Pat Buchanan resurfaces to demand GOP embrace new Southern Strategy

Hunter

Daily Kos Staff

Monday May 13, 2013 · 1:40 PM PDT

2013/05/13 · 13:40

We were just talking about how odd it is that all of these hard-right conservatives seem to "accidentally" find themselves advocating racist things, and popping up like a garden gopher comes ... Pat Buchanan? Wow, we haven't heard from Pat for a while; I assume that he fell behind the cushions of a green room couch, way back when, only to be discovered again last week, curled and shriveled, by some very surprised re-upholsterer.

Pat's reemergence comes in the form of an essay for conspiracy site WorldNetDaily, which career-wise is only slightly more embarrassing than being mistaken for couch lint. As usual, Pat's going on about how white folks are being overrun by pesky minorities, and that's bad because minorities don't like the Republican Party, possibly for all that stuff Republicans did. He calls it the "crisis of the Grand Old Party," and isn't happy about certain new Republican efforts:

Led by Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Republicans are pushing for amnesty and “a path to citizenship” for the 11 to 12 million illegal aliens in the country today.
Who are these folks? Perhaps half are Hispanic, but 90 percent are people of color who, once registered, vote 4-to-1 Democratic. One would not be surprised to hear that the Senate Democratic Caucus had broken out into chants of “Go, Marco, Go!”

Wow, only half are Hispanic but a full 90 percent are Colored Folks? That's a lot of Colored Folks. I can see why Pat's all worked up.

Pat, of course, has a different idea of what to do about the Colored Folks, which is to do exactly what the Republican Party has done about Colored Folks for the last half-century. He blames Bush and other Republicans for not sufficiently re-embracing the wildly successful (and wildly racist) Southern Strategy. I wish I were kidding. Pat's wisdom, below the fold:

After Richard Nixon cobbled together his New Majority, the GOP carried 49 states in 1972 and 1984, 44 states in 1980 and 40 in 1988. In four elections – 1972, 1984, 1988 and 2004 – the Republican Party swept all 11 states of FDR’s “Solid South.”
Such were the fruits of that evil Southern Strategy.

But when conservatives urged Bush 1 to declare a moratorium on legal immigration in 1992 and build a security fence, the politically correct Republican establishment fought tooth and nail to keep the idea out of the platform.

So, where are we?

Oh, Pat. Pat, Pat, Pat—what are we going to do with you?

I know you're thinking, well, maybe he's still got some plausible deniability there, maybe he's not really talking about a path to Republican victory predicated on the Southern Strategy and its combination of racial fearmongering and racial resentment. I also know you're not really thinking that, because this is Pat Buchanan we're talking about, and Pat Buchanan has long since passed into "cranky old person doesn't realize you're not allowed to be racist anymore" territory:

[W]hite folks are losing interest in politics and voting. Yet, whites still constitute three-fourths of the electorate and nine in 10 Republican votes.
Query: Is the way to increase the enthusiasm and turnout among this three-fourths of the electorate for the GOP to embrace amnesty and a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal foreign aliens?

Or is it to demand the sealing of America’s borders against any and all intruders?

Just asking.

Fast forward to his response, a year from now: "Oh no! I have accidentally called for a new and literal Southern Strategy in a conspiracy-riddled, racist-coddling website! How did that happen?"

Now, Pat here just devoted a bunch of other words to describing how America's irritating black people and brown people and Asian people already have the ability to overwhelm proper white voters, so I'm not sure those additional brown people really change the equation much. And Pat seems to think the answer is to "increase the enthusiasm" of white people by mounting a campaign against the non-white people, but doesn't seem to think that would motivate the non-white voters to get to the polls themselves and—oh, never mind. There's no point.

Pat, like other Republicans, definitely recognizes the inherent problem presented by wide swaths of the American electorate hating you. His solution—to do the same thing, only more of it—doesn't exactly surprise. And it's not like he has any other choice: We all know that the prescriptions available to people like Pat are limited at best, once you've already made up your mind that it's not you that's the problem, it's all those pesky non-white people.

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