{"id":26271,"date":"2023-05-02T20:22:50","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T03:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26271"},"modified":"2023-05-02T20:39:45","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T03:39:45","slug":"exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-on-the-southern-strategy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-on-the-southern-strategy-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Lee Atwater\u2019s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater\u2019s incendiary remarks and places them in context.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">By&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/authors\/rick-perlstein\/\">Rick Perlstein<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">NOVEMBER 13, 2012 (thenation.com)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Exclusive: Lee Atwater&#039;s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/X_8E3ENrKrQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>You start out in 1954 by saying, \u201cNigger, nigger, nigger.\u201d By 1968 you can\u2019t say \u201cnigger\u201d\u2014that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states\u2019 rights, and all that stuff, and you\u2019re getting so abstract. Now, you\u2019re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you\u2019re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.\u2026 \u201cWe want to cut this,\u201d is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than \u201cNigger, nigger.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney\u2019s \u201c47 percent\u201d remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Here,&nbsp;<em>The Nation<\/em>&nbsp;publishes it in its entirety for the very first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina\u2019s most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan\u2019s White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater\u2019s name in his 1984 book&nbsp;<em>The Two-Party South<\/em>. Fifteen years later\u2014and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer\u2014Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater\u2019s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the&nbsp;<em>New York Times<\/em>\u2018 Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/query.nytimes.com\/gst\/fullpage.html?res=9C04E6DF1E30F935A35753C1A9639C8B63\">column<\/a>\u2014then five more times over the next four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those words soon became legend\u2014quoted in both screeds (<em>The GOP-Haters Handbook<\/em>, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin\u2019s 2011 classic work of political theory,&nbsp;<em>The Reactionary Mind<\/em>). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks\u2019 context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.politifact.com\/truth-o-meter\/statements\/2012\/aug\/28\/rick-santorum\/Santorum-Romney-claim-Obama-ending-welfare-work\/\">lies<\/a>&nbsp;about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/24\/romney-makes-a-birther-joke-while-campaigning\/\">jokes<\/a>\u201d about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Ren\u00e9e Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was \u201cupset,\u201d Carter told me, that \u201cfor some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.\u201d For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband\u2019s use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what does the new contextual wrapping teach us? It vindicates Lamis, who indeed comes off as careful and scholarly. And no surprise, it shows Atwater acting yet again in bad faith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the lead-up to the infamous remarks, it is fascinating to witness the confidence with which Atwater believes himself to be establishing the racial innocence of latter-day Republican campaigning: \u201cMy generation,\u201d he insists, \u201cwill be the first generation of Southerners that won\u2019t be prejudiced.\u201d He proceeds to develop the argument that by dropping talk about civil rights gains like the Voting Rights Act and sticking to the now-mainstream tropes of fiscal conservatism and national defense, consultants like him were proving \u201cpeople in the South are just like any people in the history of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is only upon Professor Lamis\u2019s gently Socratic follow-ups, and those of a co-interviewer named \u201cSaul\u201d (Carter hasn\u2019t been able to confirm his identity, but suspects it was the late White House correspondent Saul Friedman), that Atwater begins to loosen up\u2014prefacing his reflections, with a plainly guilty conscience, \u201cNow, y\u2019all aren\u2019t quoting me on this?\u201d (Apparently&nbsp;, this is the reason why Atwater\u2019s name wasn\u2019t published in 1984 but was in 1999, after his death).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he\u2019d absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina\u2019s middle-class&nbsp; black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThat voter, in my judgment,\u201d he claims, \u201cwill be more likely to vote his economic interests than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think through a fairly slow but very steady process, will go Republican.\u201d Because race no longer matters: \u201cIn my judgment Karl Marx [is right]\u2026 the real issues ultimately will be the economic issues.\u201d He continues, in words that uncannily echo the \u201c47 percent tape\u201d (nothing new under the wingnut sun), that \u201cstatistically, as the number of non-producers in the system moves toward fifty percent,\u201d the conservative coalition cannot but expand. Voila: a new Republican majority. Racism won\u2019t have anything to do with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not bloody likely. In 2005, the political scientists Nicholas Valentino and David Sears&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/race-party-realignment-in-the-south-old-times-not-forgotten2.pdf\">demonstrated<\/a>&nbsp;that a Southern man holding conservative positions on issues other than race is no more likely than a conservative Northerner to vote for a Democrat. But when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions\u2014like whether one agrees \u201cIf blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites\u201d\u2014white Southerners were twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote Democratic. As another political scientist, Thomas Schaller, wrote in his 2006 book&nbsp;<em><a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books\/about\/Whistling_Past_Dixie.html?id=jG5Jhexkjg0C\">Whistling Past Dixie<\/a><\/em>&nbsp;(which naturally quotes the infamous Atwater lines), \u201cDespite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters\u2026the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is&nbsp;<em>stronger<\/em>&nbsp;today than in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which one particular Republican spinmeister, when he wasn\u2019t preening before political scientists, knew fully well\u2014which was why, seven years after that interview, in his stated&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1991\/01\/13\/us\/gravely-ill-atwater-offers-apology.html\">goal<\/a>&nbsp;to \u201crip the bark off the little bastard [Michael Dukakis]\u201d on behalf of his candidate George H.W. Bush, Atwater ran the infamous ad blaming Dukakis for an escaped Massachusetts convict, Willie Horton, \u201crepeatedly raping\u201d an apparently white girl. Indeed, Atwater pledged to make \u201cWillie Horton his running mate.\u201d The commercial was sponsored by a dummy outfit called the&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/USA\/Elections\/2012\/0524\/From-Willie-Horton-to-windsurfing-Five-top-political-attack-ads\/Willie-Horton-erases-a-double-digit-lead\">National Security Political Action Committee<\/a>\u2014which it is true, was a whole lot more abstract than saying \u201cnigger, nigger, nigger.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>For more on the GOP\u2019s effort to roll back enfranchisment, read Ari Berman\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/why-we-still-need-section-5-voting-rights-act\">Why We Still Need Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/authors\/rick-perlstein\/\">Rick Perlstein<\/a><a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/@rickperlstein\" target=\"_blank\">TWITTER<\/a> Rick Perlstein is the author of, most recently,&nbsp;<em>Reaganland: America\u2019s Right Turn 1976\u20131980<\/em>, as well as&nbsp;<em>Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater\u2019s incendiary remarks and places them in context. By&nbsp;Rick Perlstein NOVEMBER 13, 2012 (thenation.com) It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking&#8230; <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/02\/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-on-the-southern-strategy-2\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[532],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26271"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26271"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26275,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26271\/revisions\/26275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}