How Trump Remixed the Republican 'Southern Strategy'

[yallerdawg]

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't." - Polonius, Hamlet

The presidential candidate has resurrected divisive GOP campaign tactics that target and alienate minorities.

Source: The Atlantic, by Robert P. Jones

One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. Since the 1980s, Manafort’s business partners have included Charles Black, who helped launch the Senate career of outspoken segregationist Jessie Helms, and Lee Atwater, who was behind the infamously racist Willie Horton ads run by the George H. W. Bush campaign.

And here is one more clue about just how much life this resurrected strategy may yet have in it, at least among Trump’s core supporters. A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, of which I’m the CEO, conducted just after Trump declared his candidacy in the fall of 2015, asked Americans whether they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride or as a symbol of racism. More than three-quarters of Republicans, including 83 percent of white working-class Republicans, reported that they see the Confederate flag more as a symbol of southern pride, compared to more than six in ten Democrats who said they see it more as a symbol of racism.

To be sure, Trump has not simply exhumed and dusted off the old Southern Strategy. He has characterized illegal immigrants rather than black Americans as a threat to white women’s safety. And he has redirected the Christian Right’s focus away from its preoccupation with a “godless Communism.” In its place, Trump has exploited the perception of Islam’s growing power abroad against a backdrop of genuinely declining white Christian influence at home, where the U.S. finds itself for the first time a minority white Christian nation. And, significantly—in a demonstration of just how successful the old strategy was—he’s discarded the dog whistle in favor of a bull horn.

Despite the efforts of RNC leaders to move on, Trump’s campaign is demonstrating how difficult it may be to disavow decades of cultural investment. Trump’s unlikely success with these old tactics is demonstrating William Faulkner famous aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Read it all at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/how-trump-remixed-the-republican-southern-strategy/495719/

[Mister Ed]

1. Regarding the Confederate flag as a "symbol of pride":

It's a symbol of pride, all right. It's the beloved icon of people who take pride in their racism and hatred.

[yallerdawg]

3. They used to argue it was all about 'State's Rights!'

Until we finally understood that was for the right of the privileged class of a state to legally own a race of people as slaves.

[Wounded Bear]

5. Historically, states' rights have always been....

cover for some of the most odious practices and conventions in human history. It has been a great way for assholes to keep others from reining in their assholiness.

[Jim Dandy]

2. So Trumpy has locked down Mississippi

Not doing to well elsewhere, tho.

[yallerdawg]

4. "Mississippi?"

[Wounded Bear]

6. K & R ......for visibility..nt