Nixon’s law-and-order appeal was a coded racial strategy uniting northern and southern racists.

Evidence

Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The strategy was right on time. In a 1968 Gallup poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed Nixon’s campaign slogan: “Law and order has broken down in the country.” A Nixon television advertisement shrieked frightening music and frightening images of violent and bloodied activists. A deep voiceover says, “I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.” The ad “hit it right on the nose. It’s all about those damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there,” Nixon reportedly said in private. In public, the tune was the same, save the racial lyrics. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1031

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how ‘law and order’ rhetoric remains a racial dog-whistle long after Nixon — tracing the same pattern into modern political speech.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s prior interest in how institutions translate racial policy into acceptable public language.