Lee Atwater interview on dog-whistle politics -- how and why talk of "cutting taxes ... is a lot more abstract than [racial slurs]"

CONTENT ADVISORY -- offensive racial slur in Atwater quote below ...

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Rick Perlstein. "Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy" Nation Nov, 13, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

From a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, a Republican political operative from South Carolina who helped design Pres. Nixon's "Southern strategy" and later was Pres. George Bush Sr.'s campaign manager in 1988. At the core of the strategy was appealing to white Southerners who had opposed integration after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and were leaving the Democratic Party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.

Still later, after Atwater's death in 1991, it morphed into today's racial "dog whistles" that don't specifically mention race but are heard in racial terms by people who accept the stereotypes behind them -- for example Reagan's "welfare queens" or the common stereotype in downstate Illinois that "Chicago thugs and gang-bangers" are African American. This one paragraph sums it up in Atwater's words:

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 cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

But Atwater's context is important, and the quote really is best understood in the context of the entire interview. Another verbatim excerpt from article:

The back-story goes like this. In 1981, Atwater, after a decade as South Carolina's most effective Republican operative, was working in Ronald Reagan's White House when he was interviewed by Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. Lamis published the interview without using Atwater's name in his 1984 book The Two-Party South. Fifteen years later—and eight years after Atwater passed away from cancer—Lamis republished the interview in another book using Atwater’s name. For seven years no one paid much attention. Then the New York Times' Bob Herbert, a bit of an Atwater obsessive, quoted it in an October 6, 2005 column—then five more times over the next four years.

Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Google Books records its use in ten books published so far this year alone. Curious about the remarks' context, Carter, who learned Lamis had died in 2012, asked his widow if she would consider releasing the audio of the interview, especially in light of the use of race-baiting dog-whistles (lies about Obama ending work requirements for welfare; "jokes" about his supposed Kenyan provenance) in the Romney presidential campaign. Renée Lamis, an Obama donor, agreed that very same night. For one thing she was “upset,” Carter told me, that “for some time, conservatives believed [her] husband made up the Atwater interview.” For another, she was eager to illustrate that her husband's use of the Atwater quote was scholarly, not political.

Carter is " the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks," James Carter IV,"