“I’m no expert on Rusher, but if as you seem to imply, Rusher here talks about Nixon’s so-called Southern strategy, I would recommend to you D’Souza’s new movie, “Death of a Nation” which, among other things, debunks that.”
Sure, because Dinesh knows so much more than the people who actually knew Nixon. Including some who designed the 1968 campaign and strategy.
“The two books I reviewed in the March 24 TAC, Alfred Regnerys Upstream and Donald Critchlows The Conservative Ascendancy, both offer some interesting background on what became the Southern strategy. Regnery argues that National Reviews Bill Rusher had outlined the strategy as early as February 1963, noting that (in Regnerys words), a conservative Republican with support in the Midwest and West could make inroads into the solidly Democratic South because of Southerners discomfort with the civil rights movement and thus eke out a presidential victory.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/2008/04/03/secret-origins-of-the-southern-strategy/
“Having made his intentions known, Nixon dialed up the charm. In January 1967 he invited Buckley, Bill Rusher (publisher of National Review), and other members of the conservative media to his sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment. There he exhibited his virtuosic command of foreign and domestic policy. Rusher remained unmoved Rusher would always remain unmoved when it came to Nixon but Buckley? There was no surer way to Buckleys heart than a vigorous display of intellect and insight. As Neal Freeman, Buckleys personal aide, recalled: I knew when we went down the elevator, early in the evening, that Bill Buckley was going to find some reason to support Richard Nixon. True, Nixon was no conservative, but the heart wants what it wants. And a smart, experienced, electable Republican was exactly what Buckley wanted in a 1968 candidate. More than a year before the election, he was recommending Nixon as the wisest Republican choice.
https://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/richard-nixons-model-campaign/
“In 1968, the political experts were all looking in the wrong place, just as they would do in 2016. The young, the antiwar groups, the mass demonstrations, Buchanan remembers. But Nixons men picked up a different signal: The center was being ignored and was there for the grabbing. You could carve off the conservative wing of the Democratic party, populist and conservativeNorthern Catholics and Southern Protestants we called them thenand bring them into the Republican party of Goldwater and Nixon. A few liberal Republicans would flee, but the GOP would wind up with the larger half of the country. Out of this came Nixons 1972 landslide, on a scale unthinkable today: 60 percent of the vote, forty-nine states.
“To hear Buchanan sift through this, with his easy command of electoral numbers and voting trends, is to feel how thin and hollow our politics has become. Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants still exist in America, but you wouldnt know it. They have been crowded into an undifferentiated blurwhite and Christian, with no shadings. But Nixons men grew up in a denser geography of ethnic difference, full of prickles and thorns. They used terms like lower-middle-class Irish Catholic: Daniel Patrick Moynihans description of Buchanan, in a letter sent when both were working for Nixon. The two were ideological foes but, when it came to elites, of one suspicious mind.
“Later accounts would cast all this as a politics of bitter polarization, the marshaling of resentments and grievances. And indeed it was, to a considerable extentthe whole secret of politicsknowing who hates who, as Kevin Phillips, a lawyer and the master strategist of Nixons new majority, summarized it at the time. Phillips was a prodigy who at fifteen had begun working out the intricacies of shifting voter allegiances going back to the nineteenth century. Even younger than Buchanan, he had gone on to work for Nixons 1968 campaign and in his administration. His 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, elevated voter analysis into a rarefied art. American voting patterns are a kaleidoscope of sociology, history, geography and economics, Phillips wrote. The threads are very tangled and complex, but they can be pulled apart. Phillips unknotted those threads in formulations like this: The sharpest Democratic losses of the 196068 period came among the Mormons and Southern-leaning traditional Democrats of the Interior Plateau.
http://buchanan.org/blog/pat-buchanan-tried-make-america-great-126773
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Dinesh has always had visions of grandeur.
But no foundation.
Thanks for a fascinating & informative post, seriously,
Feel free to tell me what the point of it is.