Thread by @KevinMKruse

No, in that very interview, Lee Atwater says quite clearly that there *used* to be a racist southern strategy in the 1960s but then claims they didn't use it in the 1980 campaign.

Let's take a look.

https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1145336490580488192

Now, as always, D'Souza doesn't provide any links to the actual evidence.

You can listen to the full interview in this piece at @thenation:
thenation.com/article/exclus…

And @delong has helpfully transcribed it all here, if you'd rather read it:
bradford-delong.com/2017/03/lee-at…

Here's the key passage.

(Harry Dent, an aide to Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, chaired the South Carolina GOP from 1965-1968 and served in the Nixon White House as a political strategist for the South. He's recognized, even by Atwater, as a key architect of the southern strategy.)

As Atwater notes frankly here, "the Harry Dent-style southern strategy" of the Nixon-era Republican Party definitely existed.

And it was, in Atwater's own words, "based on coded racism."

The "old southern strategy" was not "hypothetical." It was, as he states clearly, a fact.

Later in the interview, Atwater argues that the Reagan campaign didn't use this "old southern strategy."

That's a separate issue from whether the GOP *used* to have a southern strategy -- again, which Atwater frankly admits -- but historians have taken issue with that claim.

For instance, Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign with a "states rights" speech in Neshoba County, Mississippi, which was infamous as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

From @CrespinoJoe's In Search of Another Country:

Reagan took heat for that appearance and others, so in that interview Atwater tried to draw a stark line between what Reagan did there to reach out to what a GOP official called "George Wallace inclined voters" and the "old southern strategy" that was "based on coded racism."

Scholars, of course, have long disagreed.

Just this week, political scientists @AngieMaxwell1 and Todd Shields published a terrific new book that makes a convincing case for a "Long Southern Strategy" that linked the old and new strategies of the GOP. amazon.com/dp/B07RWP3D3V

But again, that's a separate matter.

Even if you're inclined to trust Lee Atwater that the Reagan strategy was wholly unconnected to the "old southern strategy," @DineshDSouza, then you should also trust Lee Atwater when he says the "old southern strategy" was quite real.