From ameslevinelist.com: Lee Atwater explains in 1981 how using terms like "states' rights" and "tax cuts" are coded appeals to racism linking to original article: Many Republican-Conservative Small Government Positions Since Nixon Are Really Veiled Racist Policies
Published: Jan 21, 2011
Author: Destro
Post Date: 2011-01-21 11:23:02 by Destro I am starting to embrace the notion that pretty much all the Republican- conservative positions since Nixon are really veiled racist policies and that small govt is really code word for weakining the federal govt so it can't enforce civil rights or not paying welfare to "coloreds" even though most people on welfare and food stamps are whites (but the false myth in the racist right wing mind is that its the blacks who are living well on welfare having kids out of wedlock that whites have to pay for the mythical black welfare queen).
Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, reported a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Prof. Alexander P. Lamis, in which Lee Atwater discussed politics in the South: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger".
Herbert wrote in the same column, "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
To prove this thesis some more I went to LibertyPost because I figured the posters on there were too stupid to hide their racism behind "code words" effectively.
And I was right. Here is an example of a LP poster being against the Federal govt building high speed rails, standard abstract from the conservative right wing would be that the govt should let the private sector build it and other such arguments. But the LPers are not that smart and they think no one is watching them so the truth slips out:
Mass transportation only makes sense in densely populated urban areas. Working-class and middle-class Whites, the people that make the money, moved out of cities to get away from the pathologies of Blacks and Mexicans. The last thing they want is to be jammed in on a train or bus with loudmouthed, uncouth Blacks & Mexicans at 7:00 in the morning. Current mass transit systems in all major cities consistently lose money and are subsidized heavily by State, i.e., White taxpayers.
OsamaBinGoldstein posted on 2011-01-21 9:19:32 ET
So here we have an argument against govt subsidizing mass transit - a sensible policy done in every country on the planet for the greater good of the people. But for the post Nixon Southern Strategy conservative the reason to hate this govt subsidy is that its a transfer of money from "whites" to "coloreds" and thus bad. In polite company or when they have their guard up they will tell you they are against higher taxes and wanting the private sector to do these sort of things but when their guard is down amongst their own kind the real racist reason comes out for their positions.
