The overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Republicans’ right-wing Supreme Court majority marks a massive and most likely irreversible victory for a party long bent on returning the United States to the policies and hierarchies of the antebellum South for political gain. GOP strategists have, for over half a century, knowingly harnessed white fears of a Black planet to nostalgic fantasies of an Edenic pre-Civil War era. A time when putatively straight, white, Christian men ruled with impunity, commandeering the bodies, lives, and labor of all those around them—women, children, workers, slaves—without anyone challenging their dominance or, crucially, making them feel bad.
The so-called “Southern Strategy,” which used coded language to galvanize white voters’ racism into support for presidential candidates who richly rewarded wealthy supporters at the expense of the middle class and any semblance of workers’ rights, or a social safety net, has worked like a charm. Former President Richard Nixon’s evocation of “the silent majority” and his calls for “law and order.” Former President Ronald Reagan’s conjuring of “welfare queens” and “young Black bucks” and his stoking of a “war on drugs” that flooded U.S. prisons with non-violent, first-time drug offenders of color, then privatized them, awarding huge contracts to Republican supporters and donors.
One might say that the Southern Strategy reached its full potential thanks to former President Donald Trump. He gifted his party with the realization that you can and should abandon even the pretense of dog-whistling in favor of saying the quiet part aloud—the better to summon the hounds.
