Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins
A significant number of the American people have been bamboozled, swindled, and otherwise cheated and lied to for at least the past 40+ years, at least since 1980, and beginning in earnest in January 1981 with the Reagan administration.
In actuality, the Republican party’s seeds of destruction were sown in 1964 at the Republican National Convention in Daly City, California when then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller warned the assembled delegates that
“The Republican party is in real danger of subversion
by
a radical, well-financed,
and
highly disciplined minority.”
He was given 5 minutes to address the delegates, but was booed for over 16 minutes.
Why?
He was seeking the inclusion of language in the official party platform which would have said,
“The Republican Party fully respects the contribution of responsible criticism, and defends the right of dissent in the democratic process. But we repudiate the efforts of irresponsible, extremist groups, such as the Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society and others, to discredit our Party by their efforts to infiltrate positions of responsibility in the Party, or to attach themselves to its candidates.”
One would think that such language condemning and repudiating the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society members, and others, would have been welcomed.
Ku Klux Klansmen rally in support of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, the GOP 1964 Presidential nominee.
Image: Universal History Archive/Getty Images
But, it wasn’t.
That was the year Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater was the party’s Presidential nominee.
That was also the year the GOP suffered one of the greatest losses in American political history.
A mere 6 states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina – voted for Barry Goldwater.
Lyndon Baines Johnson won in a landslide with 486 Electoral College votes to Goldwater’s 52.
The Popular Vote was just as decisive:
Johnson 43,127,041 (61.1%), to Goldwater 27,175,754 (38.5%).
The next quadrennial election cycle proved to be a harbinger of things to come.
Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse
In 1968, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace – a stridently biogted racist and segregationist, at the height of his hatred of Blacks – campaigned on the American Independent ticket against Republican Richard Nixon of New York, and Minnesota Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey, who had been LBJ’s Vice President. That year’s election was equally decisive in its victory, but what may be most interesting, is the fact that as a 3rd Party Candidate, the openly racist, bigoted Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, though he was a Democratic governor, campaigned on a platform of racial segregation as a Presidential candidate on the American Independent ticket – and commonly, though incorrectly known as a “Dixiecrat” – won 5 states (AL, AR, GA, LA, MS) and their 46 Electoral College votes, along with 9,901,118 Popular Votes, for 13.5% of all Popular Votes cast. It remains the strongest showing of a 3rd Party candidate in American political history. Not even John B. Anderson in 1980, or Ross Perot in 1992 won any Electoral College Votes, though Ross Perot made a good showing among the Popular Vote with 19,743,821, or 18.9% of all Popular Votes cast, and in 1996, Perot secured 8,085,294 Popular Votes, which was 8.4% of all Popular Votes cast, though he never won any Electoral College votes in any election.
Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski
Wallace’s strong showing among those 5 Southern states in 1968 was resounding evidence of how pervasive, ingrained, and embedded – how thoroughly infiltrated – the message of hate, and he as its chief messenger – along with the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society, and other such elements as then-New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller had mentioned at 1964’s RNC convention – had become in the South. Sadly, Nixon did nothing to help, and rather, relied upon a “Southern Strategy” to win over those very voters – the racist bigoted “Dixiecrats” who had become enured with the Ku Klux Klan, Communists, John Birch Society members, and others – to welcome them into the fold of the Republican Party.
Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was the creation, per se (it was more an anthropological and demographic analysis of long-term trends than anything else), of Kevin Phillips (b.1940), a brilliant, if not genius (matriculated Colgate University aged 16, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude, spent his junior year at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, where he knew more about Scottish history than his Scottish classmates), Harvard Law-educated man who authored the 1969 book “The Emerging Republican Majority“ in which he detailed an ethnographic political strategy that capitalized upon, an exploited alleged hostilities between the Irish, Italians, and Poles, and Jews, Negroes, and affluent Yankees to achieve its goals. He later abandoned the GOP in the 1990’s after becoming grossly disaffected by them.
Having now authored over 13 books, the premise of his first book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” was the presumption that most voters “still voted on the basis of ethnic or cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited. For instance, the old bitterness toward Protestant Yankee Republicans that had for generations made Democrats out of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants had now shifted, among their children and grandchildren, to resentment of the new immigrants – Negroes and Latinos – and against the national Democratic party, whose Great Society programs increasingly seemed to reflect favoritism for the new minorities over the old.”
Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy
In a May 17, 1970 article entitled “Nixon’s Southern strategy ‘It’s All In the Charts’” for the New York Times, Read the rest of this entry »
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