In 1981, Lee Atwater, the political campaign architect who refined the Southern Strategy for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, described the Republican Party’s winning template: 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, 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
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