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Lee Atwater and the Left’s Southern Strategy Suicide
Part 1
RTS Admin & Daniel Shuster
July 19, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
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 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.”
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.
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.”[…]
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:
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