By Andy Brack, editor and publisher | Turn the pages of South Carolina history to about 50 years ago if you want to better understand the rise of Donald Trump, the current GOP presidential candidate who is fueling rage across America.
Back in 1968, America was changing. African Americans, long disenfranchised across the South, had won major civil rights victories. They were voting, going to integrated schools and starting to move into “white” neighborhoods. It was a big change for the white South.
A key Republican Party strategist at the time, Harry S. Dent Sr. from South Carolina, recognized how the political playing field was shifting and translated it for impact. He became a major architect of Republican Richard Nixon’s so-called “Southern strategy,” which successfully sought to win white votes in the solid Democratic South by appealing to fears and prejudices of white Southern voters upset by changes caused by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Dent, a St. Matthews native who had been on U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond’s staff in the 1950s, served as the state’s Republican Party chairman from 1965 to 1968 before joining Nixon’s team. Dent’s 2007 obituary in The New York Times outlined the strategy that changed politics forever in the South:
“Its detractors call it racism cloaked in code words like ‘law and order.’ Its advocates call it a legitimate appeal to people left on the sidelines while other groups benefit from affirmative action and government aid programs. In any event, the strategy was credited with the Nixon victory.”
Historian Dan T. Carter, professor emeritus at the University of South Carolina, echoed the substance of the summary in an interview this week.
“The genius of Nixon was to come up with a way of talking about race without talking about race,” said Carter, author of “The Politics of Rage.” The book offers a deep look into the 1968 presidential campaign of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who tapped into the same Southern sentiment.
With the Southern strategy, Carter explained, “You find issues which profoundly resonate with underlying racial attitudes — welfare, busing and schools — and you focus on those in a way that invokes people’s racial fears without saying you’ve got to keep those black folks out of the schools or out of the neighborhoods.”
The rage that led white Southern voters in droves to vote for Nixon or Wallace had a long-lasting impact. Former Nixon aide Kevin Phillips is also credited by Carter with understanding that the Republican Party could dominate for a long time by winning the South. A generation later, that has come to pass.
“You do have a larger percentage of white voters that are voting Republican in the South than certainly in major states in the United States,” he said, adding that exceptions are Virginia and Florida.
While anger — and the political use of it by Nixon thanks to a South Carolinian’s understanding of the shifting politics of the time — helped propel President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president into the White House, there are dissimilarities to what happened in 1968, Carter says.
Yes, people are angry now, but there’s also been a collapse of the old political party system, which is easily visible in the staged, made-for-TV pep rallies called conventions. Decisions are made in advance. Little is left to chance.
Additionally, American culture has coarsened, with political correctness and respectful political interactions being less of a factor on the campaign trail. In 1968, rage was more coded with Nixon’s “law and order” platform, mimicked today by Trump’s campaign. Unlike campaigns of five decades ago, today’s politics thrive on put-downs, vitriol and verbal nastiness, which is like orally throwing gas on the fire of voters.
Much like Nixon and Wallace manipulated fear in 1968 to attract voters, Trump doing much of the same thing now. The concepts may be similar (safety) and different (immigration), but the strategy is the same. Recognize it for what it is so you don’t have regrets like Harry Dent outlined in a 1981 interview with The Washington Post:
“When I look back, my biggest regret now is anything that I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people. Or any people.”
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