≡ Menu

The Southern Strategy Of George W. Bush

This post brings together some things I've been saying in bits and pieces in other posts and in messages to email lists and friends. What I say here is also intended as an introduction to my next post, which presents some information about the Council of Conservative Citizens in Mississippi.

I have tried before to emphasize that Republican efforts to suppress the African American vote are deeply rooted in the history of American racism. Much of what we can enumerate is nothing new: voter intimidation, voter roll purges, voter challenges, unequal distribution of voting technology and information to predominantly African American precincts. These tactics have been around for decades, but in this year's election cycle they were employed more brazenly and on an unprecedented scale by the GOP. In one New York Times post-mortem on Bush's success in Florida, for example, Republican campaigners were extremely nonchalant about their pre-election threats of massive voter challenges.

Republican strategists acknowledged that their party had purposely warned the news media that they might file challenges to deter felons and dual registrants from voting. They said their tough talk had forced the Democrats to marshal their forces to conduct poll monitoring in the critical final days.

This kind of Republican bragging about voter intimidation tactics, threatened or real, is just one side of the coin Bush uses as currency with his racist base. The other side is John Ashcroft's reconfiguration of the DOJ Civil Rights Division. Charged with protecting minority voting rights after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is now poised to be a federal voter "integrity" agency that prosecutes voters who would try to vote "fraudulently." Ashcroft has also been pushing for a narrow interpretation of the 2002 Help America Vote Act that would greatly limit the abilities of citizens to file suit for violations of their voting rights.

These shamelessly public attacks on African American voters and on the federal protections of their rights carry an intent much like Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. There, in the place famous only for the 1964 Klan murders of Chaney, Gooodman and Schwerner, the presidential candidate made no acknowledgment of those events, only fourteen years past, but made his coded appeal to Southern racists:

I believe in states' rights. I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to the federal establishment.

States' rights has long been the banner under which some Southerners declare allegiance to crumbling racist institutions, first to slavery and then to Jim Crow.

In Bush's hands, the Southern strategy has a new, brutish cast. Rather than cart out the states' rights rhetoric or welfare queens or Willie Horton, the Bush administration appeals to its racist base by modeling old-style Jim Crow tactics widely and visibly—as official party election practices and as part of the Department of Justice's stated law enforcement agenda. George W. Bush did something truly radical in 2004: he affirmed states' rights by federalizing the states' rights agenda.

The relative absence of overt racist rhetoric, coded or otherwise, in the Bush administration, coupled with the unprecedented ethnic and gender diversity of Bush's cabinet and other staff, effects an Orwellian dissonance between Bush's demonstrated personal tolerance and the hostilities he willingly fosters. In effect, Bush is working to reinstitute the distinction that was do dear to Southern segregationists in the the 1950s. James Forman, former Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, put it this way in his book, The Making of Black Revolutionaries:

Southerners believed integration meant the total acceptance of the American Negro in the American way of life. Desegregation meant the removal of the legal barriers that prevented Negroes from having access to the American way of life. . . .

For instance, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 said that Southern schools should be desegregated. That is a legal question, a legal right which is indisputable. However, when you twist the removal of legal barriers to mean that one must accept (how gracious) us totally into the American way of life, then the justification for hostility increases. (91-92)

Bush keeps a coterie of minorities and women in the upper echelons of his administration to project images of full access for all, a supposed absence of legal barriers to the American dream. At the same time, for anyone who cares to look behind the scrim, Bush's policies and his electoral strategies communicate clear opposition to a meaningfully integrated society.

The current revival of racism in our country (not that it ever went away) is not directed only at random, hateful individuals. Bush's audience also includes powerful infrastructures of racist sympathy with active agendas of minority suppression and intimidation. I'm not talking about splinter hate groups that may be deemed as far outside the mainstream. As my friends in Alabama will often say, "The Klan dresses in three-piece suits now, not sheets." The Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly known as White Citizens Councils, have for decades been the suited, "respectable" face of the Klan, "trumpeting the 'Southern way of life,'" through "a traditionalist rhetoric that appealed to better-mannered, more discreet racists; while the Klan burned crosses, the CCA relied on political and economic pressure." The information in my next post details the intricate, many-tentacled reach of the CCC into the mainstream political life of the state of Mississippi.

And these influences reach well beyond Mississippi state lines. For starters, in case you don't remember, you might want to check out John Ashcroft's Southern heritage credentials.

{ 0 comments… add one }

Leave a Comment