Bob Herbert joins in the spanking of David Brooks for trying to whitewash over Ronald Reagan’s racist legacy, particularly his non-subtle signaling of support for the murders of 3 civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. Reagan opened his campaign for President there in 1980 with a lot of loaded language about “states’ rights”, the rallying cry for the Confederacy to paper over the fact that they were separating in an attempt to escape an impending ban on slavery. “States’ rights” then became the battle cry for those who didn’t appreciate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and were casting around for code language to oppose it without making directly racist statements. Sayeth Herbert:
The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County’s primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.
That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!”
Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”
Emphasis mine. Brooks is playing off the fact that, from our vantage point, those murders happened a long time ago, and don’t loom so large. In 1980, however, the murders had only happened 16 years before. The cases were still open. (No action was taken against the murderers until 2005, 41 years after the murders and 25 years after Reagan gave his nod of approval.) To put that into perspective, it would be like Rudy Giuliani kicking off his campaign in Jasper, TX with a speech about how he wants to “clean up” the nation like he cleaned up New York. No one would be under any illusions that barely concealed racist messages were being sent out.
The notion that there’s some deep philosophical underpinnings to the “states’ rights” argument—that many people actually have a fervent belief that state authority should override federal authority, even (and especially) when it comes to questions of basic human rights—is so transparently false that the only people I’ve ever seen fiercely defend it where more defending their right to be giant racists without having to defend racism directly. Not that there’s no support from a few ideological libertarians who believe their own bullshit for actual state sovereignty on issues not relating to oppressing racial minorities, women, or gays, but it’s pretty meager and certainly not the same as the Republican base that licks Reagan’s ass. The federal “partial birth abortion” ban is a perfect example—anti-choicers run around bleating about states’ rights strictly because they have traditionally thought that the states were more likely to pass abortion bans than the federal government. But the second that wasn’t so, the solid commitment to states’ rights flew out the window.
The American tradition is to embrace oppression (to various degrees) so long as the supporters can come up with convincing enough bullshit to cover it up, which endlessly fascinates me. Open racism wouldn’t fly well in this country, but transparent, disingenuous arguments about “states’ rights” and invoking of stereotypes about crime and welfare cheating provide the same function. The anti-choice movement knows that coming right out and saying that they want to use nature to force oppressive gender roles on women won’t ever work, so the maudlin concern about “babies” is an excellent substitute, to the degree that they’re trying to convince people that women controlling their own ovulation is somehow baby-killing. One reason victory is imminent for the pro-gay marriage movement is that the opposition can’t come up with a coherent piece of bullshit—protecting “traditional” marriage doesn’t make a lick of sense. People are generally smart enough to realize you’re not going to divorce because the same-sex couple next door is married.
45 Responses to “Brooks argues Reagan was stupid, not malicious, but Bob Herbert delivers the smackdown”
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States’ rights also disappear when a state approves gay marriage, I’ve noticed.
Spot on, both you and Herbert.
If Reagan was only stupid and not racist, what does that make Bobo?
To answer my own question, why a stupid racist of course.
(And I fully recognize the redundancies in those two words).
Same thing with “activist judges” as with states’ rights — whining and complaining until and unless those judges are activists for something they like. Telling American woman that they are dull-witted, for example.
There’s another element to the Reagan at Neshoba story that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, one that speaks both to what he was communicating and how he was able to communicate it.
The Cheney-Schwerner-Goodman murders took place in the summer of 1964, during the Freedom Summer campaign that brought white students from the north and the west to do civil rights organizing in the deep south. (Goodman and Schwerner were both New Yorkers.)
After Freedom Summer, the many white volunteers who were college students went back to their campuses with new organizing skills and a new sense of urgency. When UC Berkeley erupted into protest that fall, Freedom Summer veterans were among the protest leaders, and their example inspired many who hadn’t gone south.
The sixties student movement as a mass phenomenon arguably began at Berkeley that fall, and California remained a crucial center of the movement in the years that followed. Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966 as a vocal opponent of the student organizers, and through two terms he governed as an antagonist to campus radicalism.
Goodman and Schwerner, murdered by law enforcement officials in Mississippi in 1964, their murders still unpunished in 1980, died in service to a political movement that Reagan made his political career attacking. It wasn’t just the civil rights movement that Reagan was signaling his opposition to in Neshoba County, it was sixties social activism as a whole.
When Reagan went to the Neshoba County Fair, he was going as one of the nation’s most vocal and effective opponents of the student movement of the sixites — the movement that had taken Goodman and Schwerner to Mississippi. His presence, and his speech, need to be understood in that context.
Reposted, with links, at my blog.
I’m so glad Herbert (and earlier, Krugman) smacked this revisionism down hard.
Reagan was as bad a religious extremist / psychopath as kindred spirits who claimed 9/11 was a punishment from God for [everyone the theofascists hate: liberals, women, GBLTs, black / brown / latino / immigrants].
Strange how the “signs” never indicate divine disapproval of the intolerant right, who appear not to want to leave any creature free to knock on Heaven’s door unjudged. Huh, you’d think theofascists didn’t believe their own screeds or something.
“It wasn’t just the civil rights movement that Reagan was signaling his opposition to in Neshoba County, it was sixties social activism as a whole.”
It is very interesting that the activism of the ’60’s remains a powerful subtext to a lot of the radical anti-progressive cultural references made by the Reichwing.
Everything that is currently “wrong” with America started in the ’60’s: Civil Rights, Voting Rights, Women’s Rights, Gay Rights, and most evil and dangerous of all - Questioning Authority…
“One reason victory is imminent for the pro-gay marriage movement is that the opposition can’t come up with a coherent piece of bullshit—protecting “traditional” marriage doesn’t make a lick of sense. People are generally smart enough to realize you’re not going to divorce because the same-sex couple next door is married.”
I agree that it’s inevitable (just like Universal Healthcare in the US is inevitable), but there are a lot of people in the Reichwing who literally don’t know what to think about any particular subject until they’ve heard the talking points from Rush, Faux News, Darth, Pat Roberston, etc.
As Dan Quayle said “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
I think we can all agree with whatever the hell young Danforth was saying…
think we can all agree with whatever the hell young Danforth was saying…
It’s amazing how smart, thoughtful and issue-oriented J. Danforth looks in hindsight . . .
There’s such an adulation of authority that comes through in much of this Reagan-defending. While the yokels at the bottom of the Republican party might have these kinds of bigoted ideas, the story goes, the politicians and other elites are completely untainted by ignorance. Our elite overlords hold “principled” ideas about governance, and if the yokels ‘misunderstand’ these ideas as coinciding with their bigotry, that’s their problem. (All of this, of course, is abstracted away from the actual impact of the policies being discussed.)
Ronald Reagan, as someone over at Yglesias’s place wrote, was a white guy born in the 1920’s who switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in the early 1960’s. Nearly anyone meeting that description was probably full of some pretty serious racism. He wasn’t some philosopher-king who transcended the unwashed masses.
Just how this idea of the untainted god-king is supposed to mesh with the regular-guy, ‘would want to have a beer with him’ rhetoric (also pushed by David Brooks) is a mystery to me.
But he ended communism and took down the wall single-handedly
/snark
My recollection is that the “states rights” battle cry, shouted most by George Wallace had pretty much died down by 1980. An echo of it voiced by Raygun no doubt was intended to resonate with the racist portion of the electorate.
But I would challenge this assertion of Herbert’s:
I was in Mississippi in the summer of 1972, as a college student from the Northeast on a summer fellowship, basically to do whatever Fayette black Mayor Charles Evers wanted us to do. White supremacy as it was known in 1964 was in full retreat by 1972. The only times the Goodman et al. case affected what we did was the fact that our grown up handlers made sure we called them at the beginning and end of any travel trips. Our integrated group was never threatened.
We campaigned for a moderate white candidate in the Democratic primary for Congress. While the old line segregationist won the primary, he lost to the comparatively moderate Thad Cochrane (now Senator) in the general election.
“States rights” became a dirty word phrase but there are several pubilc policy issues, not including fundamental constitutional rights, which are better left to states or local government than controlled by the federal government.
Exactly. Anyone who backed the Supreme Court hijacking of Bush vs. Gore has forfeited any high ground on “states rights” forever.
Of course, when anyone directly confronted Reagan about his racism, he’d always say something like “But I wasn’t raised a racist! My daddy forbade us to see Birth Of A Nation.” That was his “Get Out of Jail Free” card. As long as he hadn’t seen a racist movie, he wasn’t a racist.
“States’ rights” is incoherent, anyway. The ideal that the smaller the unit, the greater the rights means that individual rights should trump states’ rights. The notion that states > federal, but human
protecting “traditional” marriage doesn’t make a lick of sense
This is the only point where I really disagree with you. Since “traditional”, patriarchal marriage is between unequal parties, having marriages around that are blatantly between legal equals does undermine the patriarchy.
Yep, so incoherent that it was enshrined into the Constitution.
States’ rights has nearly always been a code-word for “keep the blacks down” (today we can add women and gays as well). It’s mainly been an excuse for the big fish in small ponds (southern states) to keep down everyone else without having to answer to the larger nation.
It’s not hard to find examples of the rabid states’ righters having conversion experiences to extreme federalism when they benefit. Dred Scott, Bush v Gore, DOMA, No Child Left Behind, Homeland Security, etc., etc.
Bullshit, Simon. State’s rights, as a rhetorical tool, has nothing to do with the Constitution. Whenever it is brought up it usually is being used to attack rights held by the people under the federal constitution. Racial discirimination is an excellent example: many aspects of racial descrimination are illegal UNDER THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION with enabling statutes written by the federal Congress authorized by — wait for it — THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. End of fucking story. The “right to be an un-American traitor and maliciously discriminate based on race” is NOT a right found in our federal constitution — it is, in fact, denied — thus, there is no “state right” to preserve.
The Constitution is not available to be your own, personal CYA maneuver.
I wonder if the murderers of the three civil rights workers were there in the crowd the day of that speech.
“The Constitution is not available to be your own, personal CYA maneuver.”
Apparently somebody forgot to tell Cheney, Bush, most members of the current Supreme Court, and rest of the Reichwing Authoritarian Cultists, who all see “states rights” as a way to limit the federal government - except when they see federalism as a way to limit states rights.
Want to smoke a joint? Federal law supersedes state law.
Want to ban abortion? State anti-abortion law supersedes federal law.
In the end, you can’t tell the players without a score card…
“I wonder if the murderers of the three civil rights workers were there in the crowd the day of that speech.”
Probably - smiling and laughing and convincing everybody they knew to vote for and become Republicans. And that cancer on what used to be the “Party of Lincoln” still grows and metastasizes…
The drug war, particularly the federal crackdown on medical marijuana authorized by state governments, demonstrates that not all calls for states’ rights are hokum and nonsense. A powerful federal government is not always a good thing.
Let’s not fight. They are both right. Reagan was stupid and a racist.
Remember his defense regarding Iran-Contra: I was stupid (actually, given the time course, Alzheimer’s had probably begun).
It always amazes me that the press obsesses on the Republican lead over the Democrats with conservative Christians, and how the Democrats should respond, what Bible verses they favor, etc., but won’t touch with a ten foot pole the implications of the far more astounding lead the Democrats have with black voters.
If the Christian right rejecting the Democrats means they are insufficiently Christian, then blacks rejecting the Republicans means they are too racist.
I dare Russert to pose such a question to a prominent Republican. Ask the Republican candidates at the next debate who their closest black friend is. Watch the squirming.
Also, there are some states that are way ahead of the federal government on the issue of marriage equality. Conservatives would like nothing better than to force Massachusetts to comply with DOMA (which of course makes them hypocrites, but that’s hardly news). However, since states do have rights, they can choose to extend more rights to their citizens than the federal government and the Constitution guarantee. Try reading the Tenth Amendment sometime. It’s illuminating.
Nobody goes to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by mistake, let along Philadelphia, Mississippi. Even the people who LIVE there don’t go there by mistake. All honor on Krugman and Herbert for taking Brooksie behind the toolshed.
Or sane drug laws. Or anything and everything else that conservatives disapprove of, for that matter.
On this subject, see also the excellent refutation of Brooks by the historian Joseph Crespino, who’s written a book on Mississippi and the rise of modern conservatism that looks like it’s worth reading.
My favorite tidbit from the Crespino article:
If the Christian right rejecting the Democrats means they are insufficiently Christian, then blacks rejecting the Republicans means they are too racist.
Well, that just means that Republicans are insufficiently “black”, right? And if black people don’t want to vote for an old white guy who only hires and associates with other white people, that just means that blacks are the racist ones!
Or maybe black people reject Republicans because the GOP wants to reduce welfare payouts, and we all know that every black person is on welfare and lazy–nothing racist about it!
(Wow. I think I just killed off a third of my brain cells trying to think like a wingnut. That really, really hurt.)
Oh, when I was handling business litigation I used to love trotting out what I cheerfully called “the Reagan Dilemma”:
Your Honour, the defendant [insert businessman’s name here] is on the horns of the Reagan Dilemma when he says that he did not know that [X, Y or Z] was done. He either did know, in which case he should be held liable. Or he didn’t know, which could only be achieved through negligence or wilful blindness, for which he should be held liable.”
I think Brooklynite is on to something. Reagan’s appearance at the Neshoba County Fair was about more than the obvious dog whistle politics of race. It was about repealing the 1960’s.
Reagan knew how to court the reactionary element of American politics. He did it in California, and he did it again on the national stage. His actual governance was bad enough, but nowhere near as extreme as his rhetoric, and nowhere near as conservative as the “mythical Reagan” who is worshiped by the wingnuts. (Tell a wingnut that Ronald Reagan legalized abortion in California, negotiated with terrorists, raised taxes, and granted amnesty to illegal aliens and watch his head explode.)
These jerks just keep renaming the shit not so much to change the law — which would be against them — but in a rhetorical gambit to keep extra-judicial, extra-constitutional PERSECUTION open-ended until a crony-stacked judicial system can swipecard it through.
Hence the essentially meaningless phrases family values, later changed to moral values, to pretend they were entitled to obey those “higher” values rather than rule of law.
That’s why I say that if states’ rights purists want, eg, the definition of life to begin at conception, they should arrest and charge women on a menstrual basis or leave us the fuck alone.
Women with the muscle and the means should make citizens’ arrests, even of themselves, if they suspect a fertilized egg has been destroyed. (Healthy and unhealthy female bodies expel such eggs for a wide variety of reasons; even the loss of water weight, changes in climate or environment such as the move from high to low altitude, training for a sport, etc. etc.)
Sorry to be redundant or simplistic on this point but I’m so sick of this shit.
BTW, via Left Coaster (click my nick) Bush’s new BFF and fixer Mukasey are tossing AbuGonzo under the bus and the Dems have compiled a report estimating that President Stompy’s War on Whatever is costing every family $20,000.
I wonder how picky the states’ rights purists are about denying same-sex couples their family status when it comes to ponying up for the Infanta’s credit card war? If they’re not getting a pass, why the fuck not?
A paragraph later and I’m STILL sick of this shit.
NOS,
You can say some silly shit when you pop off in anger.
From our previous tiff on war atrocities I know you can write rationally when you calm down.
The 10th Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Commerce Clause may have just about swallowed the 10th Amendment, but not quite. The Brady Bill’s attempt to require state and local law enforcement officials to conduct background checks on persons attempting to purchase handguns was tossed on 10th Amendment grounds in Printz v. United States in 1997.
I usually don’t like to cite Wikipedia but it has a halfway decent discussion (though sometimes contradictory) on the 10th Amendment here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
The segregationists had a legal argument in the 50’s and 60’s that integration of public facilities was a subject to be controlled by state law. The Commerce Clause and the 14th Amendment, thankfully, were used successfully to win that legal argument in favor of integration. But it wasn’t just a rhetorical tool.
Those who think federal control in all matters is a good thing will be happy to know that no one in California can legally grow marijuana solely for their own use, because to do so might affect the interstate market for marijuana. Therefore, the federal drug laws preempt California law. Gonzales v. Raich, 2005.
Re-reading the main post, this clunker jumped out at me:
Not exactly. Let’s not be sloppy. In one of the famous efforts to use federal civil rights laws to punish criminals the locals refused to prosecute, the U.S. charged 18 and convicted 7 of them in a 1967 trial. For three men, including Edgar Ray Killen, the trial ended in a hung jury, after the jurors deadlocked 11-1 in favor of conviction. The lone holdout saying she could never convict a preacher.
It was Killen who was retried in 2005. He was found guilty of manslaughter. The jury of nine whites and three blacks rejected the charges of murder but found him guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings.
““States’ rights” then became the battle cry for those who didn’t appreciate the Civil Rights Act of 1964,…”
You are giving the Gipper way too much credit. The States Rights argument actually was part and parcel of the confederacy’s stand against the union and thus, was pretty old and crusty by the time Ronnie got a hold of it.
Its still considered a viable discussion might I add among many white folks in the south and yes, its a shield for blatant racism. Its also the rallying cry that today unites many libertarians, who are quite well aware of its origin and just fine with that.
Herbert and Krugman were right on top of Brooks’ ass with this one. For crying out loud. We all knew Brooks was a flaming idiot, but this denial of the longstanding use of the Southern Strategy and use of racially coded language by the R’s for years is just plain denial of reality. It’s the active rewriting of history, but Brooks chose a history that just isn’t amenable to the kind of rewriting he was attempting.
Yep, so incoherent that it was enshrined into the Constitution.
And human rights were, to a much larger degree. So why should “states’ rights” trump human rights, again? Oh yes, don’t make sense, just grasp for official-sounding bullshit to paper over your fucking racist hate.
This is the only point where I really disagree with you. Since “traditional”, patriarchal marriage is between unequal parties, having marriages around that are blatantly between legal equals does undermine the patriarchy.
Agreed, to a point. But the horse is already out of the barn. Banning gay marriage won’t return us to the days when women couldn’t file for divorce or own property. Most people think of simple male/female marriage when they hear “traditional marriage”, since their marriages are already not “traditional”, in that women have rights in them.
You are giving the Gipper way too much credit. The States Rights argument actually was part and parcel of the confederacy’s stand against the union and thus, was pretty old and crusty by the time Ronnie got a hold of it.
Selective quoting for what end? I pointed out that it was a confederacy thing that was revived for the 60s. So you’re correcting me….by pointing out what I already said? I’m confused as to why.
Amanda,
It wasn’t merely revived for the 60s. It was deployed more strongly. After all, it had been used for nearly a century to maintain Jim Crow, and Eisenhower’s federalization of the Arkansas National Guard during the Little Rock crisis gave it a new impetus. It may have been reinvigorated, but it wasn’t revived because it never went away. [/quibble]
I keep scrolling past that poster.
One of the things we discuss in my Race and Ethnicity course is the civil rights movement. Of course, we utilize Omi/Winant’s Racial Formation approach, and although I take issue with some of their movement analysis, they do recognize the role of movements in creating change. So, I spend time making sure students know about the Civil Rights Movement. I make sure they know the names Cheney, Goodwin, and Schwerner. I make sure they know what a big deal, and what dangerous work, bringing down Jim Crow was.
Yeah, racial inequality still pervades. But Jim Crow was brought down, and that was no mean feat.
And we discuss the New Right project and it’s uses of coded language, included Reagan at Philadelphia, Bob Jones, and “welfare queens”
Brooks ain’t getting this shit past me or my students.
Um, you really didn’t read my post clearly SL.
I said:
You replied:
. . . which is easy to recall from my ConLaw class. Remarkably, this doesn’t contradict my post in any way shape or form, since I criticized the formulation of states rights as it is use as a rhetorical tool. Before you can claim a state has a right, you’d need to establish a) that it does not infringe upon an individual right of the persons in the state and b) most obviously that the Fed. didn’t establish itself as having power over that right. I pointed out that, as of today, the fed has clearly established that, when it comes to racial discrimination, the states have no “rights” (save to strengthen the anti-discrimination public policy Congress has already established, which is why it may well be better to be queer in New York than Nevada).
The state’s rights arguments in favor of segregation survive to this day, and they are illegitimate now even if they ever were in the 50’s. (I’d argue that they weren’t and the 14th Amendment clearly prohibited Jim Crow, but that’s thankfully all moot now.) You missed the point here, though I find no fault (or particular relevance) in your mention of the commerce clause. The point, again, for the cheap seats, is that the state’s rights argument as used today is nigh-inevitably empty rhetorical, nonsensical obfuscation meant to get whatever the hell it is the speaker wants at that very moment, and will be dispensed with as soon as it grows tiresome.
The historical pedigree of state’s rights is also rather irrelevant. It doesn’t mean what it did in, say 1825 where the federal government was significantly weaker than it is now. (And it actually has some logical basis when it comes to secession. I actually believe the southern states had a legitimate case when it came to secession. Of course, I also hold that most of the socioeconomic policies of the South violated the Constitution and the leaders of the former should have been summarially executed as a result and Reconstruction should have been, in fact, nothing less than a complete and absolute dismantiling of the garbage that passed for southern “culture,” but that’s a policy rant for a different day.)
NOC,
OK, I get what you’re saying. I do find myself annoyed at the continuing tendency to try to apply a federal solution to all problems. Tort law and education are two areas in particular that the central government ought to leave to individual states. Dictating a single solution from on high has several drawbacks, among them stifling innovation and experimentation, increased costs and increased disaffection with government.
Your comment on Reconstruction was interesting. From that I would take it you’re more of Mao guy than a Mandela guy, but I’m probably being too snarky.
Simon,
The Constitution’s a living document, which means it can mean whatever you want it to mean, so figure that one out.
For instance, “treason and sedition” used to mean sheltering enemy soldiers, selling state secrets, etc. Now, it apparently means holding up a sign saying We Did Not Vote For Bush.
Wow, that means I’ve committed treason repeatedly for the last seven years. Do I get the electric chair or the firing squad?
I hope this helps with the dismaying trend of Reagan deification (or at least whitewashing). The man may not have been an overtly vicious racist, but he used them as an important part of his political bloc, and that’s just as bad, if not worse.
It’s a little snarky, Sixties, but accurate. Seriously, Mandela’s strategy couldn’t have worked in the South. Why did it work in South Africa? Here’s my guess:
a) There are many, many more blacks than whites in SA, so once freedom to vote was assured, then naturally —
b) Blacks have more power at the ballot box than whites.
This is not the case for the South post-Civil War. Blacks were an illiterate minority. The culture was feudal. Could Jews have integrated easily into Germany after WWII? The “Mandela Method” only works when the disadvantaged people can fend for themselves.
Right after the war ended, Democrats and Republicans conspired to disinfranchise blacks. You know voter registration? That was made to stop blacks. Felon disenfranchisement? Again, blacks. Combine with trumped-up charges and you get, well, the modern south. And long before Bush crawled his way out of Babs, we had an election stolen in Florida where disinfranchisement played a strong role. (That state just fucking sucks.)
So, seriously, the only solution was to Kill ‘Em All. Mandate a minimum number of non-whites in each Congress, forbid all Confederate politicians and military officers from public office. There’s no point in winning the war if you don’t win the peace.
The alternative was a morally-bankrupt caste system and continued economic strife.
Ronald Reagan was probably not as personally racist as some interpretations of his 1980 Neshoba County campaign speech imply. But the statement did have the effect of rallying “states rights” voters and interest groups, the most influential of which were not principally racist, but all of whom went on to benefit from his Reagan’s election and especially from Carter’s defeat, as Carter was seen as a liberal Southern politician and a threat to those groups’ agenda.
The goals of groups circa 1980 who might be inclined to support “states rights” were not to defend the obviously crackpot and extremist KKK but rather to overturn progressive federal policies and regulations dealing with the Warren Court (1953-1969) and the New Deal. It’s hard to point to documents in Lexis-Nexis, say, that would show the groups that this possible misstatement by Reagan resonated with because Lexis-Nexis indexes the mainstream media, and not the newsletters from activist groups, especially political extremist groups and industry advocacy groups, especially “Astroturf” groups which were created without grassroots support and broken up after a short period of time when their political usefulness waned.
“States rights” advocates circa 1980 actually didn’t include many particularly influential groups that might be considered overtly racist, like some anti-immigrant groups, for example, don’t base their policies on “states rights” because they want to exclude immigrants from the whole COUNTRY, not from certain states. There was a fringe racist / white nationalist fringe in 1980, especially in the Mississippi Delta which supported overt racial segregation, but they weren’t responsible for turning out many voters nationally.
Influential “states rights” groups from that era opposed environmental protection and wanted to give states the opportunity to grant more exceptions to land development, toxic dumping, air pollution, and to cut taxes, especially taxes on higher income people and corporations. “States rights” groups at the time also included anti-choice groups who with a solidly pro-choice Supreme Court wanted to pursue various tactics to give states more leeway in determining how to restrict abortion access, intrusively intervene in poor families’ lives and custody matters, etc. And under the Reagan administration – and especially in his second term under the people who played an increasingly influential role as he seemed to dodder and deteriorate in his competence – those “states rights” groups certainly did increase in influence.
Reagan had many faults and reactionary political positions, but he may not have been overtly racist – he did come from a part of California society and political thought that wasn’t in the vanguard of supporting segregation, and in his film career he actually did star in a nearly forgotten 1950 anti-KKK film (“Storm Warning”, with Ginger Rogers and Doris Day, Reagan played a DA attempting to prosecute the KKK for murder). Statements attributed to President Reagan against black “welfare queens” were actually in a context that was derogatory to poor white and Latino mothers as well, as I recall, though I can’t find an online source right now for that quote at all. The Reagan administration probably came closest to overtly supporting a racist administration more through foreign policy than domestic, by opposing sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime, for example.
But the mainstream media and popular interest didn’t put as much priority on reporting and editorializing reproductive rights and environmental protection as it did on reporting and editorializing more extreme and more easily caricatured southern KKK racists. That lesser emphasis affects how we contextualize these issues both in history from that time and today.