Confederate Rump Strategy --- Fox/Breitbart tickling America's racist Bizard brain

Confederate Rump Strategy

by digby

I think Joan is right here:

Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state "Southern strategy," the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic Party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).

Consider four of the biggest stories the network has peddled since Obama entered the White House:

Remember that Pat Buchanan has compared the Tea Partiers to "George Wallace voters," and bragged that he won them over to Nixon.
The Republicans aren't making a purely racist play, of course. There simply aren't enough racists in America anymore to get a majority that way. but it's part of the package, to be sure, and Fox is the vehicle for promoting it. (Buchanan is a sort of fish out of water over on MSNBC, although he gets his message across to the odd wingnut who might tune in.)

The point is that this is obviously part of the strategy, particularly among older voters who tend to be a rather large part of the mid-term electorate. Ailes is a very shrewd political propagandist and he knows he has a major part to play with his older, white, conservative male demographic. Breitbart's just feeding the bea.

I do have to wonder how many new, young bigots are being made with the normalizing of Fox/Breitbart racist victimhood rhetoric, though. It's not like cultures can't ever go backwards.


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