‘Race mixing is communism,’ Little Rock (1959): accusations of Marxism are still used today against so-called ‘identity politics.’

1.

‘Identity politics,’ you can read or hear on the news, ‘is cancer.’ What is this ‘cancer’? As one Republican politician — Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas — put it,

It’s this temptation to divide us up into different groups. Whether that be based on race, gender, or some other category and then pit those groups against each other and compete for power accordingly.

This ‘divisive’ politics commits the deep sin of discussing politics in terms of ‘identities’ when, as Crenshaw puts it, the “only colors that matter are red, white, and blue.”

In the American Conservative, ‘identity politics’ is “a shameful attempt to separate Americans by identifying them primarily by where their ancestors came from,” while David French, for the National Review, claims that it is “ the mirror image of white supremacy.”

Where did this ‘cancer’ come from? According to some on the right, the story goes like this: as Marxism became unpopular in the West, the radical leftists of the 60s, still bent on revolution, turned to ‘identity’ instead of economics to achieve their goals: it “is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms,” claimed paleo-conservative William Lind in 1998, who identified as culprits the Frankfurt School (who are, “to a man, Jewish,” he helpfully adds).

Twenty years later, we are still told by important professors and politicians that ‘identity politics’ are dangerous, a genuine threat to civilization. Rather than the Jewish thinkers of the Frankfurt School, an idea with roots in anti-Semitic ‘cultural bolshevism,’ the new intellectual source for mainstream right-wingers is now ‘postmodernism’ — a dubious source given post-modern’s distinctive brand of skepticism towards all-encompassing systems.

Yet this narrative has gained cultural prominence in recent years. Obscure French thinkers are termed ‘reprehensible’ and ‘evil’ while retired Navy SEALs turned Texas Republicans breezily talk on Fox News of a “postmodern mentality” that wishes to “tear down Enlightenment ideals,” as if the Fox and Friends audience is familiar with either of these concepts. Dr. Jordan Peterson calls ‘identity politics’ a ‘Marxist lie’ in a 150 minute video with more than 2 million views; on his personal blog, he claims that

French intellectuals in particular just pulled off a sleight of hand and transformed Marxism into post-modern identity politics.

Similarly, Ben Shapiro, for the National Review, writes:

Realizing, however, that embracing Communism itself might alienate those who remember the Berlin Wall, today’s Marxists rally instead for identity politics.

Similar claims can be found in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, who writes that ‘identity politics’ — such as singling out institutional racism as a causal factor — is a “Marxist classic … spewed out by simpering Liberal apologists,” running together three very different political currents as one homogeneous enemy. But the point is clear: identity politics is Marxism by other means.

Of course, this reconstruction is more than confused. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a useful entry on ‘identity politics’, writing:

Rather than organizing solely around belief systems, programmatic manifestos, or party affiliation, identity political formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context.

Examples might include the civil rights movement of the 60s, or the gay rights movements of the 90s and 2000s, both of which have been successful to the extent that their successes are now unnoticed and uncontroversial. Such ‘formations’ are typically tactical and contextual, with specific goals that are related to issues — marriage, policing, access to health care and education — that flow from identity; it is gay couples who cannot marry, black men who are disproportionately jailed — how else to organize around these issues? For many, the instigating factor is less about their identity being a monolith than the experience of having been treated as monolithic — not as a person, but an instance.

Marxism is mentioned only in passing in the Stanford Encyclopedia, as critical of politics based on identity, which is seen by Marxists as

factionalizing and depoliticizing, drawing attention away from the ravages of late capitalism toward superstructural cultural accommodations that leave economic structures unchanged.

But it is not my intent here to ‘disprove’ the putative link between Marxism, post-modernity, and identity politics; others have done this better than I could already in any event, and there are always tendrils of historical influence that can be used as ‘evidence’ of the theory. It is also a story presented in bad faith, for the political traction accusations of ‘Marxist’ gain — in 1959, or today.

Rather, I wish to address a specific historical diagnosis that the ‘identity politics’ narrative from the right offers. On this view, sometime in the late 1960s or ealy 1970s, as the horrors of Communist rule became apparent to even the most radical Marxists, the left abandoned class and economic issues in favor of identity in order to better foment their stalled ‘revolution.’ In doing so, they lost broad popular support, especially among American whites, as they no longer cared about ‘universal’ issues of concern to all. No matter; the divide and conquer strategy would, in time, yield power.

This basic story is told, for instance, by Peterson in massive best-seller 12 Rules for Life, writing that even after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1972, “the fascination Marxist ideas had for intellectuals — particularly French intellectuals … merely transformed,” with these ‘post-modern Neo-Marxists’ simply substituting ‘oppression’ for ‘class.’

The radicalism of the late 60s and early 70s are a critical time for this new story. In her influential treatment of the politics of online ‘chan’ culture, Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle claims the turning point for the left came when the AFL-CIO — the largest labour organization in the United States — declined to endorse George McGovern, Democratic candidate, against Nixon in 1972, because of ‘identity politics’ (a term which did not even exist):

By the 1972 presidential campaign, the AFL-CIO abstained from supporting the democratic candidate … because they saw him as a sell-out to identity politics. This was because of the party’s adoption of ‘new politics’ designed to bring identity groups to the forefront of politics while moving away from the centrality of economic equality. (Nagle, Kill all Normies, 61)

Nagle is, unfortunately, buying into the right’s revisionist history. It is easy to verify the record on her specific claims.

Why did the ALF-CIO decline to endorse the Democratic candidate? George Meaney, then AFL-CIO president, publicly opposed McGovern on Vietnam, calling him “an apologist for the communist world,” and supported the war until 1975; this, not identity politics, was the major cause behind the AFL-CIO’s decision.

Meany in fact asked the executive council of the AFL-CIO to not endorse either candidate, and they only acquiesced out of respect for the labour leader’s long-standing record:

However, the labor leaders say that the executive council is deeply split and will support Mr. Meany only as a gesture of confidence in the 77‐year‐old labor leader, not because they share his views on the Democratic party ticket.

Nixon’s 1972 re-election bid was propped up by a strong economy and decreasing American casualties in Vietnam; McGovern, meanwhile, had also voted against repealing sections of the Taft-Hartley Act that allowed states to pass ‘right to work’ legislation prohibiting closed union shops which many union members, including Meany, bitterly remembered.

That being said, let’s take a historical journey back to Nixon and the late 60s / early 70s, because there was a very real turning point here. And, better yet, it has to do ‘identity politics.’ Recall Rep. Crenshaw’s definition:

What is identity politics? It’s this temptation to divide us up into different groups. Whether that be based on race, gender, or some other category and then pit those groups against each other and compete for power accordingly.

This definition of ‘identity politics,’ rather distinct from the Stanford Encyclopedia’s, was certainly in play.

It was not a post-modernist or Marxist creation; but it did shift political focus away from economic issues.

And it did create a small revolution.

2.

‘The Political Bible of the Nixon Era,’ (1969).

Nearly fifty years ago, in May of 1970, the New York Times ran a profile of a man named Kevin Phillips.

Phillips was a Republican strategist who had worked for Nixon’s successful 1968 Presidential campaign and he had written a book called The Emerging Republican Majority. In it, he laid out the path Republicans, like himself, strategist Harry Dent Sr., and others had found to Nixon’s historic victory: the ‘Southern Strategy.’

Despite the previous election’s democratic landslide for Lyndon B. Johnson, Phillips predicted that

…just around the corner was an inevitable cycle of Republican dominance that would begin in the late 1960s and prosper until the advent of the 21st century.

Phillips was right.

Republicans won seven presidencies from 1968 to 2004, while the Democrats only won three: Carter and Clinton. Carter won essentially because of Nixon’s resignation, serving one term before losing badly to Ronald Reagan.

Clinton’s win in 1992 required a third-party run by Ross Perot (who garnered nearly 20% of the vote), a severe recession, and Clinton outflanking opponent George H.W. Bush on the right on issues of crime and social spending. It was Clinton, after all, that put an “end to welfare as we know it,” and then escalated the drug war to new heights with a controversial 1994 crime bill, written by Joe Biden and defended by Hillary Clinton (who claimed it was needed to protect the community against black ‘superpredators’).

What happened in 1968 and 1972?

Since 1932, Democrats had held together a coalition premised around Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal.’ Roosevelt had announced in his nomination speech that he would “resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small” by implementing wide-ranging social assistance and welfare programs.

Using rhetoric unimaginable today, Roosevelt went on to say that

Our Republican leaders tell us economic laws — sacred, inviolable, unchangeable — cause panics which no one could prevent. But while they prate of economic laws, men and women are starving. We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Forged in the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal program created a democratic coalition that lasted three decades, promising meaningful economic reform, federal emergency relief funds, protection for labour organizing (the ‘Wagner Act’), social security, housing security, major public works projects, and, eventually, civil rights legislation.

With Nixon it all unraveled. Why?

The explanation is simple: the Civil Rights Act. Identity politics. The night it was signed, journalist and then-White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers described President Lyndon Johnson as ‘melancholy’:

When he signed the act, he was euphoric, but late that very night I found him in a melancholy mood as he lay in bed reading the early edition of The Washington Post with headlines celebrating the day. I asked him what was troubling him. “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come,” he said.

There’s a great historical irony to the conservative complaint that the left has capitulated to ‘identity politics.’ In a narrow sense, they are correct, but it was less capitulation than defeat: it was precisely the white identity politics of the right, which exploited racial and ethnic identity for electoral gains, that dismantled class-based New Deal politics.

The process had already began before Nixon. In 1964, the first Republican to win a seat in Mississippi, Prentiss Walker — who had unseated an 11-term Democratic incumbent — celebrated his victory with a speech for a group called Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. Before that, in 1961, John Tower became the first post-reconstruction Texas Republican Senator on a segregationist platform, voting against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It’s true: identity politics defeated class. White identity.

Kevin Phillips lays it all out it in The Emerging Republican Majority.

Phillips’ theory was that simmering ethnic tensions could be exploited to turn ‘ethnic whites’ — a term he used to describe descendants of immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe (including Italians, Slavs, Poles and Irish) — into Republicans.

As the New York Times helpfully summarized in 1970, Phillips’ election strategy was “premised on the alleged hostility” of ethnic whites “towards Jews, Negroes and affluent Yankees.” This would be weaponized and translated into electoral gains by portraying bedrock New Deal programs as handouts to undeserving, lazy minorities. It is not known whether he was studying Marx or French post-modernists when he devised this theory.

The result?

Let’s look at the prediction first, and see: “When the political realignment that Phillips foresees has truly come to pass,” New York Times book reviewer Warren Weaver jr. writes, in 1969, “the Democratic party will consist largely of treacherous yankees, Negroes, Jews, some stubborn Scandinavians, and the liberal establishment” — characterized by Phillips as a “privileged elite, blind to the needs and interests of the large national majority.”

You couldn’t have predicted Reagan, Birtherism, the Tea Party, or Trump, better than this.

Nixon was in some ways a centrist, but — especially in 1972 — toured on a racially-coded ‘law and order’ platform that promised police suppression of protests as race riots burned the country in the wake of violent push-back against civil rights gains, including the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nixon also promised to end perceived ‘handouts’ to black Americans, influenced by a study written by sociologist Daniel Patrick Moyhnihan — whose thesis was that

the steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Nixon took this as a guide to welfare policy on the campaign, abandoning Lyondon Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ for a war on the poor. This is all because Phillip’s campaign strategy required “full racial polarization,” as Weaver jr., notes, seeking to create the perception of

…a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because this will drive into the Republican party precisely the kind of anti-Negro whites who will help constitute the emerging majority.

Finally, Weaver jr. concludes,

It is not a little depressing to read a serious 480-page book on politics based largely on the theory that deep divisive conflicts between black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Irishman, East and South are immutable, that such differences cannot be harmonized, and that the politician should thus play upon them to his own advantage.

Depressing or not, white identity politics (recall Crenshaw’s useful definition: “divide us up into different groups … and then pit those groups against each other and compete for power”) resonated with voters. For instance, the Spokane Daily Chronicle, August 13th, 1968, wrote

…many an American clutched their wallets to his breast when Nixon took a stand against costly welfare programs for schemes and huge government programs for black Americans “which perpetuate dependency” …. there was fervent receptiveness for the view that all black people need, to be free, equal, and affluent, is to work hard and become private entrepreneurs.

Of course, the exhortation to become ‘entrepreneurs’ in an era where being black meant being systematically denied credit, educational opportunities, and permits should not be construed as ignorant, but malicious. It was only 47 years before these remarks, in 1921, that the ‘Tulsa Race Riot’ destroyed 35 square blocks of black-owned businesses in Oklahoma.

It should be noted that explicit segregationist George Wallace, cast out of the Democratic party, won five southern states in 1968 for the American Independent Party. Wallace’s campaign is often as evidence that the Republicans under Nixon were not, in fact, capitalizing on backlash from the Civil Rights Act — that was Wallace.

This is not quite right: Wallace was for those voters who still believed things could go back to the way they were. Cannier voters knew the Jim Crow era was done, and with Nixon (who declared, in 1971, the ‘war on drugs’) a post-segregation racial politics could be founded. As Kevin Philips wrote, “We’ll get two-thirds to three-fourths of the Wallace vote in nineteen seventy-two.” They did.

Nixon handily won in 1968, and was re-elected in a landslide electoral college victory in 1972, carrying the entire South — a first for a Republican.

And so here we are: 50 years later, where a minor school board election in Georgia that elected black candidates can led to a major resurgence of white Republican voters:

…it sparked another unexpected reaction along racial lines. Before 2010, there wasn’t a local Republican Party politics to speak of in the county. Fewer than 200 people voted in the 2006 GOP primary, most of them white. But in 2018, there were 1,253 white voters who took part in the Republican primary. And turnout among white voters in Brooks County in 2018 was at its highest level in two decades, with 60 percent turnout, up from a norm of roughly 50 percent in midterm elections before 2010. The 2010 election “woke us up,” Cunningham told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It became obvious that you couldn’t sit down and be a Republican but then vote in a Democratic primary.”

Identity politics, triumphant.

3.

“ If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Lyndon B. Johnson

All this is, of course, more famously known as the Southern Strategy: the post-Civil Rights defection of Southern whites to the Republican party, who promised to turn back the clock — or, at least, resist the changing times. But we should think of the Southern Strategy as identity politics in Rep. Crenshaw’s sense — or, as Jordan Peterson might put it, reprehensible ‘collectivism.’

Kevin Phillips was not the only architect of the Southern Strategy, but was perhaps its least sentimental practitioner. He put the strategy to work early on, helping flip a Bronx, N.Y. congressional district in the 1966 mid-term elections, openly gerrymandering the district and turning it into “a laboratory of ethnic politics” in order to test his theory in advance of the 1968 election:

Most voters, [Phillips] had found, still voted on the basis of ethnic of cultural enmities that could be graphed, predicted and exploited. The old bitterness towards Protestant Yankee Republicans that had for generations made democrats out of Irish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants had now shifted, among their children and grandchildren, to resentment of the new immigrants — Negroes and Latinos — and against the national Democratic party, whose Great Society programs increasingly seemed to reflect favoritism for the new minorities over the old.

These ‘ethnic politics,’ in other words, ushered in an era of Republican dominance that still pays dividends today. Even ‘centrist’ Democrats have swung further and further to the right. And Trump’s presidency, just like the Tea Party, owes a significant debt to this exact dynamic.

In political science research, the phenomenon is called ‘racial resentment’ or ‘symbolic racism,’ characterized as a set of attitudes and prejudices rather than explicitly discriminatory laws. These prejudices typically include the belief that discrimination no longer exists; lack of progress is the fault of minorities; minorities, especially blacks, are making unreasonable demands; and minorities have already received more than they deserve.

How does racial resentment play out in policy terms? It’s not about explicit support for discriminatory policies; but, for instance, the Washington Post found that Republican voters were less likely to support the same mortgage assistance program when presented with a picture of a black person than a white person.

Racial resentment strongly predicts Republican support, Tea Party support, and Trump Support, more than socioeconomic status or educational attainment. You can read the research yourself; here’s a sample, to get started:

As ‘Understanding White Polarization’ notes,

while economic considerations were an important part of the story, racial attitudes and sexism were much more strongly related to support for Trump … the economic variables in our models were significantly associated with vote choice, those effects were dwarfed by the relationship between hostile sexism and denial of racism and voting for Trump (pp. 10, 24).

It is a politics premised entirely on identity, ethnicity, racial animosity, and racial resentment. It is, in other words, everything the conservative claims leftist ‘identity politics’ is, except for one thing: it has actually delivered elections for a half-century. White identity politics holds the reins of power in the United States.

And while these attitudes do not directly correlate to endorsement of explicitly discriminatory or ‘Jim Crow’ laws, they do result in policies that indirectly target minorities, including voter ID laws that are effective voter suppression mechanisms among minority groups, policing that targets black neighborhoods, and government spending cuts that affect middle-class black jobs.

The democratic party has been hobbled, ever since, by white identity politics. After the particularly disastrous re-election of Ronald Reagan in 1984, the Democratic National Committee spent millions trying to find out why they lost so badly. As the New Republic writes,

…the DNC sponsored several research surveys, including one that has been estimated, at that time, to be the most expensive study commissioned in its history … In focus groups, whites from the south and northern ethnic enclaves described the Democratic Party as the “give away party, giving white tax money to blacks and poor people.” As political scientist Robert Smith has argued, the explicit racist content of Kotler and Rosenbaum’s report proved so embarrassing [the DNC] suppressed its release and had nearly all of the existing copies destroyed.

[Author’s note: Attempt to locate a copy of this report have failed, but several sources contacted about the document have confirmed its existence and suppression.]

In essence, the Democratic party did not abandon class or economic issues; class abandoned them. The problem was that they could no longer hold a political coalition together with class-based policies in the face of deliberately calculated appeals to race and white ethnic identity by the right.

Steinbeck famously said that socialism never took root in America because the poor viewed themselves, one and all, as ‘temporarily embarrassed millionaires.’ It’s a memorable turn of phrase, but inaccurate.

The dark cleft at the heart of American politics was and is race; the real problem with universal social programs is that, by virtue of its universality, it benefits the ‘undeserving,’ which is code for racial minorities. White tax dollars to black health care will never happen.

4.

Jackson, Missisippi (1964).

Phillips was unapologetic about his ‘ethnic’ approach, and openly derided what he viewed as ‘moralizing’ critics of his theory: it had won the presidency, hadn’t it? He made it clear to the New York Times that Republican electoral success relied on exploiting racial tensions between whites and nonwhites, saying

From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need any more than that … The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

This openly racial strategy was not of course not unique or even entirely original to Phillips; he was just being unusually candid in a public forum. Just as President Donald Trump is unusually candid.

Exploiting racial animosity has been the governing model of most Republicans following the defection of ‘Dixiecrats’ — Southern democrats opposed to the civil rights movement — who would eventually switch to the Republican Party, with George Wallace as a way-station. ‘State’s rights’ in this context has always been a racial dogwhistle: the state’s right to continue enforcing piecemeal racial segregation (against forced busing, for instance) in defiance of the federal government. It took the Civil Rights Act to make this kind of politics successful, but there are precedents.

Perhaps the first serious attempt at leveraging white ethnic politics to destroy ‘New Deal’ class politics is so-called ‘right to work’ legislation, which owes much of its prominence to racist Texan oil-industry lobbyist Vance Muse.

As union membership soared in the 1920s and 1930s, Muse pushed for ‘right to work,’ that is, open shops, finally securing the first such bill in Texas by 1947. Muse did so by openly equating unions with “race-mixing” and communism, saying

From now on, white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.

Muse and his organization, the “Christian American Association, Inc.” engaged in race-baiting tactics trying to defeat unions and the ‘new deal’ coalition. Muse spent most of his career opposing woman’s suffrage, child labour laws, the 8-hour workday and civil rights for blacks. As he wrote, in a letter to the Texas Republican Party in 1943,

The negro question plus incapable leadership has prevented many citizens from openly affiliating with the Republican party in Texas in the past but since the Democratic party has largely been transformed into the Black New Deal party this question should no longer be an issue.

Even in 1943 the portrayal of Democratic ‘New Deal’ programs as somehow demonstrating favoritism to blacks — before the civil rights era, as segregation, lynching, and Jim Crow continued — had political traction. Muse felt the winds changing.

Muse’s sister, treasurer of his lobbying organization, passed along dark rumours to the papers of black servants organizing under the guise of so-called ‘Eleanor Clubs,’ named after first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying

$15 a week salary for all n*gger house help, Sundays off, no washing, and no cleaning upstairs. . . . My n*gger maid wouldn’t dare sit down in the same room with me unless she sat on the floor at my feet!

The strategy, as it was with Nixon, was to break the New Deal coalition and destroy the Democrats’ appeal to a multi-racial working-class voters by stoking ethnic fears, white supremacy, and racial resentment. This would prevent working-class blacks and whites from making common cause. The effectiveness of this course of action is amply demonstrated in the one true American exceptionalism: the only first-world country without universal healthcare, maternity leave, or worker protection from unfair dismissal.

Vance Muse was highly motivated and had the backing of wealthy oil industry donors. However, the strategy he applied did not come to full fruition for another 20 years, after the Civil Rights Act.

And just last year, the Supreme Court decided that ‘Right to Work’ was within the purview of “States’ Rights” with the disastrous decision in Janus.

Muse would be proud.

Of course none of this is exactly unique to the late 20th-century. Explicitly racist politics haunts the history of the United States, never fully exorcised, receding and reappearing in a cycle not unlike the titular monster of Stephen King’s IT.

Prior to Vance Muse and Kevin Philips, there was the Lily-White Movement’s campaign to purge black Republicans from the party during reconstruction, culminating in total black disenfranchisement and segregation.

From a brief moment in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War blacks in America has made real gains — only to be immediately rolled back when Federal troops were pulled from the South and an antebellum system of repression was put in place that persisted until the 1950s.

The optimism of Reconstruction was quickly replaced with the ‘Nadir’ of American race relations: a time of lynching, outright massacres, and wholesale destruction of black property and lives that lasted perhaps as long as fifty years. Its legacy persists even today in the form of the war on drugs: “the new Jim Crow,” as Michelle Alexander calls it.

As should be clear by now, the common story about radical leftist or ‘cultural Marxist identity politics’ issuing from the left in the 60s and breaking up the ‘new deal’ coalition gets it completely backwards: the white ‘ethnic politics’ of the right dismantled it, succeeding wildly from the Civil Rights Act on.

The narrative of ‘identity politics’ is itself a product of white ethnic politics: it claims that the politics of other minority groups are uniquely illegitimate and falsely associates universal policies with ‘minority’ benefits.

No proponent of the identity politics moral panic has ever condemned, in their histories of collectivist calumny, the Southern Strategy, Kevin Phillips, the Tea Party, or Donald J. Trump. Careful custodians of a cabinet of Communist atrocity, they are silent on the white collectivism intrinsic to ‘Manifest Destiny,’ Jim Crow and the American eugenics movement. When the political right stokes racial tension to deepen the cleavages within American society on the basis of group and ethnic identity it is never criticized as a dangerous form of collectivism.

Only when the left’s emancipatory politics carry the faint whiff of demographic concern do the torches come out. And then there is no mention of the arguments of their opponents: no discussion of Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, or even the Department of Justice’s own Ferguson Report. As far as the intellectual dark web is concerned, college kids, tumblr posts and Jacques Derrida pull-quotes comprise the intellectual depth of the enemy.

The ‘cancer’ of the Southern Strategy grows in the American body politic: Trump’s explicitly racist rhetoric and far-right online radicalization has helped create an ongoing set of ‘stochastic terrorists’ that have now murdered hundreds. Over 90% of ideologically motivated homicides in the US since 2002 were carried out by far-right terrorists and white supremacists. Nathan Robinson, at Current Affairs, writes of a ‘descent into cruelty’ in American politics, most of it directed at minorities.

By taking the fight to ‘identity’ the left is acknowledging the reality, and historical priority, of white ethnic politics. To defeat white collectivism is to set the preconditions for a meaningful return of class solidarity. This may be with us sooner than we think.

________________________

Post-script. Many conservatives deny there was any such thing as the ‘Southern Strategy.’ For instance, the ‘PragerU’ series of videos features one episode claiming it is an invention of liberal academics long after the fact. This is profoundly ahistorical and simply false, as Princeton professor of History Dr. Kevin Kruse points out on twitter.

That being said, there are many details omitted in my already long piece, most prominently surrounding the 1968 the candidacy of former Democrat segregationist George Wallace in 1968, who carried five southern states. By 1972, however, Nixon swept the entire South, becoming the first Republican to ever do so. It is true that many Southern Democrats were pro-segregation before the Civil Rights Acts. Some changed their minds; others turned to the Republicans.