The New London Day has called on Roseanne Kotowski to resign from the Groton Representative Town Meeting, and State Rep. Craig Fishbein to resign as well, since like Roseanne, he has outed himself as a racist. I’ve written about Roseanne here and here. To briefly recap her story: she sent an email to Groton Town Councilors about an upcoming BLM demonstration here in Groton that fairly reeked of racism, though it was not, to give Roseanne credit, explicitly racist. Still, the dog whistles were so loud even the Day heard them, so they’ve called for her resignation.
Which brings me to the main point of this little post. It really is past time for the media to stop pretending that 1968 never happened. That was the year Nixon adopted the Southern Strategy, the idea being to move into the racist space the Democrats had left open when they passed the Civil Rights Act. At first the rules were that the dog whistles should be ever so ambiguous, such that the message got through but there was still room for plausible deniability. That’s changed over the years, to the point where the dog whistles are clearly audible to the most human of ears, yet the media, including the Day, continues to insist on pretending that appeals to racism is not the underlying political strategy of the GOP, but merely a problem with those, like Roseanne and Fishbein, who whistle the loudest. It is no coincidence that Republicans who do not whistle have become nearly extinct in the party, for those that didn’t play the game were slowly but surely sent to the sidelines.
It is patently obvious that in order to get white people, especially those in the hinterlands, to vote against their own interests, it is necessary for the party of the elite to get those white people to believe that their problems are caused by a group of people who are worse off than they. Dylan sang about the strategy in the early 60s, when it was used by Southern Democrats. Now it belongs to the Republicans and is practiced nationwide, and it’s time that the media acknowledged that fact. It’s history. There’s no doubt about it.