The 'Southern strategy' goes south

[Nevilledog]

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Philip Bump
@pbump
So after the civil rights movement, the GOP deployed the "Southern strategy" to appeal to prejudice against Black Americans while avoiding explicit invocations of race.

In the Trump/Tucker era, as this week showed, the appeals are explicit.

washingtonpost.com
Analysis | The ‘Southern strategy’ goes south
A GOP operative once boasted about how the party coded its racial messaging. It no longer tries very hard.
10:03 PM · Feb 10, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/southern-strategy-goes-south/

No paywall
https://archive.fo/W20Zu

The story went like this. The conservative Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration was “set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance ‘racial equity,'” something it claimed had been confirmed by an administration official. It’s a potent combination of triggers for the political right, the idea of spending government money on drug abusers coupled with the elevation of stereotypical assumptions about who those drug abusers are. So it quickly carried far and wide.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) hopped on Twitter to bash the “lunacy” of sending these “smoking kits” to drug users.

“This isn’t even about liberal and conservative anymore,” he said. “This is about crazy versus normal. Insane versus common sense.”

And, of course, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson went further. He suggested that the real problem in America was deaths from opioids in 2021, not that “crackheads don’t have crack pipes.” The administration was doing “nothing” about those deaths, he claimed, though of course that’s false. But this was in service to his broader argument: that Biden wanted those largely White Americans to die— people who he “hates.”

Those who died from opioid overdoses “weren’t from officially marginalized groups,” he said. “Their deaths had nothing to do with the ‘equity agenda.’ In fact, their deaths may have helped the ‘equity agenda’ by changing the demographics of the country in a way that benefits the Democratic Party.”

*snip*

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. The "Southern Strategy" is alive and well.

In every state.....think rural v. urban.

[Chainfire]

2. A chicken in every pot and a crack pipe in every home. Good Democratic values.

The larger the lie, the more readily the masses will accept it.

[dalton99a]

3. The 'Southern strategy' goes national