern states to circumvent civil rights legislation—credit for this innovation perhaps goes to Wallace. Third, although at the core of the Southern strategy is the subjectification of the objective interests of the white working class by objectifying their subjective interests, one must not overlook the fact that it is also a strategy aimed at erasing from the national agenda the very notion of racial justice despite the centuries-long history of racial injustice targeted at blacks. In other words, the Southern strategy is not simply a matter of rallying agency, it is also a question of exploiting and reinforcing dialectically a particular historically-rooted structural attribute of United States: institutionalized racism. Fourth, the Southern strategy approach has not been restricted only to the South, it has found relevance, not surprisingly given the history of racism in United States, in the North as well (the target being of course Northern working class whites)—as Cowden (2001: 279) puts it: “the United States has become Southern.”[4]
[1]. Those familiar with the literature on this subject will quickly note that the prefix “white” is usually absent—reminding us that most EuroAmericans view the term “Southerner” to refer to white Southerners, ignoring the fact, with typical hubris, that millions of other people have also been part of the South from the very beginning of the founding of United States as a European settler nation. (So, for example, southern African Americans in the South are as much Southerners as southern whites!)
[2]. In its various guises, the literature on the White Southern strategy is considerable, however, in addition to Boyd (1970) and Cowden (2001) this basket of sources should more than suffice for an introduction to this one of the most cynical and nefarious of Machiavellian political strategies ever devised to undermine democracy in the United States in modern times—to the detriment, in the long run, of all: Carter (1995 and 1996), Cowden (2001), Edsall and Edsall (1992), Knuckey (2006), Mendelberg (2001), Murphy and Gulliver (1971), Perlstein (2008), and Phillips (1969).
[3]. For an illuminating article on the historical significance of Robert E. Lee to EuroAmericans (North and South), to this day, see the one by James C. Cobb in Humanities (magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities) in the July/August 2011 issue (vol. 32, no. 4) also available on the internet, as of this writing, here: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2011-07/RobertELee.html
[4]. Most recently, the strategy even reared its ugly head in the nomination process of the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate when Hillary Clinton, supported by her spouse former president Bill Clinton—both supposedly dyed-in-the-wool liberals—used it against her opponent African American Barack Obama, thus clearly testifying to the veracity of the adage that scratch a white liberal deep enough and more often than not you will uncover a racist. For an account of the significance of race and class (and gender) in the Democratic primary elections, see, for example the Newsweek cover stories titled “Only in America” [May 5, 2008, pp. 28–39] and “A Memo to Senator Obama” [June 2, 2008, pp. 22–30]. Interestingly, the June 2 issue of the news magazine also carries an article titled “A Secret Side to the Secret Service” (pp. 32–33) in which the presence of a racist culture—against the backdrop of the Barack candidacy no less—in the U.S. secret service (whose job includes protecting the U.S. president) evidenced, for example by the interchange of racist e-mails and an incident where a noose was hung at one of the training sites. The kicker in the story is this paragraph: “[t]he officer responsible, who hasn’t been named by the agency, insisted he didn’t mean any offense, and his superiors seem to believe him. ‘At this time, there is no clear indication that he had intended a racial message.’” Given the potent and inflammatory symbolism in U.S. political culture that a hanging rope with a noose has historically come to acquire as a consequence of the horrendous terrorist practice of lynching in which more often than not blacks were the target of the depraved vigilante white mob violence this is a typical lie-in-your-face denial so characteristic of the ideology of whiteness.