Did Trump Pull off His Own Version of the Southern Strategy?
Back in the late 60s, Nixon and Goldwater made a plan to take advantage of white grievance in the otherwise solidly Democratic South, completely reshaping what both Democrats and Republicans looked like for decades to come. What always blew my mind about this was how few Republicans today acknowledge this realignment. You can still find endless posts about how Republicans are the “party of Lincoln” and that Democrats are the “real racists.” For someone who doesn’t pay much attention to politics, it would seem insane that two parties would completely flip their stances on race and civil rights so rapidly. It would sound like a conspiracy theory to them. Why would a politician ever cynically take advantage of racial grievance like that?
I think Trump successfully pulled off our generation’s version of the Southern Strategy - not exclusively taking advantage of racial grievance, in this case, since the great shift itself actually accomplished the opposite: the once solidly white Republican party is more diverse than it was four or eight years ago. And where the working class was once the bedrock of the Democrats, now we see union leaders choosing Trump over the Democrats. Trump cynically grabbed two key demographics that the Democrats have taken for granted for decades. And just like the civil rights era provided enough social change for political alliances to shift, the rapid social change around the pandemic provided enough chaos for this to happen today.
Trump’s team picked their own grievances that they knew would split the party: trans issues and working class aesthetics. I say “aesthetics” because materially, Trump offers the working class nothing more than “vibes”. He makes the working class feel seen, something the Democrats have failed to do for a long time.
Steven Teles said something on the Ezra Klein show this week that stuck out to me on this topic:
“Part of the problem with the Democratic Party is that liberalism has a lot of what…I’ve called “advocacy organizations” rather than “representative organizations”. That is, they’re groups that claim to speak for populations that they themselves have not mobilized or organized. And that part of the coalitional etiquette of the Democratic Party is not really questioning the basis of many groups to speak for the groups that they’re claiming to speak for.”
Trump absolutely took advantage of this failure on the left. And like a frog boiling in water, it didn’t happen overnight, so it was hard to see where exactly we went too far. I’d argue that this growing chasm roughly corresponds with the movement of educated people to cities over the past three decades or so, and I’m not even sure anyone in particular is to “blame” for this. I’ll just say that there was an obvious vulnerability on the left, and Trump took advantage of it, because there was something that these right-shifting voting blocs wanted that we were not offering.
We can talk for hours about how “working-class vibes” is not a policy platform – of course it isn’t. But populism isn’t about policy platforms – it’s 1% reality, and 99% vibes. And since there wasn’t some massive civil rights bill to rally a bunch of racists against, Trump chose trans issues as the next best scapegoat, even though it affects practically nobody in the Republican party nearly as much as his economic policy will.
Just like the Southern strategy was a cynical move to literally take advantage of racist Democrats to benefit Republicans, Trump’s strategy was a cynical move to take advantage of feelings of alienation among the working class without doing anything to help the working class. Whether this was just a narcissistic instinct or a legitimate lesson from history, Trump absolutely pulled off his own “Southern Strategy” by taking advantage of a vulnerability that a lot of us were unwilling to admit existed. And I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that we can put Trump in the same camp as Nixon and fucking Barry Goldwater here.
What I urge people to take away from this is to accept that we can never take the working class or identity politics for granted in the Democratic Party ever again. We can’t engage in the doublethink of the Republican who supports racist policies while claiming they’re the party of Lincoln. And to be fair, Republicans shouldn’t engage in the doublethink of believing they both represent and meaningfully support the working class. But for Democrats specifically, we can’t say we support the working class unless we both advocate for them and truly represent them. Trans issues were just an easy wedge to fit in that gap. We may spend years figuring out what the Democratic party should do to remedy this, but I hope that we can individually, at least, come at this with open eyes as to what happened and what will continue to happen as our political order is reformed.
Also, Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you have the pleasure of discussing all of this over dinner tomorrow. Everyone will love it, I’m sure.
