That's stretching pretty pathetically thin to say "reducing spending" is racial code. Might as well just say being a Republican automatically makes you a racist.
I agree, if you take what I said completely out of context. We're talking about white Southerners who voted for Reagan, who talked a lot about fictional welfare queens from Chicago (gee, I wonder why?) and who launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, with a pro-"States Rights" speech. Coming off the heels of the 1960s and 1970s, when poor black people were implicated (rightly or wrongly) in urban crime and rioting and when many white Americans were angry at "welfare cheats" (and welfare is highly racialized in our political discourse), I think it's being naive and obtuse to say that there wasn't at least some exploitation of white racial resentment by the Republican Party in that time.
Sure, but I do think that idea has been stretched beyond believability in some cases.
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