Dear ANC, riding monsters for political gain will cost you dearly

First published in DM168

The year was 1928 and something unprecedented had happened in the US: for the first time ever a Catholic was the presidential candidate for a major party. A Democrat from New York, Al Smith had managed to win the party nomination even as many of his own were openly against him. His opponent, Herbert Hoover, was a successful commerce secretary in the Roaring Twenties era. Smith the Catholic didn’t stand much chance, but the GOP leaders also made sure their hold on power was not interrupted. Their slash and burn campaign in the South, the Democrats’ stronghold since even before the Reconstruction was over, enlisted the help of the Ku Klux Klan to stop the country’s “takeover by the Pope”. The party that brought Abraham Lincoln to power on an anti-slavery platform went 180 degrees on his legacy. Al Smith suffered a landslide defeat.

Fast-forward to 1964, and the “moderate” wing of the GOP suffered another blow when the pugilistic right-wing senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, became their standard-bearer. He lost badly to Lyndon Johnson, but his vision of the Republican Party, which sounded very much like the party was a natural home for the white people in the US, managed to stick. And after President Johnson signed the slew of historic laws that helped bring the black minority into the political mainstream, Richard Nixon devised his 1968 election strategy to incorporate the enraged Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) and ensure the control of the South by the GOP, a goal that was cemented by the ascent to power of one Ronald Reagan in 1980. His successor, George HW Bush, employed Reagan’s adviser Lee Atwater as campaign chief in the 1988 elections.

This is how Atwater explained the GOP’s tactics through the decades:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n****r’ – 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****r, n****r’.”