Does No One Remember the Southern Strategy?

Jon Chait has a piece arguing that, while the Tea Party genuinely does not pursue a racist political agenda, Tea Party members do hold a distinctive and deeply regressive set of opinions about racial issues. They think, for example, that anti-white racism is as big a problem as anti-black racism much more than other people, or that too much has been made of the problems facing black Americans. But, Chait says (and as far as I know he's right about this), they don't push the racial part of their ideology very much at all as a part of their public agenda.

Uh, obviously.

That's the whole point of the Southern Strategy. When Nixon decided to make an explicit play for white Southern racist voters in '68, and especially in '72, the point was not to talk about race. Rather, it was to talk about other things like welfare or crime or whatever. To the untrained ear, this sounded like it was just Nixon pursuing his conservative, law-&-order agenda. But to the racist, it sounded like what it was meant as: "let's go get those welfare-dependent, law-breaking ******s!" Dog-whistle politics. The way to do racist politics is to not talk about race, but subtly hint, in a way that those who are racists themselves will recognize, that you will pursue anti-black policies, or just that you sympathize with the racists, or something.

So consider the Tea Party. Its members hold anti-black views much more than the general populace does. Their leaders like to spend a lot of time talking about how our President, who was born in Hawaii and spent most of his life in places like Chicago, is actually a foreigner and there's been a massive conspiracy to pretend he's an American. Or that our President, who both describes himself as Christian and appears to be much more comfortable than other recent Democrats when discussing his own faith, is in reality a secret Muslim. Both are claims that would never ever in a billion years be made against a white President. Sure, people made crazy accusations against Clinton, like the whole "murder" thing, but you can tell by the fact that the specific tone of Obama's crazy accusations that they're racially derived.

Finally we have the Tea Party's agenda. The thing about the Tea Party's agenda is that it's incoherent. The only constant that I've ever seen is that anything at all that President Obama supports is evil wicked socialism that will destroy the world, and must be opposed to the utmost. Giving states increased flexibility to implement health-care laws three years earlier than would otherwise happen, a proposal that there is literally no coherent argument against? Nope. Oppose it. Never mind that it literally is a Republican proposal, right now, let alone in 1994 or even two years ago. It's all a part of the creeping tyranny. To my mind, that kind of agenda suggests strongly a personal animus against Obama himself, and a very strong one. Hmmm, what might that animus be?

And, of course, to the extent that the Tea Party does actually have an agenda or an ideology, it's a carbon copy, if not a distillation, of the same old dog-whistle issues. To the brain of a racist, "let's cut government spending" means "let's cut government handouts to black people."

The birtherism stuff is racist. The "party members" themselves are relatively speaking racist. The agenda is designed to appeal to racial animus. In what way is this not a racist movement?

(Standard disclaimer: many who identify with the Tea Party are not racist at all; it's a large movement (in absolute terms) and therefore contains a large amount of variety and, well, okay, not much diversity, but you get the point. I'm talking in the aggregate here.)