Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law<\/a> a bill on Sept. 7, 2021, that reduces opportunities for people to vote, allows partisan poll watchers more access and creates steeper penalties for violating voting laws.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Republican governor argued that the legislation would \u201csolidify trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections by making it easier to vote and harder to cheat<\/a>.\u201d Democratic opponents of the measure, however, said Republican legislators presented no evidence<\/a> of widespread voter fraud during debate on the bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Civil rights organizations immediately filed suit<\/a>, calling the law unconstitutional because it is intended to restrict voting among minorities, who overwhelmingly<\/a> support Democratic political candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across the country, Republicans have turned to gerrymandering<\/a> and voter suppression legislation<\/a> such as closing polling stations in minority and low-income precincts, mandating discriminatory voter ID laws and purging millions from voter rolls. In addition, GOP politicians and right-wing commentators have demanded that educators quit teaching the facts of America\u2019s racist history<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For several decades, the GOP has depended on racism to keep white people in power and nonwhites on the outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1981, longtime GOP strategist Lee Atwater plainly declared that the Republican Party\u2019s key strategy was racism. Atwater described how the GOP began to define itself as a white supremacist party<\/a> in response to the civil rights movement. The Nation magazine later published the full audio recording of the interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou start out in 1954 by saying, \u2018N\u2014\u2013, n\u2014\u2013, n\u2014\u2013.\u2019\u201d, Atwater said, using the actual racial slur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBy 1968, you can\u2019t say \u2018n\u2014\u2013\u2019 \u2013 that hurts, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, \u2018forced busing,\u2019 \u2018states\u2019 rights,\u2019 and all that stuff, and you\u2019re getting so abstract,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNow, 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,\u201d Atwater explained. \u201c\u2018We want to cut this\u2019 is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than \u2018N\u2014\u2013, n\u2014\u2013<\/a>.\u2019\u201d https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/X_8E3ENrKrQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 An excerpt from Lee Atwater\u2019s 1981 interview explaining racist Republican tactics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For much of the country\u2019s history, the Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln and racial equality, and the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow laws and white supremacy. The two parties switched<\/a> positions during the civil rights movement when the Democrats abandoned their support for segregation and Republicans sought to appeal to segregationists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early 1960s, U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a Republican, challenged the GOP\u2019s more liberal politicians to redefine the Republican Party as what newspaper editor William Loeb called \u201cthe white man\u2019s party<\/a>.\u201d Republican New York Gov. Nelson B. Rockefeller responded that if the GOP embraced Goldwater, an opponent of civil rights legislation, as its presidential candidate in 1964, then it would advance a \u201cprogram based on racism and sectionalism<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goldwater won the GOP\u2019s nomination but lost the presidential election in a landslide<\/a> to the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. But even without winning the Oval Office, Goldwater and other like-minded conservative Republicans won the hearts and minds of pro-segregation Democrats, who were angry with Johnson for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The GOP, as Atwater pointed out, learned to use coded words to court these disillusioned Democrats who became Republicans in what would become known as the \u201cgreat white switch<\/a>\u201d or Southern strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Republican Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election in part by using references to states\u2019 rights and \u201claw and order,\u201d rather than by making blatant appeals to white supremacy or racism. Nixon\u2019s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, noted that Nixon \u201cemphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks<\/a>. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1980, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, also a Republican, gave a presidential campaign speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered<\/a> in 1963. Reagan declared his own support for states\u2019 rights. Gabrielle Bruney wrote in Esquire that \u201cby touting himself as a states\u2019 rights candidate near the site of one of the nation\u2019s most famous hate crimes, Reagan offered voters a racism<\/a> that was both obvious and unspoken.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As president, Reagan used coded rhetoric to connect race to crime, welfare and government spending. For instance, Bryce Covert wrote in The New Republic, Reagan frequently used distortion in his references to a single con artist named Linda Taylor, the so-called \u201cwelfare queen<\/a>,\u201d to argue that welfare was corrupt and Black people were too lazy to work<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Atwater worked as a consultant for Reagan and then as campaign manager for Vice President George H.W. Bush\u2019s presidential campaign in 1988. Atwater approved a television ad blaming Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts, for a furlough program in the state that released a Black first-degree murderer, Willie Horton, who then raped a white woman. Atwater famously claimed, \u201cBy the time we\u2019re finished, they\u2019re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis\u2019 running mate<\/a>.\u201d Bush won the election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The GOP\u2019s hold on the South became complete in 2016 when Donald Trump won all the former Confederate states<\/a> except Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump became one of the GOP\u2019s top contenders for the 2012 presidential nomination after questioning without evidence whether Black president Barack Obama was born in Hawaii<\/a>. When Obama released his birth certificate, Trump\u2019s candidacy fell apart<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Trump ran for president in 2016, he used racially divisive rhetoric<\/a>, calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. and suggesting a judge should recuse himself<\/a> from a case solely because of the judge\u2019s Mexican heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His campaign used the slogan \u201cMake America Great Again,\u201d which had been widely criticized for being a dog whistle to white people<\/a> who felt that minorities were encroaching on their country. Then, as president, he pandered to white supremacists<\/a> by refusing to criticize them and by using coded words<\/a>. He told Americans that there are \u201cfine people on both sides<\/a>\u201d after a confrontation between white supremacists and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Trump ran for reelection in 2020, he renewed his birther claim by insinuating that Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, who is Black and Asian<\/a>, \u201cdoesn\u2019t meet the requirements<\/a>\u201d to run for vice president. When Trump lost the election, he challenged the accuracy of voting in precincts that were heavily minority<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now Republicans in Texas and around the nation are back to openly expressing their racism with no need for dog whistling or other forms of abstraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [Understand key political developments, each week.<\/em> Subscribe to The Conversation\u2019s politics newsletter<\/a>.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chris Lamb<\/a>, Professor of Journalism, IUPUI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Lamb, IUPUI Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill on Sept. 7, 2021, that reduces opportunities for people to vote, allows partisan poll watchers more access and creates steeper penalties for violating voting laws. The Republican governor argued that the legislation would \u201csolidify trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":26828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46,4],"tags":[3605,479,10496,1461,699,503,1538,530,989,987,683,2950],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26827"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26827"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26842,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26827\/revisions\/26842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/420336\/original\/file-20210909-8898-cd25e2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C5451%2C3528&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
<\/a>Lee Atwater and the strategy of racism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The GOP moves from overt racist words to coded words<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/420335\/original\/file-20210909-23-1lk86vc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
<\/a>States\u2019 rights, welfare queens and Willie Horton<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/420912\/original\/file-20210913-27-gzm7o1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip\")
<\/a>Onward to Donald Trump<\/h2>\n\n\n\n