The party of Lincoln offered to sell its soul for the segregationist vote in 1964. In 1968, with the election of Tricky Dick Nixon (the GOP’s original Law & Order candidate) the deal was sealed.
They didn't have to go that way. The old Republican establishment, led by Nelson Rockefeller, knew that Jim Crow had to go. In the context of the Cold War, the newly decolonized nations of Africa and the Caribbean turned desegregation into a national security issue. Truman desegregated the army. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard in September of 1957 to enforce the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated Central High.
Both the Soviets and US attempted to sway prospective African leaders, offering free college tuition as part of the bargain. That's how Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. made his way from Kenya to the University of Hawaii in a recruitment campaign spearheaded by Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson and Harry Belafonte. These young Africans found America, for all it's problems, significantly less racist than Russia. In a funny way, Martin Luther King did far more to win the Cold War than Ronald Reagan.
But in 1964 Barry Goldwater road tested the appeal of "state's rights", the old Confederacy's flimsy fig leaf. He carried most of the south and his home state but nowhere else. With the cities in flames after King was killed in April of '68 (amid calls of "burn, baby, burn" from the black power movement) Nixon rode a white backlash to power and the era of racial dog-whistle was on. Welfare queens, strapping bucks, "state's rights" strict constructionists and Willie Horton all served to bring the old confederacy into the GOP's so-called big tent.
On January 20, 2009, even after eight disastrous years of Bush Jr. the GOP congressional leadership opted to double down. They rejected every olive branch offered by the new Obama administration. In spite of a national emergency, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, they put party above country and did their damnedest to thwart Obama at every turn. It sure seemed to work. By the end of 2014 they controlled the Supreme Court, the Senate and the House, and the vast majority of state legislatures and governorships. Then came Daffy Donald Trump to collect what the devil was due.
Now the Republican Party is double damned. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they don't repudiate Daffy Donald they lose the white college educated women. If they do repudiate him they lose the uneducated white men. In choosing this self styled invincible winner the GOP has put itself in a lose-lose position that will likely take a generation to recover. By then, we'll be majority minority and dog whistling should be history.
Abe Lincoln, the first Republican president, famously said "My concern is not whether God is on my side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." When the GOP took up the southern strategy, they tossed that concern to the wind. Having sowed the wind they reap the whirlwind.
Next stop, the damnation of the Donald.
