Few sources are more instructive about the modern Republican Party than the now-infamous interview Lee Atwater gave for Alexander Lamis’ 1988 book, The Two-Party South. Lamis didn’t name his source, but after Atwater died in 1991, The Nation magazine published the recording of the veteran Republican strategist.
One quote in particular demonstrates the methods that gave Chamber of Commerce Republicans the cover they needed to accept former Dixiecrats into the GOP:
“You start in 1954 by saying ‘[repeated racial slur].’ By 1968 you can’t say [racial slur]. That hurts you. It backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states rights’ and all that stuff and you get so abstract. Now you talk about cutting taxes and these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that’s part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Obviously sitting around saying we want to cut taxes and we want this, is a lot more abstract than even the busing thing and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘[repeated racial slur].’ So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
Atwater, a senior advisor in the Reagan and elder Bush administrations, narrated in detail what is known in shorthand as a “dog whistle.” This “Southern Strategy” allowed various constituencies to hear only what they wanted to hear.
Northern Republicans heard “small government.” Southerners heard “white power.”
Once Democrats discovered how successful the strategy was, they adapted it for their electoral purposes. In his 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton modulated the “welfare queen” stereotype popularized by Ronald Reagan, softening it to “ending welfare as we know it.” At the Democratic convention that year, he accepted the nomination “in the name of all those who do the work and pay the taxes, raise kids and play by the rules.”
People heard what they wanted to hear, and Clinton’s “Southern Strategy Lite” won back some of the voters Democrats had lost, giving them an eight-year reprieve between two decades of Republican dominance.
The financial crisis of 2008, coupled with the Democratic nomination of a Black man for President, exposed the strategy for what it was. Three decades of racialized politics masquerading as “small government” crumbled down alongside the housing market, as Barack Obama tied Wall Street greed to systemic inequality. Obama’s calm, competent framing of the economic situation stood in stark contrast to John McCain’s erratic attempts to salvage unregulated capitalist greed.
Voters, many of whom lost 20% of their retirement in the weeks leading up to the election, could no longer pretend that “trickle-down economics” was anything other than a ruse for racism. Obama won the election with 365 electoral votes, the most any nominee has received since.
Removing the Hood
As much as has been made about how Trump descending the escalator in 2015 ushered in a new era of darkness and cynicism in politics, his ascension has offered the gift of clarity. They are no longer expending as much energy pretending. There’s still a veil, but it is thinner than the layer of foundation on the president’s face.
Recasting positive terms such as “woke” and “DEI” as racialized perjoratives, though, only scratches the surface of the White House communications strategy. Hateful attacks on immigrants as “vermin” and heinous lies about trans children are now part of the menu of offenses against marginalized communities.
Sadly, it appears the Democrats are working on a revision of the Clinton strategy from the 90s to regain political control.
‘Working People’
In the year since the 2024 election, the accepted narrative among many Democrats about why they lost has centered around economic issues. A week after the election, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders wrote that the Democratic Party had “abandoned the working class people.” In her Democratic response to Trump’s State of the Union address, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin focused on proverbial “kitchen table issues.”
On its surface and to a degree, the impulse to highlight the financial situation of individuals, families and communities isn’t a bad one. However, several implications at play make the strategy feel eerily similar to the one Lee Atwater described almost 45 years ago. The obvious one is that in turning toward economic issues, Democrats believe they should turn away from “social issues” such as civil rights for marginalized communities.
This ignores several realities, chief among which is that Kamala Harris’ campaign focused almost exclusively on economic issues. That’s not to say she wasn’t at least a little tone deaf to the discomfort people were feeling at the grocery store as she sought to highlight the strides in the post-pandemic economy. Even so, she didn’t just run away from progressive social issues in favor of the economy; she also downplayed the gender and racialized realities of her historic candidacy.
The movement toward “working class voters” and “kitchen table” issues is no longer geared to a geographic region, but still employs new dog whistles for old forms of bigotry. It silently presumes racialized individuals fighting for their rights aren’t “working class” and folks with LGBTQ+ identities don’t sit around kitchen tables stressing over bills.
One of the most concerning aspects of this shift is that Democrats appear poised to surrender progress made by the queer community to the evangelicals who are working in lock-step with the president to push them back into closets. This summer, Rahm Emanuel told Megyn Kelly that he didn’t believe in the existence of trans individuals. Emanuel served as Obama’s Chief of Staff and is considering a 2028 bid for president.
Even former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, arguably the highest profile LGBTQ+ individual in politics, has echoed anti-trans talking points about “fairness in sports.” Although his remarks were focused on the extremely small scope and localized nature of the subject, they contained echoes of the “states’ rights” justifications employed to justify Jim Crow.
As the Democrats appear poised to deny they ever knew anything about diversity, equity and inclusion, it will become crucial for people of good faith to double down on their prophetic witness. It will be especially important for faith communities that follow in the way of Jesus to embrace the immigrant, the stranger, and those with their backs against the wall.
This isn’t about embracing an “agenda” to win an election. Protecting the dignity of all people has rarely been a winning electoral issue. Also, God’s embrace of all people isn’t an agenda; it is a divine call.
There is no trans agenda. There are trans people seeking to live their lives freely and safe from harm.
There is no DEI agenda. There are people seeking to overcome the systems that have been designed to hold them back.
There is no woke agenda. There are people urgently proclaiming, “Wake up!”
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
