Reagan: Did he exploit white racism?

last updated 8 January 2015

Of all the lies being told this election season, said David Brooks in The New York Times, the biggest concerns Ronald Reagan. In recent months, left-wing pundits seeking to discredit the president who created the Republican majority have revived an old slur that Reagan got elected by exploiting white racism. He did this, supposedly, by kicking off his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil-rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. During Reagan’s speech, which was mostly about the economy and inflation, he said, “I believe in states’ rights.” Liberals claim that by using the phrase “states’ rights’’—which Southern politicians had long used to justify segregation—Reagan was signaling to white bigots that “he was on their side.” But while it was “callous’’ to use the phrase in Mississippi, it was a one-time mistake. “Any fair-minded look at Reagan’s biography and record demonstrates that he was not a bigot,’’ said Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, also in the Times. When Reagan crushed Jimmy Carter in a landslide that fall, “Neshoba had nothing to do with it.”

That argument is both absurd and naïve, said Bob Herbert in the Times. It relies on the assumption that Reagan, “an absolute master at the use of symbolism,” wasn’t aware of the veiled message inherent in the term “states’ rights.’’ In reality, his use of that fraught phrase is consistent with his entire political career, which was full of hostile stands on racial issues. Reagan opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, as president, “actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” He also stood against making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday and vetoed sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime. Reagan’s apologists insist that he wasn’t personally prejudiced, said Paul Krugman in the Times. Who cares? “We’re talking about his political strategy,” and that strategy was repellent.

In winking to Southern bigots, Reagan was only following a long-established Republican script, said Eric Rauchway in The New Republic. After Democrats began taking small steps toward civil rights and integration in 1948, the white South began migrating to Republicans. Richard Nixon perfected that “Southern strategy’’ in his 1968 campaign. So there’s really no point in parsing Reagan’s words in Mississippi or in relating personal anecdotes about how much he really liked black people. The issue isn’t complicated: “If you go to Mississippi and use the same words used by every redneck, you’re either stupid or you’re courting the bigots.’’