The Real Reagan Revolution
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, AlterNet. Posted June 10, 2004.
The Reagan revolution rolled back the clock to the
pre-civil rights days when blacks, minorities and
women knew their place.Story Tools
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BUY
In
1980,
the
throngs
that
packed
the
annual
County
Fair
in
Neshoba,
Mississippi,
the
area
made
infamous
with
the
murder
of three civil rights workers in 1964, buzzed with excitement at the prospect of a
speech by their special guest, Ronald Reagan. From the time he and Nancy arrived
at the nearby Meridian airport, he was greeted as a conquering hero. Thousands of
whites lined the road and cheered his motorcade from the airport to the fair
grounds. The Deep South was Reagan country, and white Mississippians regarded
Reagan as their native son.
In appearing at the fair, Reagan did something that neither conservative Republican
presidential candidate Barry Goldwater or President Richard Nixon did. He was the
first presidential candidate in the near century that the fair had been held to speak
at the event. Indeed, he deliberately and calculatedly chose the Neshoba Fair to
kick off his presidential campaign. When Reagan took the stage, with dozens of
Confederate flags festooning the fairground, the crowd chanted, "We want Reagan."
A beaming Regan shouted back, "There isn't any place like this anywhere." There
was thunderous applause, and rebel yells.
Reagan then got down to business. He tore into Washington bureaucrats, i.e. the
Democrats, big government and welfare. He then shouted the words that everyone
wanted to hear, "I believe in state's rights. I believe that we've distorted the
balance of our government by giving powers that were never intended in the
Constitution to the federal establishment."
The Reagan revolution didn't merely return America to a world in which God,
patriotism, rugged individualism, militant anti-communism and family values ruled
supreme. There was the ugly, and dark subtext; unspoken but understood, and
indeed anticipated, that the Reagan revolution would roll the clock back to the
pre-civil rights days when blacks, minorities and women knew their place.
Reagan, far more adroitly than Nixon, parlayed the forgotten American sentiment
and a sanitized image of the past into a powerful conservative ideological
movement. White Southerners joined with blue-collar ethnics who were fed up with
bussing, affirmative action and crime (always seen as committed by
African-Americans) to desert the Democratic Party in even bigger numbers than
during Nixon's campaigns. Reagan appealed to their fear that society was spinning
out of control and that the Democrats did not have the answers, and their hope
that a telegenic, conservative Republican could fulfill Nixon and Goldwater's promise
to reinstitute law and order, clamp down on "permissiveness" and restore prosperity.
But Reagan upped Goldwater and Nixon's ante. His first task was to eliminate the
remnants of the Great Society programs assailed by many whites as government
handouts to blacks. He didn't totally succeed. But he crippled funding and further
eroded public enthusiasm for social spending. During Reagan's first four years federal
expenditures on education and training, social services, public works, civilian
research and development plummeted forty percent.
Reagan fixated white Middle Americans on the government as pro-higher taxes,
pro-bureaucracy, pro-immigrant and especially pro-welfare and pro-rights of
criminals. He painted government as a destructive, bloated, inefficient white
elephant, weighting down the backs of Americans. He claimed that government
entitlement programs that benefited the poor were a crushing drain on the budget.
Though the big winners were the rich and corporations, and it racked up towering
deficits, many whites believed that Reagan tax cuts delivered them from big
government and big spending, and were a hammer to pound the Democrats for
supposedly selling out to "special interests" which came to mean blacks, the poor
and women.
Even though the Reagan revolution masked its racial appeals in code words, and
subtle messages, race was never far from the surface. In his autobiography, My
American Journey, Colin Powell called Reagan "insensitive" on racial issues. Reagan's
attack, though unsuccessful, on affirmative action programs, his refusal to meet
with the Congressional Black Caucus, his attempt to reduce the power of the Civil
Rights Commission over employment discrimination cases, his opposition to the
extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Reagan Attorney General, Ed Meese
complained that the bill discriminated against the South) were huge signals that the
assault on civil rights was a prime goal of his administration.
Reagan's frontal attack on government, social programs and civil rights insured
Republican wins in national elections and tightened the Republican party's iron-grip
on the South. President Bush more than the other Republican president has
benefited mightily from Reagan's Southern and unforgotten man strategy.
In the 2000 presidential election, he bagged the electoral votes of the Old
Confederate states, and secured the granite like backing of America's heartland.
Polls show that white males by whopping margins favor Bush over Kerry, and that's
not likely to change in November.
Civil rights, civil liberties, women's groups and liberal Democrats regard the Reagan
years as the most disastrous in modern times for civil rights and social programs. But
conservatives revel in the era and aura of Reagan. They should. His Southern
strategy, forgotten man pitch, and happy grin style of politics, guaranteed that
Republicans will dominate the South and mid-America for years to come.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. |
