In 1980, Ronald Reagan appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi. the town made famous as the site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James E. Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Reagan told the crowd, "I believe in states' rights...I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment," and promised to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." Now, in 1980 people were pissed off at Jimmy Carter because of gas prices and a sputtering economy and the taking of the American embassy in Iraq and the Russians overreaching in Afghanistan. "States' rights" was not a phrase on everybody's lips. It did not come trippingly off the tongue. But it had baggage. It was associated, especially in the minds of white Southerners who felt stepped on and disenfranchised by the civil rights movement and the desegregation era, and in 1980 there were a lot of people who fit that description, with federal troops coming in to force George Wallace to get his hateful ass out from in front of the schoolhouse doorway so that the desegregation laws could be enforced, over the objections of many of the locals. It was a code phrase, it was loaded, and speaking as the son of a Klansman and someone who at that time had spent pretty much his whole sentient life in rural Mississippi, I can assure you there was no adult in that crowd who had a problem with black people who didn't hear those words and immediately take them as a signal that Ronald Reagan and the Republican party were on his side.

That was all obvious at the time and has been no kind of secret since. In a disingenuous, stupid, and potentially dangerous op-ed piece in the New York Times, David Brooks attempts to rewrite history and recast it as "a slur... a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months" that "was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale." To hear Brooks tell it, the idea that Reagan was reaching out to white bigots is ludicrous, because he also campaigned in front of black audiences that year. "In reality," he writes, "Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes...Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters." Besides, "Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful...He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

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