Southern Strategies

This week, I saw someone on social media trot out a notorious quote from Lee Atwater that's wildly misunderstood. I went back to dust off my old Twitter thread about it, but I found that a lot of the links there have decayed or been deleted. So I'll do it again.

The quote is definitely one you've read or maybe even heard before:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—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 “Nigger, nigger.”

Many people like to trot this out as a sudden confession or perhaps a Kinsley gaffe on the part of Lee Atwater, but it's nothing of the kind. Lee Atwater was evil, yes, but he was also quite smart. If you think he was doing a cartoonish villain's monologue revealing his secret plan to a liberal political scientist like Alexander Lamis, well, think again.

If you listen to the full interview – which runs 42 minutes, much longer than that 1 minute or so of soundbite – or just read the transcript, you'll quickly see that this wasn't Atwater suddenly baring his soul and confessing that Reagan was engaged in an extension of the "southern strategy." No, this is Atwater mocking a liberal academic and making his arguments sound like a weird conspiracy theory.

Before the passage that everyone knows, there's this section, in which Atwater readily admits that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon had a racist "southern strategy" – Harry Dent was a Strom Thurmond aide who became President Nixon's point man on the South – but then insists that the Reagan team in 1980 did nothing of the sort.

… so what you had was two things happening that totally washed away the Southern Strategy, the Harry Dent-type southern strategy. And that is… That whole strategy was based - although it was more sophisticated than a Bilbo or a George Wallace - it was nevertheless based on coded racism. The whole thing. Busing. We want a supreme court judge that will not bus. Anything you'd look at could be traced back to the race issue and the old Southern strategy.

And it was not done in a blatantly discriminatory way.

But the Reagans did not have to do a Southern strategy for two reasons:

Number one, race was not a dominant issue.

And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been “Southern issues” since way back in the 60s. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the economics and on national defense, the whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference.

I'll pause here to acknowledge what you're currently muttering to yourself:

Yes, the claim that Reagan – who launched his national campaign with a speech praising "states' rights" in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and more – was not actually engaged in a race-baiting "southern strategy" is utter nonsense.

But my point here is that in this particular conversation, Atwater is clearly not admitting that the Reagan campaign did all that. He's repeatedly denying it.

With that in mind, look at the full context around the initial passage above.

He starts off by saying, first, there's no need to pull that coded racism anymore because southern white conservatives were already pulled into the Republican camp when Nixon did it and now Reagan can just appeal to them on other issues.

Lee Atwater: ... Now in 1968, the whole Southern strategy that Harry and those had put together, the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now they don't have to do that. All you gotta do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues his campaigned on since 1964. And that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cutting taxes, you know that whole cluster, and being tough with national defense. And it's going to be very hard for Reagan to lose.

Alexander Lamis: But whether he, I'm not saying that he does this consciously, but the fact is that he does get the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by doing away with uh… by cutting down on food stamps…

Lee Atwater: Here's how I would approach that issue as a statistician or a political scientist. Or as a psychologist, which I'm not, is how abstract do you handle the race thing. Now once you start out, and now you all don't quote me on this, you start out in 1954 by saying 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger,' that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like ‘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 totally economic things, and the byproduct often is Blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that *is* part of it. I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.

Do you follow me?

Because obviously sitting around saying, 'we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of lot more abstract than, 'nigger, nigger.'

So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.

He's clearly playing Devil's advocate with Lamis in that bolded part, recapping the argument that political analysts and scholars like Lamis had been making for over a decade, but the closest Atwater comes to admitting any of that is true is granting that "maybe" race a subconscious part of the conservative appeal on other issues, before quickly adding "I'm not saying that."

Notably, that last part is usually elided in the version of the quote I posted above. That elision turns the final lines – about the race issue becoming more abstract – from Atwater's spin which is that, "hey, even if you think these policies are racist, they're not capital-R Racist, right?" into an admission that they've just made the racism subtler.

But, of course, in a larger sense, Alexander Lamis was right.

As scholars have repeatedly shown (including me, in Myth America), the appeals made by Republicans in the 1980s – most notably the 1988 George H.W. Bush campaign, which Lee Atwater masterminded and which brought us the infamous "Willie Horton" ads – were very much an extension of the "old southern strategy" pioneered by Goldwater, Nixon and Dent, and despite Atwater's attempts to mock that idea with sarcasm, it was all true.

That's why the misunderstanding about this quote persists. Atwater wasn't actually confessing, but of course the text of the confession tracks with what we know. (While he didn't admit it in 1981, but he repented for it on his deathbed less than a decade later.)

The interview isn't an admission from Atwater about his culpability in continuing the southern strategy. It's actually more interesting than that, a sign of the dissembling that political operatives do, trying to convince critics (and maybe themselves) that they've cut themselves free from an old style of racist politics when in truth, they've only made it worse.