Lee Atwater and the Left’s Southern Strategy Suicide
Part 1
A 1981 Lee Atwater attributed statement, the Atwater Abstraction, has for decades been a primary weapon used to prove Republican politics as inherently nefarious and based on pure evil. The abstraction made by the influential Republican campaign consultant is to the Left, as best-selling narrative writer Rick Perlstein1 says, a kind of “smoking gun.”
This smoking gun serves to confirm the self-anointed position of the Left atop their beloved moral hierarchy of American politics. It also serves to explain the reason for Republican electoral dominance while absolving Democrats of the inheritance of past racial politics via the alleged Republican “Southern Strategy.” Reagan and the Republicans didn’t have generational appeal, it was just racism!
The Left has convinced itself that this conversation is significant and that it cements the broader Party Switch mythology. They would be far better off and more effective, if they stopped pretending this conversation helped their case. It objectively doesn’t. The often-cited section is taken so far out of context that its intended use illustrates the objective opposite of what Atwater was conveying. If the Left wants to place so much authority on Atwater’s actual description of Republican strategy, they are undoing their whole narrative. But first, let’s start with the infamous vulgar out-of-context version:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Rick Perlstein version*
Even before getting into the wider context, simply adding a few surrounding lines already changes the meaning. Consider the more accurate section of the transcript with emphasis on what Perlstein et al. omits:
Atwater: Here's how I would approach that issue as a statistician or a political scientist, or as a psychologist, which I'm not, is how abstract you handle the race thing. In other words you start out, and now you don't quote me on this.
Questioner: All right, I won’t.
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger,' that hurts you, backfires, so you say stuff like ‘forced busing, states rights’ and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now you're talking about cutting taxes and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct [slurred speech possibly “often is”] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it, I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract and that coded, that we're doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. Do you follow me?
Because obviously sitting around saying, 'we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of lot more abstract than, 'nigger, nigger.' You know, so anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.
RTS Transcript with emphasis on typical ommissions.
What Perlstein leaves out and what is made clear throughout the rest of the recorded conversation is precisely the opposite of what the truncated Perlstein Abstraction intends to show.
Atwater’s answer begins with, “Here’s how I would approach that,” not how he did approach voters, because he’s speaking hypothetically. Atwater had already established that the 1980 campaign was not an appeal to racism, but Atwater was specifically prompted by the questioner to devise a reason why a racist would vote for Reagan. Atwater continually brags about how the 1980 Reagan campaign attracted southerners and blue-collar voters, previously thought to be George Wallace voters, without appealing to prejudice. This is the thesis for his entire “new southern strategy.” Atwater, in fact, is trying to argue that the Republican campaign “was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference.” Atwater makes several similar statements throughout the conversation:
“But the Reagans did not have to do a Southern strategy for two reasons. Number one, race was not a dominant issue. And number two, the mainstream issues in this campaign had been southern issues since way back in the ‘60s. So Reagan goes out and campaigns on the economics and on national defense, the whole campaign was devoid of any kind of racism, any kind of reference.”[…]
“The bottom line is it's a mainstream thing now [Southern politics], and it's not grounded in racism…”[…]
“[1980 campaign not having] ...anything to do with racism or the race question, but on economics and national defense it was [Carter’s] to lose.”[…]
“So in 1980 I think the crucial thing in 1980 is, number one, that the two dominant issues of Southern politics which had been race and party, meaning you had to be a Democrat to win, and it was pretty well resolved. And the main issues became the economy and national defense.”[…]
“[Republicans can]...create a legitimate black middle class and upper middle class. That voter, in my judgment, will be more likely to vote with his economic interest than he will anything else. And that is the voter that I think of just through a very slow, but very steady process of will go Republican.”[…]
“I'll say this, my generation, you're [and/or] my generation, will be the first generation of Southerners that won’t be prejudiced, totally.”[…]
RTS Transcript.
Atwater’s central point of the 40-minute conversation is that the South no longer votes based on race or prejudice, but instead, on economics and national defense. The questioners repeatedly challenged this position, trying to get Atwater to admit Reagan had hidden nefarious appeals, but Atwater explains how the South historically moved from racial segregation to voting based on broader issues due in part to Republicans’ breaking of the one-party system in the South.
The Atwater Abstraction is clearly not a confession of GOP strategy because in this scenario Atwater starts in 1954, and the GOP didn’t exist as a functioning party in the South in 1954.2 Needless to say, Republican presidential campaigns didn’t comprise of racial slurs as Atwater hypothetically described. They looked more like this:
In response to the hypothetical Abstraction, the questioner admiringly shares an anecdote about how Huey Long used the racism of some constituents to diminish job market discrimination. Atwater agrees with the analogy, aligning with his timeline of southern race relations moving from overt to abstract, and by 1980, detached.
We have no desire to spend our time defending Lee Atwater or his private remarks from 1981. Typically, we would disregard the entire recording for this and many other reasons, but the recording’s impact on the Left necessitates scrutiny. We do not rely on such frailties to form our interpretations of 20th-century politics as the Left embarrassingly does. In the end, it is just the opinion of one man, Lee Atwater, and the far more relevant topic is what happened in reality, not Atwater’s hypothetical abstractions.
Most of the over 40-minute rambling conversation is sloppy and filled with the simple messiness of extemporaneous back-and-forth. By its nature, it is a strange piece of evidence to rely on. What we at RTS consider real smoking guns can be found in the upcoming book Dismantled: The Party Switch Myth and in the RTS newsletter.
Another illustration of the absurdity of depending on this Atwater conversation is how Atwater’s state of mind seemingly diminishes with the passing of time and possible looseners partook. By the end of the conversation and numerous obvious slurred phrases, Atwater is nearly incoherent. Compare the lucidness near the beginning of the conversation:
Atwater: Okay, let's talk about what an issue is, Saul. When I talk about an issue… Say I'm a pollster, I ask an open-ended question, 'what's the biggest issue facing you today?' You poll 600 people and then you put on a continuum, 45-55% will say economics, 12% will say national defense, busing will not even register on the top ten. On an aggregate, busing hadn't been in the top ten of open-ended issue questions in any poll I've seen since 1972. And now it's gone.
RTS Transcript.
Now observe Atwater near the end of the conversation (with numerous breaks):
Atwater: No no, let me tell you. I think that we use tremendous opportunity only because the senate level gubernatorial and number one, state wide. In other words, I believe in kind of a [inaudible], you know presidential where, the senate, the governor, then congressional, then the state houses. I think that you have a situation because this fractured party that you have, like I said it's fractured, and the best candidate that best approaches and best identifies what the economic issues in national defense will win.
RTS Transcript.
By the end of the recording, it's our expert contention that Atwater is two and one-half sheets to the wind.
Before Atwater’s lights went out and after an Atwater history lesson, he dedicated considerable effort to establishing and claiming credit for his central thesis: that by 1980, the South had transitioned to prioritizing economic and national defense issues in their voting decisions, moving away from race-based motivations. He sought to showcase that this shift mirrored the rest of the country's political climate, aiming to minimize the significance of racial factors in shaping Southern voting patterns.
Atwater provided an example to illustrate how the racial issue in the South had diminished in his view. He recalled discussing the Voting Rights Act with Southern Republican State Chairmen, preparing to inform them that Reagan may disappoint any plans to update the enforcement of regulations specific to Southern states. These regulations, once highly contentious, no longer sparked the same level of interest:
Atwater: And I'll tell you another thing you all need to think about, that's even surprised me. It's the lack of interest, really, a lack of knowledge right now in the South among white voters on this Voting Rights Act. I brought all these Republican state chairmen up here to just kind of soothe them down and say, 'look before we have this meeting, look we may not do exactly what you all like.' And what I found out about it is all of them were very pacifists and 'we'll pretty well go along with whatever you want.' And I looked at polls in the last four to five months, and there's just no interest or no intensity on that thing among white voters.
Now, back in 1969, me bringing up, or Harry Dent, rather than me bringing up those southerners would have been a very big important thing, southerners would come up here with some kind of manifesto. That would have been a big major news story. Ongoing and all that shit.
RTS Transcript.
Atwater also boasts that his generation will be the first Southern generation not driven by prejudice. One can disagree with Atwater that this was the case, but it’s worth noting that Atwater appears to take genuine pride in this assertion.
All of this must be ignored to focus on what the conversation became famous for, which is twisted to mean the opposite of what Atwater was trying to convey due to the hypothetical nature of the statement. Still, even many on the Left acknowledged this to some extent in their reframing of the issue between the 2005 resurgence in the New York Times and the release of more context in 2012.
Bob Herbert of the New York Times was responsible for the 2005 resurgence and consistently framed the notorious statement like this:
“…Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.'s Southern strategy:…”
Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant, NYT, 2005.“…explained the evolution of the Southern strategy:...”
A Platform of Bigotry, NYT, 2006.“…explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:…”
The Ugly Side of the G.O.P., NYT, 2007.“…crucial to the success of the G.O.P.’s Southern strategy…”
Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?, NYT, Nov 2007.“...this [Republican] strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows:…”
The Howls of a Fading Species, NYT, 2009.
That was how the statement was originally published and how the Left generally views the Abstraction: as a confession of GOP actions. But after the release of additional context in 2012, the framing shifted:
“…explaining how to get racist whites to vote for Republicans.” [emphasis added]
Against All Odds“ Bob Herbert, PBS, 2017.“…Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist…” [emphasis added]
Rick Perlstein, The Nation, 2012.
This subtle distinction in framing by commentators like Herbert is noteworthy. Before 2012, they reported the Abstraction as a literal confession of Republican strategies to attract racist votes. After 2012, they described the Abstraction as a hypothetical scenario of how Republicans could have garnered racist votes. The pre-2012 descriptions read as matter-of-fact GOP actions, whereas post-2012, the framing shifts to hypothetical possibilities. The post-2012 still misrepresents the Abstraction but avoids being objectively false.
This new but still rare reframing of the Atwater Abstraction lacks context and reveals an intention to deceive the reader who will likely not understand the distinction. When commentators like Herbert and Perlstein are forced to confront the added context, they shift the framing.
The Atwater Abstraction is unambiguously not a description of Republican strategy as is endlessly claimed. At best it’s a hypothetical abstraction, wrapped in innuendo, dipped in whiskey. For this to be the Left’s “Southern Strategy” Exhibit A is revealing on its own, but to rely on this once unwrapped becomes self-defeating.
Atwater’s famous 1981 interview is not evidence yet it was the best the Left could do for the last 50 years. Without evidence, the Left’s charge that Republican politics relied on a racial “Southern Strategy” is nothing more than another drunk self-serving abstraction. The target of the Left's smoking gun now seems to be its own narrative.
Notes:
*We cite/blame Rick Perlstein because he is responsible for publishing the 2012 recording. Perlstein was the only one willing to publish the recording throughout its curious journey from 1981 to 2012 which is the subject of the upcoming Part 2 in this series.
Meade Alcorn Oral History, DDEL, 89-90.