There is no strategy to combat poor policy, founded in identity politics ...
What baffles me about Dems is that they scream at the top of their lungs how racism and bigotry riddle the Republican party, and yet they spend most of their time talking about racism and bigotry ... There are only two outcomes to this strategy: 1) You are spot on and the the racists and bigots rally around the identity rhetoric and want to stick it to the minorities!!!!!! 2) More likely, people like me who wouldn't even pay attention unless Booker called me a racist, get pissed off at being called a racist and a bigot and vote against any and all Libbies ...
Would you describe the following as identity politics too?
Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, who popularized the Southern Strategy:
"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."
Reagan adviser and Republican party strategist/consultant:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that
Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the
Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now you don't have to do that. All that you need to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues that he's campaigned on since 1964, and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on
food stamps?
Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "******, ******, ******". By 1968 you can't say "******"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing,
states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] 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 are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "******, ******"
Nixon's top adviser John Ehrlichman:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people."
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
N.C. Republican party consultant Carter Wrenn responding to the state's voter ID law and the court ruling that struck down parts of that law for "targeting African-Americans with almost surgical precision":
“Of course it’s political. Why else would you do it?” he said, explaining that Republicans, like any political party, want to protect their majority. While GOP lawmakers might have passed the law to suppress some voters, Wrenn said, that does not mean it was racist.
“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was,” Wrenn said. “It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”