The GOP Economic Strategy
By Michael Boyajian
The GOP under Richard Nixon developed what is called a Southern Strategy where they would appeal to voters in the south who were unhappy with President Johnson’s civil rights legislation. The strategy worked in this Democratic stronghold and the Republicans were launched into the White House.
After this a new strategy was developed by the GOP that would disable the Democratic Party’s traditional alliance with working class or middle class if you will Americans that traced its roots back to FDR. The strategy was to cripple middle class earning power to the extent that paying higher taxes would bust working class American’s household budgets.
Middle class Americans believed in the humanity of social programs that were made possible through high taxes that they could afford to pay because of their strong earning power. But now their jobs were sent overseas, cheap foreign labor caused the loss of American jobs, and unions were being busted so that earning power disappeared. More Americans may have been working but they were working at low paying jobs.
Now Americans could not make ends meet and this was before the Great Recession so higher taxes are hated not because of any ideological reason as the tea baggers say, but simply because it busts the budgets of Middle Americans.
And that snapped the strong alliance between the middle class and the Democratic Party. Americans could no longer afford the Democrats social programs because the Republicans had consciously destroyed their earning power. Middle class Americans were forced to abandon their long held liberal beliefs making an unholy alliance with conservatives for purely economic reasons. Americans in their heart are after all a liberal people. Nonetheless, the GOP Economic Strategy worked and was only overcome by extremely popular figures like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
What the Democrats must do is restore jobs not just to old levels but to the extent that American earning power is restored to the levels of the 1960s. This will reignite the alliance between Middle American and the Democratic Party. And in case you have been wondering, that is why Republicans have been fighting so hard against President Obama’s economic programs. For them prosperity means the end of their grip on the country, an end to the GOP as we know it and the reemergence of a traditional liberal and prosperous America.
End