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Ahead of the 2020 Republican National Convention, The Dossier dives into the history of the modern Republican party.
đ° Toplines
WSJ: U.S. Jobless Claims Rose to 1.1 Million in Latest Week
CNBC: The S&P 500âČs return to a record doesnât tell the full story with 60% of stocks still with losses
Bloomberg: Apple Makes Wall Street History by Breaking $2 Trillion Barrier
Forbes: Federal Student Loan Payments Officially Suspended Until 2021: 0% Interest, No Collections, And Nonpayments Count Toward Forgiveness
NYT: House Votes to Block Postal Changes and Allocate Funds for Mail
Detroit Free Press: Flint water crisis legal settlement totals $600M, creates victim compensation fund
South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Public defender candidate fired the morning after losing Broward primary
Chicago Sun-Times: Special prosecutor finds âsubstantial abuses of discretionâ in Jussie Smollett case; did not find evidence to support filing criminal charges against Cook County Stateâs Attorney Kim Foxx
Variety: Tavis Smiley Ordered to Pay PBS $2.6 Million for Workplace Affairs
Washington Post: Steve Bannon charged with defrauding donors in private effort to raise money for Trumpâs border wall
ESPN: Washington hires Jason Wright as NFL's first Black team president
đŠ COVID-19
The U.S. reports more than 5.7 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 177,000 deaths. Currently, the U.S. accounts for 24% of 23.3 million cases worldwide and 22% of the 807,000 confirmed deaths globally.
USA TODAY: More than 176,000 in US have died of COVID-19. 57% of Republicans polled say that is 'acceptable.'
BuzzFeed: These Countries Have The Highest COVID-19 Infection Rates. This Is What The US Has In Common With Them.
STAT: Is convalescent plasma safe and effective? We answer the major questions about the Covid-19 treatment
NYT: Inside Operation Warp Speed
đŁ Barry Goldwater, 1964
Who is Barry Goldwater?
Arizonaâs five-term Republican Senator, first elected in 1953.
His 1964 presidential campaign outlined the contours of the Republican Party as we know it in 2020.
It was Goldwater who prototyped the racist dog whistle on the national stage.
It was Goldwater who inspired Senator Strom Thurmond, the segregationist South Carolina Democrat, to join the Republican Party.
It was Goldwater who motivated any remaining Black Republicansâfully one third of Black votersâto flee the Republican Party in droves and join the Democratic Party.
In his speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Goldwater bemoaned the âviolence in our streets,â warning ânothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets safe from bullies and marauders.â (The summer of 1964 was one of civil unrest; race riots proliferated across the United States.)Â
As reported in the October 3, 1964 issue of the The New Yorker:Â
[T]he Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. On his tour, Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned âraceâ or âNegroesâ or âwhitesâ or âsegregationâ or âcivil rights.â But the fact that the words did not cross his lips does not mean that he ignored the realities they describe. He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, languageâa kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, âbullies and maraudersâ means âNegroes.â âCriminal defendantsâ means negroes. States rights means âopposition to civil rights.â âWomenâ means âwhite women.âÂ
Barry Goldwater lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. Indeed, Johnsonâs 1964 victory still holds the record for the highest proportion of the popular vote (61.1%) ever received by a presidential candidate. Beyond his home state of Arizona, Goldwater won only five other states, all in the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
Goldwater lost the 1964 election. But his campaign represented the opening salvo of Republicansâ âlong Southern strategyâ that was later refined by Richard Nixon in 1972 and perfected by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
đș Ronald Reagan, 1980
One week before the 1964 election, Ronald Reagan, a B-list actor, delivered a nationally televised, pre-recorded speech endorsing Barry Goldwater for President of the United States. The speech, entitled A Time for Choosing, vaulted Reagan to national political prominence.
By any objective standard, Reaganâs speech is a rhetorical masterpiece, an exceptional model of right-wing propaganda: half-truths, outright lies and fictitious anecdotes delivered in plain language and wrapped in universally held values.
In the speech Reagan railed against high taxes, sounded the alarm on the national debt, made an appeal to privatize social security, lambasted labor unions, and presented the government itself as the enemy of free people.
And, of course, Reagan blew the racist dog whistle:
Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She's eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing.
The speech contained the rhetorical strategies, racist tropes and disastrous economic agenda that would come to define the Republican Party.
Within two years, Reagan was elected Governor of California, where he served two terms. In 1980, Reagan was elected President of the United States in a landslide victory against President Jimmy Carter.
1980 represented a watershed moment for the Republican Party and the conservative movementâand a disaster for Americans who work for living:
đ How to say the N-word
In a 1981 interview, notorious political operative Lee Atwater explained the core of the Republicanâs Southern strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, âNigger, nigger, nigger.â By 1968 you canât say âniggerââthat hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, statesâ rights, and all that stuff, and youâre getting so abstract. Now, youâre talking about cutting taxes, and all these things youâre talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.⊠âWe want to cut this,â is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than âNigger, nigger.â
This racial strategy, argued Atwater, unites two traditionally disparate constituencies:
I think race as such is going to dissolve as an issue. But you are gonna have the race question in the sense of on one side youâre gonna have a guy whoâs a millionaire and heâs got something in common with the guy who makes $10,000 a year. You know, heâs busting ass and putting into the system and heâs paying taxes. And somebody else is not doing anything and taking out of the system. Those two guysâthe George Wallace voter and the millionaireâhave something in common.
That something in common, of course, is whiteness.
And, more concretely, a whiteness that is âbusting ass and putting into the systemâ as juxtaposed to an unstated Blackness that is ânot doing anything and taking out of the system.â
This racial imaginary, this racist trope is not unique to Republicans and conservatives. It is Americaâs pre-existing condition, predating the country by at least 157 years.
And it only serves the economic interests of the few who own and the many who toil for less and less with each passing year.
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