For people under 30 years old, this election cycle was probably pretty confusing, due to a lot of coded talk and terminology.

kleinbl00 has harped on about the Southern Strategy in many of his political posts here on Hubski, but what is it, exactly? Why should you give a shit about what some crusty old white men did in back rooms in the 1960's? And how could it possibly have anything to do with today?

The long and short of it is at the link... Lee Atwater discussing openly the coded language they coined to disenfranchise the black voters, and give the whites a way to be racist without doing it overtly.

So when you see a Republican talking about "tax cuts", what they actually mean is discontinuing services for the poor, in an effort to morally defeat them, and politically disenfranchise this enormous group of potential Democratic voters.

Dick Cheney - George W. Bush's Vice President - worked on these plans when he was a young man working with Goldwater and Nixon. There is a single line of continuity that carries from Cheney all the way to the day Obama took office.

The second generation of the Southern Strategy Republicans - Paul Ryan, etc - are now in power, and the only historical reference they have is the Republican party created by Cheney and his cronies.

Like the kids of today who can't understand a world without social media or email, Paul Ryan and his gang live within a world where the Republican party is built upon a foundation of racism, disenfranchisement, and coded language.

Understanding the world they live in requires us to go back to this original plan to rebuild the Republican party from the ground up, with a tactical, and numbers-based approach to election gerrymandering.

Being informed about this history is important to writing a better future for everyone.