Reply #79: This is the "Reverse of Nixon's Southern Strategy"

[bluedawg12]

I wrote about this in another thread here, in tryng to understand the rw strategy.It is basically a reverse of Nixons Southern strategy pitting white dedocrats against AA democrats and they got an exodus from the Dem party and eventually iinto the repug party.

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=221&topic_id=91644&mesg_id=91681

The development of a religious identity movement, that bridges race, ethnicity and religious tradition, the so called fundy coalition of "The People of the Book."

Members of this coalition, it seems to me, then become the foot soldiers in their cultural wars. That's why we see an amalgamation of Catholics and Mormons and a broad coalition of various races and ethnic groups united in these so called, fight for "values."


Nixon played the identity politics card:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Richard Nixon 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 was concerned with polarizing ethnic voting in general, and not just with winning the white South, this 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 legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP.

When asked about the southern strategy that used race as an issue to build GOP dominance in the once Democratic South, Mehlman replied, "Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions," and, "y the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
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So the religious right, switched the southern strategy from race, to values and cultural wars.