Complicit Civility and the Politics of Exclusion: Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Rockefeller’s Response

Abstract

This essay analyzes the 1964 and 1968 Republican campaigns as a case study in the rhetoric of complicit civility, a strategy of elite cooperation in which one rhetor wields a subtle rhetoric of exclusion while other rhetors, who recognize the undemocratic aspects of that rhetoric but also its potential electoral appeal, challenge the rhetor but not the rhetoric, instead shifting the political argument to other grounds. This combination endorses antidemocratic rhetoric while normalizing it as a routine part of democratic political processes. As a strategy practiced by elites, complicit civility entrenches extant hierarchies and authorizes exclusion.

Keywords:

• US Presidency
• US Presidential Campaigns
• US Racism

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Stephen H. Browne, the anonymous reviewers, Amy J. Johnson, and Brittany S. Morrissey for their contributions to the essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The analysis presented here relied on archival and other primary research as well as secondary sources. I analyzed every speech Nixon gave in 1968 and every Rockefeller speech in 1964 and 1968, with specific attention to the ways they categorized and treated American citizens.

2. For a discussion of the persistence of political attitudes over time, especially after a culture reaches a critical juncture, see Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), especially pages 24–44. On the transition of the southern strategy into later generations, see Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 410; Lawrence O’Donnell, Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 304; Ryan Neville-Shepard, “Rand Paul at Howard University and the Rhetoric of the New Southern Strategy,” Western Journal of Communication 82(1): 20–39.

3. For a discussion of this point, see Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

4. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Allyson Volinsky, Ilana Weitz, and Kate Kenski, “The Political Uses and Abuses of Civility and Incivility,” The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017): 205–218.

5. Deborah Jordan Brooks, and John G. Geer. “Beyond Negativity: The Effects of Incivility on the Electorate,” American Journal of Political Science 51 (2007): 1–16.

6. Mary E. Stuckey and Sean Patrick O’Rourke, “Civility, Democracy, and National Politics,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 17 (2014): 711–736.

7. Susan Herbst, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010).

8. Wilson Carey Williams, Redeeming Democracy in America, ed. Patrick J. Deneen and Susan J. McWilliams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 9.

9. Kristina L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White,” Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies 15 (2018): 331–336, 331.

10. Stuckey and O’Rourke, “Civility,” 715.

11. See Diana C. Mutz, “Effects of ‘In-your-Face’ Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition,” American Political Science Review 101 (2007): 621–635; Jamieson et al., Political Uses and Abuses, 209.

12. On the erosion of trust, see Diana C. Mutz and Byron Reeves, “The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust,” American Political Science Review 99(2005): 1–15.; on political polarization, see Lynne M. Andersson and Christine M. Pearson, “Tit for Tat? The Spiraling Effect of Incivility in the Workplace.” Academy of Management Review 24 (1999): 452–471.

13. This conception of politics has its roots in the Enlightenment, but in the US has its clearest enunciation in James Madison’s Federalist #10. Its modern expression comes in the pluralist tradition. See Publius, The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin, 1974); on pluralism see Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

14. On this point, see, for example, Thomas W. Benson’s thoughts in the strategic uses of incivility. Thomas W. Benson, “The Rhetoric of Civility: Power, Authenticity, and Democracy,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 1 (2011): 22–30.

15. For criticism of this conception of civility and alternatives to it, see Derek Edyvane, “Incivility as Dissent,” forthcoming, Political Studies - https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321719831983; Sonia K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for Invitational Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 2–18; Nina M. Lozano-Reich and Dana L. Cloud, “The Uncivil Tongue: Invitational Rhetoric and the Problem of Inequality,” Western Journal of Communication 73 (2009): 220–26; Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55 (1969): 1–8.

16. Seth Kahn, and JongHwa Lee, eds. Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement (New York: Routledge, 2010).

17. See Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000).

18. You can see how this unfolded here: Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Remarks on Extremism at the 1964 Republican National Convention,” San Francisco, California, July 14, 1964. https://rockarch.org/Inownwords/nar1964text.php

19. See, for example, George Will, “Foreword,” ix–xx, in Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, ed. CC Goldwater (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Michael Lee traces the shared set of commitments that comprise the conservative canon. See Michael J. Lee, Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014).

20. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 5.

21. Goldwater claimed that the Constitution gave everyone the right to vote, and thus voting rights were clearly enforceable. But the Constitution was silent on the question of education, for example, and so the federal government could not enforce integration of schools. He opposed farm subsidies for the same reasons. See Conscience of a Conservative, 27–40.

22. The anger was most famously but was not entirely on the conservatives’ side. Rockefeller supporters were also quite nasty, dogging Goldwater’s public appearances with signs that depicted swastikas and read, “Goldwater: The Fascist Gun in the West.” Richard Norton Smith, On his Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller, (New York: Random House, 2014), 442.

23. For a taste of the reaction to his speech, see https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=rockefeller+1964+convention&view=detail&mid=B2E923C192167F584BCCB2E923C192167F584BCC&FORM=VIRE; Nick Thimmesch, The Condition of Republicanism (New York: WW Norton, 1968), 43.

24. Dave Zirin, “Ken Burns on Jackie Robinson and the Republican Party’s ‘Pact with the Devil,’” The Nation, April 11, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/ken-burns-on-jackie-robinson-and-the-republican-partys-pact-with-the-devil/. For Robinson’s own account of that moment, see Jackie Robinson, as told to Alfred Duckett, I Never Had it Made: An Autobiography (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995), 169–170. For another account of the indignities suffered by African Americans at the convention and their reaction to it, see Thimmesch, Condition of Republicanism, 58.

25. Smith, On his Own Terms, xxi. Editing mine.

26. Zirin, “Ken Burns.”

27. Smith, On his Own Terms, xx.

28. Mendleberg argues that the overt nature of this connection, which pits the norm of equality against the practice of inequality, is essential to contesting the influence of racism in elections. See Mendelberg, The Race Card, xii.

29. Smith, On his Own Terms, 456. See also Joseph Crespino, “Goldwater in Dixie: Race, Region, and the Rise of the Right,” 144–169 in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, ed., Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

30. Gary Donaldson, Liberalism’s Last Hurrah: The Presidential Campaign of 1964 (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2003), 293; Michael Nelson, Resilient America: Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 4.

31. Joseph E. Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 79. See also Michael A. Cohen, American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 209; Nelson, Resilient America, 130.

32. The classic work on Nixon’s media strategy remains Joe McGinnis, The Selling of the President 1968 (New York: Trident, 1969). See also, Patrick J. Buchanan, The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority (New York: Crown Forum, 2014), 212; Jules Witcover, The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (New York: Warner Books, 1997), 69–70. For Nixon’s own view of this strategy, see Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 304.

33. O’Donnell, Playing with Fire, 377–379.

34. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 84.

35. Buchanan, The Greatest Comeback, 290–294; Robert Mason, Richard Nixon and the Quest for a New Majority (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 47–49; Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York Free Press, 1995), 279. Note especially Kevin Phillips’s influential The Emerging Republican Majority (New Rochelle NY: Arlington House, 1970).

36. On Wallace’s skill with the dog whistle, see, among others, John Dickerson, Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History (New York: Twelve, 2016), 371.

37. Jeremy Mayer calls Nixon’s use of the strategy “technically brilliant.” Jeremy D. Mayer, Running on Race: Racial Politics in Presidential Campaigns, 1960–2000 (New York: Random House, 2002), 88.

38. Richard M. Nixon, “An Address by Richard M. Nixon in the NBC Network,” March 7, 1968, Graham T. T. Molitor Papers, FA 074 Richard M. Nixon – Vice Presidential Nominees Box 26, Credibility Gap, Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) Sleepy Hollow, NY, 3.

39. Nixon, “An Address by Richard M. Nixon in the NBC Network,” 3.

40. Richard M. Nixon, “What has Happened to America?” A Readers Digest Imprint Graham T. T. Molitor Papers, FA 074 Richard M. Nixon – Vice Presidential Nominees Box 26, Credibility Gap, RAC, 2.

41. Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Nixon Gives Views on Urban Crisis,” New York Times, December 20, 1967, no date, Graham T. T. Molitor Papers, FA 074 Richard M. Nixon – Vice Presidential Nominees Box 26, Hatchet, RAC.

42. Nelson, Resilient America, 185. See also Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade—and After: America, 1945–1960 (New York: Vintage, 1960), 238; Mason, Richard Nixon, 7.

43. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 281.

44. These kinds of appeals are similar in some ways to what Charles E. Morris, III identifies as the “fourth persona.” See Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228–244.

45. John A Farrell, Richard Nixon: A Life (New York: Doubleday, 2017), 330.

46. Jeremy Engels. The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2015).

47. Agnew was originally a Rockefeller supporter, but felt betrayed by the governor’s inability to commit to a candidacy. See Nelson, Resilient America, 124; Witcover, The Year the Dream Died, 199–120.

48. O’Donnell, Playing with Fire, 389.

49. One analyst writes that the selection of Agnew “revealed Nixon at his worst.” Farrell, Richard Nixon, 333.

50. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 289. See also Engels, Politics of Resentment.

51. O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 281.

52. As a result, African American support for the Republican Party, which had been eroding for years, essentially ended in 1968. As Jackie Robinson put it, “The Agnew nomination, and the choice of Richard Nixon by the Republican party convinced me of something I had long suspected. The GOP didn’t give a damn about my vote or the votes—or welfare—of my people. Consequently, I could no longer justify supporting them.” Robinson was not alone. See Robinson, I Never Had it Made, 207.

53. No author, “Negro Rights Leader Says Nixon Plays on Prejudices,” New York Times, no date, Graham T. T. Molitor Papers, FA 074 Richard M. Nixon – Vice Presidential Nominees Box 26, Hatchet, RAC.

54. No author, “Nixon on Civil Rights,” For Staff Use Only, Answer Desk, 4 July, 1968, Rockefeller Papers, 111 4 G Box 5, DNA, Notebooks, Youth, Miscellaneous Issues, Nixon on Civil Rights, 111 4 G Folder 30, RAC. Folders 32 and 33 contain hundreds of pages of similar opposition research on Nixon.

55. “Nixon on Civil Rights,” 1.

56. “Nixon on Civil Rights,” 1.

57. “Nixon on Civil Rights,” 28.

58. “Nixon on Civil Rights,” 60.

59. See his declaration that he was not a candidate, and also his announcement that he was: Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Statement of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller,” March 21, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 59, 5/2/68, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, RAC; Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Statement by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, April 30, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 59, 5/2/68, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, RAC.

60. Mendelberg, The Race Card, 6.

61. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “The Building of a Just World Order,” Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 59, 5/1/68/ Philadelphia, Penna., World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, RAC, 1.

62. Rockefeller, “Building of a Just World Order,” 6.

63. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Excerpts of Remarks at Kansas State College, Manhattan, Kansas,” May 9, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 59, 5/2/68, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, RAC.

64. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “News Conference at Duluth Auditorium, Duluth, MN June 15, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 62, Press Conference Transcripts, June 1968, RAC.

65. Nixon, “An Address by Richard M. Nixon in the NBC Network,” 3.

66. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Excerpts of Remarks at the University of Minnesota,” May 8, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 59, 5/8/68 Minnesota, RAC.

67. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Excerpts from a Session of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller at a Breakfast with Delegates in Hitching Post Motel, Cheyenne, Wy.,” May 29, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 60, Press Conference Transcripts April 30-May 68, 1, RAC.

68. Rockefeller, “Breakfast with Delegates”; see also Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Interview with Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller at Station KTVU in Oakland,” June 13, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 62, Press Conference Transcripts, June 1968, RAC.

69. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Speech Text,” Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 61, 6/27/68, Sioux City Iowa RALLY, RAC.

70. Nelson A. Rockefeller, “Q &A with Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller at the DuPont Hotel, Wilmington, Del,” June 22, 1968, Campaign Speeches Series 33 Box 62, Press Conference Transcripts June 1968, 5, RAC.

71. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019).

72. Bush is often considered to represent Reagan’s third term. See Walter Dean Burnham, “The Legacy of George Bush: Travails of an Understudy,” 1–38, in Gerald M. Pomper, ed., The Election of 1992I (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1993), 2. The conservative rejection of Bush is exemplified in the primary challenge mounted by Pat Buchanan in 1992. See O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 403.

73. On the difference between patrician and populist Republicans, see Theodore J. Lowi, The End of the Republican Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996). On the battle between them during the Bush administration, see Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015), 521.

74. On Willie Horton, see Roger Simon, “How a Murderer and Rapist became the Bush Campaign’s Most Valuable Player,” Baltimore Sun, November 11, 1990. See also Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York: Free Press, 1995), 385. On the updated southern strategy, see O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, 381.

75. Alan I. Abramowitz, and Jeffrey A. Segal. “Beyond Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance: National Issues in the 1988 Elections.” Legislative Studies Quarterly (1990): 565–580.

76. Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 29–30.

77. Chris Hayes, A Colony in a Nation (New York: WW Norton, 2017), 27.