Читать книгу The Nixon Effect - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 10
ОглавлениеPart One: The Southern Strategy and the Silent Majority
Out there the juke boxes don’t play “New World Coming”; they play “Welfare Cadillac.” In the heartland, it’s all Agnew put to music.
—KEVIN PHILLIPS1
It is time for America’s silent majority to stand up for its rights.
—VICE PRESIDENT SPIRO AGNEW2
With one rhetorical stroke, Nixon identified a new populist category that redefined how political groups strive for influence.
—MATTHEW D. LASSITER, “WHO SPEAKS FOR THE SILENT MAJORITY?”3
The Nixon revolution in the Republican Party started out with an insight about weakening Democratic appeal within a key demographic: white men. As he prepared for another presidential run in 1968, Nixon began formulating a strategy that could peel off a large portion of whites—especially working-class whites and Southerners—from the Democrats. Before 1968, the idea that blue-collar workers might come out for the GOP was considered fanciful. But what Nixon and his team would then identify was a fault line, and a strategy to exploit it, that would redefine American politics. The evidence of their success, over forty years later, is clear in the continued difficulty today’s Democratic Party faces in attracting white male voters, especially those in the working class.
“Democrats are for a bunch of freeloaders in this world as far as I’m concerned,” said a sixty-three-year-old Avis bus driver, interviewed for a March 2014 New York Times feature. “Republicans make you work for your money, and try to let you keep it.” Another white working man who was interviewed criticized the Democrats’ obsession with social issues: “I don’t see why that’s at the top of our priority list,” he said. “But you say that out in the open, and people are all over your back.” And a Republican Party spokesman put it: “When you’re spending 60 percent of your time talking about birth control and Obamacare, not a lot of men are paying attention to you.”4
Where the Democrats have managed to win elections with poor results among white working-class men—President Obama won reelection with a stunningly low 38 percent of the overall white vote—Democrats like Frank Houston, a Democratic Party chairman in Michigan’s affluent Oakland county, worry that the losses among white men must be contained to some degree, lest the party rely too heavily on its “ascendant coalition” of women, gays, and minorities.
“There’s a whole cadre of us—of young, white men political leaders in Oakland County—who are saying, ‘We can’t just write off 30-year-old to 40-year-old guys, let alone anyone who’s older,’” Houston said.5 The writer of the Times feature, Jackie Calmes, reminded readers that Democrats often win the votes of fewer than four out of ten white men in elections, and that they haven’t won a majority of white men since it was done by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
And yet, this very cohort was once the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic coalition that won five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1952, and seven out of nine elections between 1932 and 1964. During that era, it would have sounded exotic to suggest that the Republican Party—a motley coalition of upper-crust business and financial types and Northeastern elites, along with a small-but-intense coalition of ideological conservatives—could break through with this demographic, let alone come to own it. Yet that is precisely what happened over the last half century.
And that brings us back to Richard Nixon. It was Nixon’s 1968 campaign that first shifted this well-worn pattern and his 1972 landslide victory that made the reversal permanent. Many factors, policies, and decisions played a role in this transformation. But two key approaches paved the way:
• The Southern Strategy: An approach that took shape among Nixon advisor Harry S. Dent Sr.—a veteran of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign—and the shrewd young political operative Kevin Phillips.
• The Silent Majority: A phrase Nixon first used to refer to a broad spectrum of American voters in a 1969 speech about the Vietnam War.
These approaches—one electoral, the other rhetorical—helped make possible not only Nixon’s electoral victories but also the wholesale transformation of the Republican Party, and, indeed, of the American political landscape. They made up a landscape that, with some alterations, remains in place today.
The Republican Party has deeply internalized the concept of the silent majority, and the party’s ideological commitments and communication style have been directly shaped by it. Inevitably, the identification of this majority involved a separating of the electorate into us-versus-them camps. But what made Nixonian polarization so remarkable was that the “us” comprised a huge majority. Perhaps that’s why Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, called this sorting of desirable and undesirable voters “positive polarization.”6 While the men spoke in polarizing terms, their words did not serve to narrow but to expand their political base—at least until Watergate intervened.
But the coining of the term “silent majority,” and its derivatives, was only the rhetorical portion of the Nixon polarization strategy. On the electoral side, he and his team also found a way to draw sharp lines while expanding their political support. They did so by looking to the beleaguered South. Nixon’s Southern strategy forged the most dramatic political realignment since the New Deal and changed the Republican Party forever. The presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are unimaginable without it, and later presidential candidates, like John McCain and Mitt Romney, would also rely on the South as their electoral bedrock.
The Southern Strategy
The Southern strategy’s genesis was as simple as arithmetic and as methodical as typical political calculation. Ever since Reconstruction, the South had been a “solid” bet for the Democratic Party, as white Southerners voted steadfastly against the party of Lincoln and the liberal Republican architects of Reconstruction, black suffrage, and civil rights. No region of the country was such a lock: in every presidential election from 1876 to 1964—a span of eighty-eight years—the South went Democratic. There is no parallel for this kind of long-running regional dominance by a major party. Even in elections where the Republican Party won the White House smashingly—in 1924, with Calvin Coolidge; in 1928, with Herbert Hoover; and in 1952 and 1956, with Dwight Eisenhower—it did so without the South.7
But by 1968, the Democrats had reached a crossroads with their disparate coalitions. They maintained the support of Southern “Dixiecrats,” but this support was threatened by their growing electoral reliance on the North, particularly on blacks, who had come north by the millions in the Great Migration starting around 1910—and then, from the 1940s on, in the Second Great Migration. In the early sixties, the civil rights movement changed the calculus. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, along with desegregation and growing national support for the civil rights movement, threatened the South with a political and social revolution rivaling anything since secession. Many Southern whites saw their way of life under attack, and more than a dozen Southern governors and senators boycotted the 1964 Democratic Convention. Most of the Alabama delegation refused to pledge support for the Lyndon Johnson/Hubert Humphrey ticket. Some were already talking about becoming Republicans.8
“We have lost the South for a generation,” President Johnson is said to have told an aide after signing the landmark 1964 civil rights legislation. If anything, LBJ was being overly optimistic: the South began drifting away from the Democratic party immediately. The Southern strategy’s dry run came later that year, with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Goldwater was far to the right of most American voters in 1964, and, though an honest and thoroughly decent human being, he was a crude politician. In one of the greatest presidential routs in history, Goldwater was trounced around the country, but not in the five core states of the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Goldwater won them all, in addition to his home state of Arizona. Johnson took everything else.9
By 1968, the Democratic Party’s turmoil was driving white Southerners en masse to the GOP. If the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts weren’t enough, there was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. The convention chaos, marked by infighting between the liberal mainstream of the party and its more militant left wing, convinced many working-class Americans—especially in the South—that the Democrats could no longer be trusted with national leadership.10 As longtime Democratic advisor Ted van Dyk put it in a 2008 Wall Street Journal article, “Democratic presidential candidates have not since 1968 been able to restore the party that was broken that year.”11 That remains true even today, recent Democratic wins notwithstanding.
Richard Nixon and his advisors thought they saw the outline of a new political alignment. Their goal was to capitalize politically on the alienation of Southern whites resulting from the civil rights movement and Washington liberalism generally—which seemed bent on forcing radical change on the South. Aware that many Southern whites would cast protest votes against Democratic candidates, Nixon and his advisors hoped to convert this demographic into a solid base of loyal Republican supporters. Their timing was good: demographic changes since World War II made the South highly amenable to such a strategy. By 1970, the South was less than 20 percent black.12 At the same time, white transplants relocated to the South—many of them Republicans already, lacking any generational loyalty to Democrats.13 Nixon and his team did not just pursue the Southern strategy among voters but also among political leaders, wooing prominent southern Democratic politicians into the Republican Party. These included former South Carolina senator Thomas A. Wofford,14 Texas attorney general Will Wilson,15 future Mississippi senator Trent Lott16—and most important, South Carolina senator and former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.17 Thurmond’s support would be crucial in the 1968 election. In addition, some formerly Democratic representatives became the first Republican congressmen from their states since Reconstruction.18 And other prominent Southern Democrats eventually became Republicans, such as Texas governor John Connally.
Unlike Goldwater, who came out explicitly against the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts, Nixon did not question these legislative achievements. Instead, he appealed to Southern whites’ concerns about the effects of broad-ranging liberal reforms as well as the federal government’s impositions on local authority. Nixon threaded the needle between accepting existing federal legislation—especially legislation narrowly tailored to protect basic rights—and opposing the newer efforts with more expansive goals, like forced busing and desegregation mandates. He spoke out against Washington’s attempts to direct state Republican parties that were more conservative on civil rights. “Washington cannot dictate,” Nixon said to state parties. He sometimes couched his positions as a defense of the two-party system: “I will go to any state in the country to campaign for a strong two-party system, whether or not I agree with local Republicans on every issue.”19
He carved out nuanced positions on civil rights court decisions. He spoke of Brown v. Board of Education as settled law, but he also said that the federal government, under a strict reading of the Constitution, had only limited ability to enforce it.
The Southern strategy is widely regarded today as racist, even by many Republicans. (Few Democrats seem as eager to condemn their own party’s exploiting of the Solid South for a century, at a time when the region was immeasurably more racist and more violent than it was by the time Republicans began winning there.) For many liberal critics, Nixon’s commercials from 1968 on crime, in particular, only strengthened the impression that the candidate was using race to stoke white fears—and win white votes.
“It is time for a proper look at the problem of order in the United States,” Nixon said in a voice-over for his most provocative ad. As quick-cut photos of urban crime scenes, bloody faces of protestors, police, and conflagrations splashed across the screen, Nixon intoned: “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change. But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.” As the frightening imagery continued, Nixon concluded: “So I pledge to you: we shall have order in the United States.”20 The use of the word “order,” not to mention the use of the phrase “civil right” in a different context than black rights, leaves room for interpretation about the ad’s intentions.
However, in my view, the Southern strategy was far more nuanced—politically and ethically—than its liberal critics have long maintained. Certainly Nixon and his men were, at minimum, politically unsentimental; at such a delicate moment in the nation’s social history, to forge ahead with the Southern strategy so unapologetically was, at the least, opportunistic. Nixon’s own reputation for private racism—his statements about blacks on Oval Office tapes, for example—and the hard-boiled attitudes of his men, like Patrick Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, didn’t alleviate that impression. Phillips was prone to saying things like: “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with local Democrats.”21 But from a purely arithmetical standpoint, Phillips was right.
On the left, the Southern strategy’s notorious reputation was enshrined by Lee Atwater, who said in an infamous 1981 interview:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”22
These are offensive and shameful formulations—but they shouldn’t obscure the fact that Nixon had no desire to run a campaign based on racism. Whatever his private views of blacks may have been, he could not afford to alienate more liberal Republicans in the rest of the country. Nixon’s own civil rights record in Congress had been strong. Martin Luther King Jr. had even called to thank him for his support of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Moreover, as noted in chapter 1, Nixon would go on to achieve substantial—even remarkable—progress on civil rights, from massive school desegregation to the promotion of black entrepreneurship.
Perhaps the most vivid testimony to Nixon’s true intentions comes from White House Communications Director Pat Buchanan, who worked closely with Nixon on his 1968 presidential campaign and was at the center of the historic strategy developed that year:
Among the malevolent myths about Nixon is that he set out to build the Republican Party in Dixie on a foundation of racism. That is not the man I knew and it is the antithesis of what I saw. While Nixon approved of my writings on law and order, he expressed an emotional empathy with black Americans. It was in his DNA. His Quaker mother’s family had been active in the Underground Railroad in Indiana. On coming to Congress he agreed to Adam Clayton Powell’s request to be part of a five-man team that would take the floor to answer the racist rants of Mississippi’s John Rankin. His record as vice president, working behind the scenes for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, for which Dr. King sent him a personal letter of gratitude, marked him as a progressive. I recall him storming out of his office in a rage one morning over a story he had read about an Alabama town that had refused to bury a black soldier killed in Vietnam in its whites-only cemetery. . . . Nixon’s visceral recoil at what he thought was a moral outrage was genuine and unforgettable.23
Indeed, far from a crudely racist appeal, Nixon’s Southern strategy should be seen as an instrument of political realism—one, that, like all pragmatic efforts, has more- and less-salutary elements. Nixon and his men were going where the votes were, as politicians have always done, and saying what they say to secure those votes. Indeed, as Joan Hoff and others have argued—I think persuasively—Nixon deserves less credit for formulating a Southern strategy than for recognizing one—that is, he saw that a political realignment was already in force, and he capitalized on it.
Buchanan continued:
What the Left never understood, or would never accept, is that Nixon brought the South into the Republican column not because he shared their views on segregation or civil rights. He did not. What we shared was the South’s contempt for a liberal press and hypocritical Democratic Party that had coexisted happily with Dixiecrats for a century but got religion when conservative Republicans began to steal the South away from them. The Goldwater-Nixon party in which I enlisted was not a segregationist party but a conservative party. Virtually every segregationist in the eleven states of the old Confederacy and every Klansman from 1865 to 1965, belonged to the party of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.24
Hoff pointed out how, before October 1960—when Jack Kennedy, in her view and Nixon’s own view, “grandstanded” by telephoning the jailed Martin Luther King Jr.—both King and Jackie Robinson “had openly praised Nixon above all other presidential candidates in 1960 for caring about the race issue.”25 Indeed, the Southern strategy is another instance of Nixon running to the right but also governing from the center. Nixon’s conservative critics would excoriate him for doing exactly that throughout his presidency.
The journalist David Frost, who got to know Nixon well, viewed it that way:
Nixon was among the most sophisticated presidents ever to seek higher office in the USA and clearly he discerned the elements of what Kevin Phillips called “the Emerging Republican Majority.” Nixon did what he could to capture the process and speed it along. Clearly he succeeded. But his contribution to what I believe was an inevitable process consisted of little more than saying some nice things about the South, holding hands with Southern districts ordered to desegregate, and seeking to appoint Southern judges to the US Supreme Court. Yes, Nixon also went after the Northern white ethnic voter and yes, in 1972 and 1984 they voted Republican in mammoth numbers. But again, I think the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the catalytic ingredient in realigning constituencies from four into two essential voting blocs. . . . Nixon for the most part simply rode the crest of events.26
Put another way: Few presidents have run more provocative, polarizing campaigns, yet few presidents have achieved more centrist, mainstream policy goals. It is a paradox worthy of Nixon himself.
However one understands it, there is no denying the impact of the Southern strategy on Nixon’s electoral fortunes. Despite the candidacy of the Southern populist and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace—whose appeal to whites was overt and enormously polarizing—the Southern strategy was astonishingly successful for Nixon in both 1968 and 1972. While Wallace took the Deep South (and many working-class votes in the North27), Nixon captured Virginia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Florida.28 In 1972, Nixon won the entire South, along with the rest of the country except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.29 The Democrats had lost their Solid South—and with it, their lock on the White House, which they had comfortably held for twenty-eight of thirty-six years before 1968.
Moreover, the Southern strategy would survive Nixon and become, with modifications, the guiding electoral model for the Republican Party up to the present day.
The Southern Strategy since 1968
It would be difficult to think of a political strategy that has had a longer “tail” in American politics than the Southern strategy. The strategy first identified, and then shaped, the most enduring political realignment since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition. Consider how it has played out in elections since 1968.
Democrats have won the Deep South in a presidential election only once since Nixon—in 1976, when Watergate and Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon helped propel Jimmy Carter into the White House. Democrats—notably Bill Clinton—have managed to pick off some Deep Southern states, but they have never won the region outright. In all the election cycles since 2000, they have been shut out entirely in the Deep South.
The move to the South that Goldwater started and Nixon completed was locked in by Ronald Reagan—a fitting inheritor of the strategy since he had been a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and given a powerful televised speech that helped launch his own political career. When Reagan came within a whisker of taking the 1976 GOP nomination from President Gerald Ford, he built his base of support with primary victories in Southern states, starting in North Carolina. And he famously, or infamously, launched his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the same town where three civil rights workers had been killed in 1964. Reagan spoke that day mostly about the economy, but he also expressed his support for “states’ rights.” Liberals ever since have branded the episode as an explicit appeal to Southern racism. But Reagan and his campaign team were trying to win Mississippi, which the GOP had lost in 1976, while also hoping to build stronger black support. Reagan’s appearance there, like Nixon’s Southern strategy itself, is more complex than usually portrayed.
If anything, the contours of the Southern strategy have only hardened in the years since Reagan, and they have affected far more than electoral math. They shape the communications and dialogue of presidential campaigns. For Democrats, Republican appeals to white Southerners are often dismissed as “dog whistles”—that is, as coded language or imagery that speaks to the concerns of Southern whites, concerns which include, however subtly, racist connotations. Republicans, on the other hand, see these appeals as both legitimate—they point out that Southern whites are a voting bloc like any other and deserve consideration—and more broad minded than Democrats allege.
A case in point for the negative interpretations is the 1988 George H. W. Bush campaign ad concerning the convicted murdered and rapist Willie Horton. At that time Bush was engaged in a difficult presidential campaign against the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. At one point in the summer, Bush trailed Dukakis in polls by seventeen points, but by early fall he had pulled even and then begun pulling ahead. The race still looked competitive in early October, when an independent Republican group ran the most provocative campaign ad since Nixon’s “We will have order in America” spot in 1968. The ad showed the mug shot of a frightening-looking man who happened to be black—Willie Horton, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence, who had nonetheless been granted a weekend furlough from prison in Dukakis’s Massachusetts. He didn’t return from furlough; instead, he raped a woman and stabbed her fiancée, whom he bound throughout the ordeal, before finally being recaptured.
“Weekend furloughs for convicted murderers,” the ad warned. “Dukakis on crime.”
Liberals howled that the ads were racist, using the mug shot to tap into white fears of black crime. Republicans countered that Dukakis’s furlough policy—which he had inherited from a predecessor and kept in place—was highly relevant, a part of his record and an insight into his priorities. Implicit in the ad was a conservative critique of the weak-willed liberalism that Dukakis seemed to embody.30
The Horton ad proved especially potent in the South, reminding Southern voters of the racial violence of the 1960s and 1970s. Bush’s campaign manager, the always-acerbic Lee Atwater, called the Horton ad campaign “a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”31 Bush beat Dukakis in a near landslide, winning forty states.
