The GOP's Way With Words

In the last several decades, Republicans have given the phrase "war of words" a darker, more literal meaning.

Republican Political Consultant Lee Atwater had a thing for words. Atwater was a proponent of the Southern Strategy – the Republican party’s scheme to attract voters in Southern states who, in the years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act, were no longer able to freely express their racism within the ranks of the Democratic party. Here’s how Atwater characterized the Southern Strategy in his own words:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N…...r, n…...r, n..….r.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n…...r’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N…...r, n…...r.’ So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.”

— Lee Atwater, 1981

Each time I read the transcript of that interview, it still makes my jaw drop, knowing how comfortable and relaxed Atwater was while casually chatting about the most hateful, brazen, cynical political tactics.

Since the Atwater era, Republicans have fully embraced those same tactics. They’ve learned to sugar-coat their most heinous positions with more palatable language, especially when the matter of race is involved.

They turned “anti-abortion” into “pro-life.” When their policies regarding the death penalty and their cavalier attitude toward migrants who died avoidable deaths shone a spotlight on the hypocrisy of their “pro-life” stance, they added another coating of sugar and started referring to their position on abortion as “pro-family.”

Republican messaging around the environment uses the same tactic. They’ve turned “drill, baby, drill” into a chant, somehow convincing some voters that our current record oil production isn’t enough, that there are no consequences for unbridled fossil fuel use, and that it’s somehow un-American to support alternative energy sources that have less negative impact on our environment. (Guess who’s funding this misinformation.)

People like Frank Luntz continue to facilitate focus groups to determine what political messaging is the most marketable. They take the proverbial pig’s ears and turn them into verbal silk purses, all in the interest of soft-pedaling sometimes repugnant Republican positions.

But in the last several years, a new set of GOP tactics has surfaced. We’ve seen Republicans repurpose and take ownership of terms that describe specific left leaning ideas and strategies. For example, not only have they long portrayed affirmative action as somehow threatening to white people, they’ve undermined much of the progress that affirmative action has made. (Particularly galling are the folks who have themselves benefitted from affirmative action but who now want to “pull the ladder up behind them.”)

Republicans have turned many of these terms into scare words by demonizing the word or phrase and — worse than that — by separating the term from its intended meaning. To wit:

• The 1619 Project. This may have been the trendsetter for right-wing demonization. This well researched volume, initially published in a series of pieces in the New York Times, compiled a historical record of slavery that had heretofore been unreported or undocumented. It created a right-wing tailspin and was almost immediately characterized as "an attack on white people.”

• Critical Race Theory (CRT). Since the 1970s, academics have been examining the relationship between race, ethnicity, and politics, along with the way these things are portrayed in our media. They looked — and to continue to look — at racism as not merely the overt, individual kind but rather what has become known as “institutional racism.” This collective attempt to understand these structures became known as Critical Race Theory.
  
  But Republicans latched onto CRT the way a badger latches onto its prey. They created a false narrative around CRT as a tool meant to demonize white people. They even passed laws in several states that banned the instruction of CRT in their public schools, even though it was not being taught in their public schools.

•  Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). DEI efforts in government and in the private sector are intended to create a more even playing field for all races and genders. It’s revealing that right-wingers hurl DEI as an all-purpose insult. In so doing, though, they’re basically saying that they value homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion.
  
  It has become commonplace for Republicans to refer to Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire,” thereby reducing her long, successful professional and political career to an unmerited series of favors unfairly bestowed upon her. Lee Atwater would be proud of GOP critics of DEI for having turned aspirations that align with our Declaration of Independence into something ominous and menacing.

• Black Lives Matter. The BLM movement originated in 2013 in response to the unjustifiable yet unpunished murder of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, FL. The movement grew further in response to Michael Brown’s mistreatment and murder by a Ferguson, MO police officer. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the general public became more aware of the underlying motivation behind BLM but, concurrent with that, the right wing started to place blame on Black Lives Matter for the civil unrest that was happening in cities across the nation, instead of on the institutionalized racism that made Floyd’s murder possible. On the right, BLM became a convenient repository of blame for all manner of race-related ills.

• “Woke”-ism. The idea of being “woke” was originally intended as shorthand for having an understanding of the plight of marginalized groups and for working to remedy the social exclusion of those groups. The Republican Party has spent more time criticizing people, policies, laws, books, cities, and political trends they perceive as being “woke” than anyone on the left has spent promoting being “woke.” But doing so was a good way to do what Lee Atwater did — they sugar-coated the racism within their ranks by making it more abstract.

It’s no coincidence that all these terms have race as their primary component. The dismissal of these terms’ and concepts’ validity is based on the faulty premise that all of the nation’s issues around race — our long history of enslavement of Black people and its horrible aftermath — have been neatly put into a box, tied up with a bow, and put up on some high closet shelf to gather dust. According to many on the right, we’re supposedly in “post-racial society.” Some point to the fact that we’ve had a Black president as evidence that we are “post-racial.” They claim they “don’t see color.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When there is the potential for a discussion around race, Republicans tend to accuse those who want to deal with the nation’s longstanding unaddressed racial issues as the ones who are “making everything about race.” Some have even convinced themselves that “reverse racism” is actually a thing, and that faulty idea is endorsed and regularly reinforced by Donald Trump.

The sad reality is that the United States of America, as diverse as the nation may be, has never fully reconciled the issue of race since Emancipation and Reconstruction. Many Americans still have learned only the lessons taught by Lee Atwater, which distill all feelings about race down to “Keep It Covert.” Only divulge your racism to the people you know share your same views. Instead, enshrine your racism in the policies that you implement. Just don’t say too much out loud.

All these years later, in the 2024 presidential election, we’re still witnessing the effects of the racism that Lee Atwater helped disguise. In some cases, the disguise isn’t all that successful. We’ve witnessed the demonization of black and brown immigrants, both in border towns and in places like Springfield, Ohio. The thinly-veiled racism is highly visible in Trump’s campaign against Kamala Harris, a reflection of his particular brand of bile that he reserves for accomplished black women in positions of power.

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I’ll end by paraphrasing what Bette Davis is reputed to have said about Joan Crawford:

“You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Lee Atwater is dead. Good."

Unfortunately, his life’s work of leveraging racism for political gain lives on.