Chapter One
THE SOLID SOUTHERN STRATEGY
THE TALE OF how Republicans "won" the South, and why Democrats gave it up, has been ironed out into a quintessentially American fable of good and evil and reduced to its satisfying essence for retelling every four years, when Democratic strategists and media pundits begin their ritual debate about whether, and how, Democrats should try to reclaim a slice of Dixie with a Southern strategy of their own.
The legend goes like this: The Democratic Party became the unity party of white Southerners—a political extension of the Confederate States of America—after the Civil War. (True enough.) From Appomattox through the civil rights movement, the national Democratic Party was really two parties, with an enlightened Northern wing and a Southern wing wallowing in the muck of benighted traditionalism. (The exaggerations begin.) The "good Democrats" of the North swallowed hard and accommodated their Dixie cousins for the very practical reason that without their "solid South" vote in nearly every presidential contest, they would not have been contests.(Right.) Even Franklin D. Roosevelt put up with the racist demagogues of the Southern leadership, the Bilbos and Vardamans and Talmadges, because of political expediency. (Right again.) And even though white Southerners didn't have a liberal bone in their bodies, they kept making an X in the boxes next to Democratic presidential candidates' names. (Well . . .)
But "with a stroke of the pen," as the saying always goes, the first Southern president since Andrew Johnson, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, intrepidly signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and brought a sudden and irrevocable end to the Democrats' solid South. Why, even LBJ himself said so; in a quote that has become an inextricable part of the fable, the president worried out loud to one of his aides, the future journalist Bill Moyers, that he had "delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."
By doing the right thing, we are told, the Democratic Party sacrificed Dixie and purified its sullied soul at last. And as soon as Johnson's pen did its work, the legend continues, Republicans were ready to pounce. With the brilliant Southern strategy brewed to wicked perfection by Richard Nixon and his henchmen, the die was cast. After a quick post-Watergate blip, with Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the popular presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ascendance of religious right politics cemented the Republicans' new solid South. While the region continued to grow in prosperity—thanks, of course, to its supposedly militant antiunionism and the resulting abundance of cheap labor that big business loves—the South remained what it had always been: backward, xenophobic, racist, and ignorantly susceptible to the rankest emotional appeals to Jesus, miscegenation, and militarism. The only difference was that the parties had switched places, with the Democrats laid as low as the sad old Southern Republicans once were. If anybody needed fresh proof of that, it came along in the 2000 election, when even a Tennessee Democrat, Al Gore, could not break through the brick wall of Caucasian conservatism to win a single state in Dixie. "The South is no longer the swing region," proclaimed political science professor and pundit Thomas Schaller, author of a "non-Southern" manifesto published in 2006 called Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. "It has swung."
That's the story, and a sweet one it is for both Republicans and—in a perverse way—blue state Democrats. For Republicans, this neat little fiction confirms their superior command of political strategy—the canny ruthlessness with which they appropriated white backlash against '60s liberalism, then rode the angry tide of evangelical politics in the '80s. It also offers them the charming promise of starting every presidential election with one-third (and climbing) of the country's electoral votes already sewn up. Meanwhile, Democrats outside the South—those who actually believe this Disneyesque version of political history—can recount the legend and view themselves, and their party, as martyrs for racial justice. The party's sad record in national politics, post-LBJ, has indeed been a cross to bear. But such is the price of righteousness.
But nobody told Southerners they weren't supposed to be Democrats anymore. During the 2006 midterm elections, Gallup pollsters discovered that more folks still said they were Democrats than Republicans in all but three Southern states—Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. In half of the South, it wasn't even close: Democrats led by more than 10 percentage points in six Southern states. It's not just the partisan leanings of Southerners that confound the solid South myths. Southerners are more conservative only if you winnow down American politics to cultural or "moral" issues alone. Southerners still tack the furthest right on gay marriage and abortion and still lead the nation in church going. They also back withdrawal from Iraq and strongly favor progressive populist economic policies—more spending on social welfare, stronger environmental and business regulations, universal health care—that are anathema to the GOP and, in many cases, markedly to the left of the national Democratic leadership.
But you'd never know that by listening to the conventional wisdom. The South has, in the popular mind, always been "solid"—solidly white, solidly conservative, solidly fundamentalist, and of course, solidly racist. But never solidly populist—and that is where the Democrats made their mistake.
It's true that Democrats were bound to take a hit in the South after LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, which ended all forms of legal segregation and doomed the various schemes—literacy tests, violent intimidation—that had long suppressed black registration and turnout. But as Johnson knew, the cracks in the "solid" Southern Democracy had been widening since 1948, when Harry S. Truman's modest civil rights plank sent Deep South Democrats stalking out of the national convention in protest. After the Dixiecrats' attempt to block Truman's reelection failed miserably, most returned—mad and determined, rather than chastened—to their ancestral party. The strains showed throughout the 1950s, especially after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing "separate but equal" schools. But it wasn't until 1964 that the awkward Democratic coalition of such long standing—working-class whites, ruling-class whites, working-class blacks, middle-class Jews, liberals, moderates, evangelical Baptists, and neo-Confederate reactionaries, to name a few—started to unravel in the South.
The day before the 1964 election, Republican insurgent Barry Goldwater chose to make his final campaign stop in Columbia, South Carolina. Matched against a popular president leading the ticket of America's dominant party, Goldwater had made the fatal mistake of being honest in his acceptance speech at the GOP convention, proclaiming his view that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and instantly snuffing out the remote hopes he had entertained of occupying the White House. But Goldwater did not give up on what became the mission—the sole possible rationale, really—for his foundering campaign: building a new Republican base by breathing reactionary life into its moribund Southern wing. He stumped hard in Dixie, often accompanied by Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who had topped the "Dixiecrat" (States Rights Party) ticket in 1948 and was now leading the segregationist exodus into the GOP. While Goldwater avoided overt race-baiting, his anti–civil rights voting record and Thurmond's enthusiastic backing were more than enough to signal to Southerners—both whites, who voted in unprecedented numbers for a Republican, and blacks, who voted in unprecedented numbers for a Democrat—just where the new GOP stood on the "race issue." More directly, with his "states' rights" rhetoric, Goldwater fully embraced the fierce distrust of the federal government that Southern traditionalists had felt in their collective gut since long before the Civil War. "Forced integration," Goldwater liked to tell his fans in Dixie, "is just as wrong as forced segregation." Richard Nixon would later pick up that refrain, sometimes verbatim.
The day after Goldwater's Columbia rally, the national results were disastrous; Johnson racked up what was, at the time, the largest percentage of the popular vote in U.S. history. But Goldwater had broken through in what Southern journalist John Egerton calls "the five-chambered, race-obsessed heart of Dixie." These were the same old cotton states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina—that had revolted in 1948. But even in President Dwight D. Eisenhower's cakewalk reelection of 1956, four of the five had still stuck with Democrat Adlai Stevenson (along with only three other states in the country). Goldwater had staked a claim in the South's—and the nation's—most "solid" Democratic territory. At the same time, Republicans had lost the majority of Southern states, including the economically booming, fast-growing cities and suburbs that had been friendly to Ike in the '50s.
Republican progress was hardly as smooth or deadly as Sherman's March. Richard Nixon's 1968 election was nearly derailed by the Deep South, which voted in big numbers for George Wallace's third-party effort and nearly swung the election to Democrat Hubert Humphrey. But that year, and more emphatically in 1972, Nixon made important inroads with the region's fastest-growing demographic: suburbanites, who would later form the base of Ronald Reagan's Republican realignment in the South. "In too many accounts of southern political realignment during the post-war era, the Deep South is the tail that wags the dog," wrote Matthew Lassiter in his brilliant revisionist history, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. But in fact, "the suburban strategies developed in the Sunbelt South, not a Southern Strategy inspired by the Deep South and orchestrated from the White House, provided the blueprint for the transformation of regional politics and the parallel reconfiguration of national politics." As Lassiter pointed out, every full-blown incarnation of a race-based Southern strategy—the Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, the Goldwater wipeout of 1964, the Wallace campaign of 1968, and the GOP's experiment with raw racial appeals in the 1970 midterm elections— backfired spectacularly, failing "to carry the high-growth states of the Upper and Outer South and instead achiev[ing] pyrrhic victories in the Deep South."
Nixon's 1972 Southern strategy, like Reagan's in the 1980s, certainly appropriated coded racial appeals—the "one of us" shtick, the opposition to "forced busing," and incessant invocations of "law and order." But the core of the GOP's rise in the South "revolved around the incisive recognition that an insurance agent in Charlotte or a middle manager in Atlanta welcomed the same combination of conservative economic policies and moderate racial rhetoric that resonated for an aerospace engineer in Southern California, a homemaker in Omaha, or an accountant in New Jersey." These were the folks Nixon cozied up to in his signature four-minute political ad in 1968, declaring, "Let us listen now to . . . the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators." Lassiter concluded, "Republicans turned out to be neither the defenders of civil rights nor the demagogues of white supremacy, but instead the regional and national party of middleclass entitlement, corporate power, and suburban protectionism." This was a national phenomenon, of course, not strictly a Southern one. But its impact on Southern politics was outsized because the non–Deep South's population, wealth, and suburbs were all booming faster than any other region's from the 1940s through the 1990s. Only one party calibrated its pitch and its organizing methods— focusing on the megachurches that were becoming the community centers of Southern suburbs—to the region's evolving culture and new economic realities.
The homogeneity of political views in Dixie has been taken as a given ever since the decades leading up to the Civil War. That's when the South began to be painted—by both Northern abolitionists and Southern plantation interests—as an impenetrable fortress for the defense of slavery. But many white Southerners opposed slavery; in fact, prior to 1830, the abolitionist movement was mainly a Southern phenomenon.
"The great popular heart is not now and never has been in this war," said North Carolina congressman and governor Zebulon Vance, a unionist. His fellow Tar Heels defeated a statewide referendum on secession in February 1861. Two months later, after the firing on Fort Sumter, state legislators had to choose a side—and North Carolina became, despite widespread opposition, the last state to join the Confederacy. "It was a revolution," said Vance, "of the politicians and not the people." Such historical complication was quickly erased, of course, by the bloody sectional resentments brought on by the incomparably brutal war and its wretched aftermath. When Northern Republicans botched Reconstruction and the South remade itself as an apartheid region two decades later, the North-South divide was starkly drawn for generations. Democrats, who had led the campaign to terrorize and disenfranchise Southern blacks in the 1890s, became the party of the vast majority of white Southerners for most of the next century. This was true one-party domination. The former Confederate states had only a solitary Republican in the Senate before 1964, when Strom Thurmond switched allegiances and turned his powerful South Carolina machine into a GOP juggernaut.
The typical, and typically reductive, view of Southern politics has thus been that it has always revolved obsessively around race. "The South is a big, complicated region," journalist Nicholas Lemann acknowledged in 2006 in the New Republic, "but the simplest available explanation of its politics is that they are primarily racial." But even the overwhelming solid support for "the Southern Democracy" through the early 1960s obscured a lively mix of allegiances and ideologies fought out within the party. Elections were always decided in Democratic primaries, but those contests were often bitter slugfests between traditionalist conservatives and either populist reformers or "good government" moderates.
In what is still, by default, the most insightful book on the subject, 1949's Southern Politics in State and Nation, historian V. O. Key found that "even on the question of race the unity of the region has been grossly exaggerated in the national mind. Nor do the conventional stereotypes of Southern politics convey any conception of the diversity of political attitude, organization and tradition among the southern states." Chronicling the political history of each state, rather than lumping them together, Key demolished the myth of the solid South by describing their divergent voting habits. The differences were stark even in neighboring states like South Carolina, a former plantation stronghold where a rabid anti-government, cultural conservatism historically held sway, and North Carolina, where the conservative Democratic wing often lost to a "respectable" progressive faction.
Furthermore, the solid South stereotype leaves no room for the generations of peace, racial, and labor activists who have waged pitched—and not always losing—battles in Dixie with little support from the national progressive movement. There's no room for some of the most epochal figures in Southern political history—no room for Georgia's Tom Watson, who in the early phase of his career led a rural populist movement that united blacks and whites. No room for the legendary quasi-socialist Louisiana populists Huey and Earl Long, whose economic reforms benefited both races alike. (Regarding the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Huey once declared, "Quote me as saying that that imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana, and that when I call him a sonofabitch, I am not using profanity but am referring to the circumstances of his birth.") Little room, too, for Alabama's midcentury governor, Big Jim Folsom, the economic populist who stirred up his state with a Christmas address in 1949, declaring, "As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity, all the other people will be held down alongside them. Let's start talking fellowship and brotherly love, and doing unto others. And let's do more than talk about it; let's start living it."
The reduction of all Southern political questions to matters of "race" (sometimes with "religion" thrown in for good measure) belies the pervasive influence of economics on how folks vote. Through the disfiguring lens of racial politics, Folsom's protégé, Alabama governor George Wallace, is remembered as the quintessential Dixie politician of the civil rights era: not for the liberal (and biracial) economic policies that got him labeled "practically a communist" and "downright pink" by Alabama conservatives, but for the chest-jutting resistance to integration that marked his first term as governor. From a decade overendowed with black-and-white images of chaos and horror, Wallace is the central figure in two of the most unforgettable: standing rigidly in the "schoolhouse door" of the University of Alabama to officially protest its integration in 1963, and declaiming fustian racist poesy from atop the marble steps of the state capitol at his inauguration. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
While Wallace was the most infamous in a sorry line of gut-bucket Democratic demagogues who had, as he infamously said, "niggered" their way into office, he was not, as most Democrats and Republicans alike today believe, the archetypal Southern politician of his time. As usual with the South, there was no archetype. While few politically minded Americans have forgotten Wallace's drawling gasps of segregationist folderol, you would be hard-pressed to find anybody— anywhere—who recalls a once-famous inaugural address given two years earlier, when North Carolina's new Democratic governor, Terry Sanford, the first Southern governor to call for employment without regard to race or creed, announced, at the height of the white civil rights backlash, "No group of our citizens can be denied the right to participate in the opportunities of first-class citizenship." As the writer Jonathan Yardley later noted, those were "fighting words" in 1961, every bit as bracing and ultimately far more significant than Wallace's antics.
Sanford was not the only Southern Democrat looking forward. In South Carolina, the same year Wallace took office, newly elected governor Ernest Hollings—a populist firecracker who had promised to defend segregation earlier in his political rise—informed an aghast state legislature that integration had arrived, and "must be done with law and order." One week later, the second-largest state university, Clemson, was integrated without violence. "That speech made quite a difference," said South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn, who became the first African American majority whip in Congress in 2007.
Yet, Hollings's unpopular gesture has fallen into historical obscurity while Wallace's hateful defiance marches along in the history books as characteristic behavior among the region's white politicians. When the "national mind" thinks "South," it has long flashed back to the grimmest moments of the 1960s—a sepia-toned montage of police dogs and fire hoses and blown-up black girls in Birmingham, of housewives spitting racist epithets in Little Rock, and of a murdered saint on a hotel balcony in Memphis. The politics of Dixie are still presumed, particularly by the most "liberalminded" of non-Southerners, to be as race-soaked, simplistic, and wrongheaded as the Ricky Bobbys and Jeeter Lesters and Jerry Falwells who supposedly blanket, or rather infest, the kudzu-choked landscape that looms below the Mason-Dixon.
"The term ‘southern,'" Key concluded, "conjures up notions that have little resemblance to reality." His observation has never been more true than today. Nearly sixty years later, four long decades after the demise of Jim Crow opened up new economic and political possibilities in the South, the solid South myth still retains the power to distort and derange American politics. The baseless concept of a "solid Republican South" dictates national campaign strategies for both political parties. Democrats consider the South hopelessly lost to them—or winnable only with the most crippling sorts of compromises on core issues. Republicans, on the other hand, like to assume the South is theirs for perpetuity—or at least as long as the old, "solid" Southern Democracy endured.
The Republicans' Southern surge has been picked apart and celebrated by scores of political scientists and pundits. But just as much as the GOP won the region with its appeals to suburbanites and cultural traditionalists, the Democratic Party lost it by failing to build on its new black base. The story of how, and why, the Democrats surrendered Dixie is well worth chewing over. Segregationist whites did, unquestionably, begin defecting in large numbers to the formerly hated "cocktail party" in the wake of the civil rights movement. But they were outnumbered by the massive infusion of Southern blacks into the Democratic Party. Between the midterm elections of 1966 and 1970, more than 1.7 million African Americans registered to vote, spiking the regionwide percentage of registered blacks to nearly 60 percent. At the same time, white Southerners' racial attitudes were, in Matthew Lassiter's terms, undergoing one of the "most pronounced shifts in the history of opinion polling." In a May 1970 Gallup Poll, for example, only 16 percent of white parents in the South opposed sending their children to schools with a small number of black students—compared to 61 percent in 1963. In the North, meanwhile, white support for a federal role in school integration dropped from 47 percent in 1966 to 21 percent in 1976.
Liberals had long nourished the hope that integration would spawn a new Democratic coalition of blacks and moderate and progressive whites. Even as Nixon swept Dixie in 1972, there were encouraging signs. While Harry Dent was roostering about the new "Republican South," the eleven former Confederate states had already elected 665 blacks to local and state offices. (Nowadays, more than two-thirds of the nation's black elected officials are Southern.) Even more strikingly, every single Southern state but Alabama (stuck with Wallace) had elected a moderate-to-progressive governor calling for racial reconciliation and "lift-all-boats" economic reforms.
In Florida, young governor Reubin Askew was hailing the emergence of a "humanistic South, which has always been there, just below the surface of racism and despair, struggling for a chance to emerge." In Arkansas, Democratic governor Dale Bumpers was promoting a "future . . . shaped and shared by all Arkansans—old and young, black and white, rich and poor." South Carolina's new-breed Democratic governor, John C. West, pledged a "color-blind" administration and followed through by immediately appointing a black adviser to a top staff position, a first in that state.
"The era of defiance is behind us," announced Virginia's new governor, Linwood Holton—a moderate Republican, no less. Even Wallace, reelected in 1970, was whistling a new tune—postelection, of course—that was most certainly not "Dixie." Eight years after his "segregation forever" address, Wallace delivered a startlingly different inaugural message: "Our state government is for all, so let us join together, for Alabama belongs to all of us—black and white, young and old, rich and poor alike."
"We in the South have an exciting opportunity," wrote Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1972, "to prove that, ultimately, black and white have only one enemy: not each other, but those economic, social, educational, and political conditions which cause and maintain hunger, neglect, bigotry, and disease." One of the giddiest signs of progress had come in Georgia two years earlier, when voters had replaced Democratic governor Lester Maddox, a clownish Wallace wannabe who had gained statewide fame by chasing blacks away from his fried-chicken restaurant with an axe, with the relatively liberal Jimmy Carter.
Carter had run a classic populist campaign, trying his damnedest to shake every hand in the state. In a precursor to his 1976 grassroots presidential campaign, he tallied some 1,800 speeches to small-town civic groups, schools, and agriculture associations, inveighing against Georgia's entrenched power brokers and big-money interests. Carter made one campaign gesture to the old-line white Democrats, coming out against "forced busing" to integrate schools. But he steered clear of demagoguing on race. And on his inaugural day in 1971, surrounded by monuments to both Confederate soldiers and legendary bigots like Eugene Talmadge ("The Negro belongs to an inferior race"), Carter made his sentiments known in stronger and clearer terms than Terry Sanford or Ernest Hollings had used eight years earlier: "I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over."
When a near-solid South—all but Virginia—propelled Carter to the presidency in 1976, it looked as though the Democratic dream could, just maybe, become a reality. After Carter accepted the nomination, the strains of "We Shall Overcome" echoed around New York's Madison Square Garden as an unlikely smorgasbord of Democratic luminaries crowded the stage, singing and swaying. Up there with Carter were Coretta Scott King, Ted Kennedy, the African American congresswoman Barbara Jordan of Texas, and—could it be? Yep, singing right along—a wheelchair-bound George Wallace. Old wounds were binding. Tears were flowing, especially among the Southern delegations. As Time magazine had declared earlier in that first post–Jim Crow decade, "the region is abandoning the fateful uniqueness that has retarded its development and estranged its people." A progressive and biracial South, at long last, was announcing its arrival.
But Carter's star-crossed presidency, hampered by stagflation and doomed by Iranian hostage taking, failed to live up to its promise on nearly every count. Carter's economic policies strayed far from the progressive populism he had championed back home. Rather than reinvigorating—or reinventing—the New Deal spirit that had brought together blacks and whites in the South (however partially and tenuously), Carter's term in office signaled the start of the Democratic Party's slide toward a feckless, defensive posture of "moderation."
Meanwhile, a right-wing political revival among evangelical Christians was delivering another chunk of traditional Southern Democrats into the Republican camp. There was more than a touch of irony in this, of course, since Carter had been America's first "born-again" president, a Sunday School teacher throughout his adult life. But the Deep South Baptist lost evangelical votes in droves in 1980 to the Moral Majority's new hero: Hollywood actor, divorcé, former union president, and faithful nonchurchgoer Ronald Reagan.
The Republicans' Southern strategy had left the Democrats an opening: Translate the South's economic populist tradition into a forward-looking, class-based politics with broad appeal to blacks and whites alike. And run, as Southern Democrats have continued to do on the state and local levels, on progressive "good-government" issues—better schools, better roads, better jobs. While Republicans had latched on to the fearmongering, "watch-out-for-Washington" style of traditional Southern populism, the Democrats had a chance to adapt the equally appealing, vote-getting substance of economic populism. Instead, they ran from it.
"The party abandoned its New Deal legacy as a positive force for change and hunkered down behind a defensive shield," lamented journalist John Egerton, author of The Americanization of Dixie: The Southernization of America. "The leaders failed to comprehend that Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson died for their sins, and in so doing freed the Democrats to reclaim their heritage as the fountainhead of egalitarian opportunity."
"Today the Democratic Party stands between two great forces," an eminent populist once said. "On one side stands the corporate interests of the nation, its moneyed institutions, its aggregations of wealth and capital, imperious, arrogant, compassionless. . . . On the other side stands the unnumbered throng which gave a name to the Democratic Party and for which it has presumed to speak. Workworn and dust-begrimed, they make their mute appeal, and too often find their cry for help beat in vain against the outer walls."
That was thirty-three-year-old William Jennings Bryan, shaking the rafters on Capitol Hill in 1893. The Democratic Party then stood at a historical crossroads similar to today's. Republicans had ruled national politics for three decades, with Democrats offering an ever-more-mushy centrist alternative. When they heeded Bryan's call, the Democrats began to transform from a small-government, "states' rights" coalition into the progressive force behind Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal— both of which won unparalleled support in the South.
When Democrats devolved from the Great Society proponents of the 1960s to the free-trading welfare reformers of the '90s, they lost their identity as the "people's party" in the process. A Bryanesque revival is sorely needed. "Bona fide Democrats need to be reaching out to their natural constituency," wrote John Egerton—a constituency that includes "young people, the working class, women, African Americans, immigrants, the elderly, the poor, small business owners and the millions of middle-class citizens who have been whipsawed by the greedy elite." The stakes could hardly be higher. "Now, all that stands between these loyal, hard-working Americans and a permanent condition of underclass subjugation is the Democratic Party."
But just as it was in the 1890s, a new Democratic populism is anathema to party leaders who have counseled middle-of-the-roadism as a way to neutralize both Republican cultural populism and the flow of corporate cash into GOP coffers. Besides, the very mention of populism stirs ancient fears among non-Southern liberals. Up north, populism has always been tainted, understandably enough, by the ugly legacy of the most colorful "people's champions" of the South—from Tom Watson to George Wallace—who became fire breathing defenders of white supremacy.
As Michael Kazin wrote in A Godly Hero, his majestic 2006 biography of William Jennings Bryan, it is nearly impossible in today's climate to imagine "an officeholder who was a flagrant racist being anything else worth mentioning." But in the pre–civil rights South, populism was a double-edged phenomenon. Many of the very figures who led the bloody campaign to disenfranchise black voters in the 1890s—the snarling "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman in South Carolina; the "Karl Marx for hillbillies" in Arkansas, Senator Jeff Davis—were also catalysts behind landmark progressive legislation: corporate regulation, income taxes, protection for strikers and union organizers, child-labor laws, federal support for education, and voting reforms such as ballot initiatives and party primaries.
With Jim Crow long dead and buried, the preservation of white privilege is no longer the supreme issue of Southern politics. There is no supreme issue in the region, no such powerful force binding together white voters. A new Democratic populism doesn't have to preach hate and fear—or cozy up to traditionalist "moral values." As a Young Democrats leader in South Carolina asked not long ago, "The Dixiecrats are dead, right?" Mostly they are—quite literally— and the civil rights backlash that soured so many white Southerners toward the Democratic Party is going to the grave with them. The South's heady half century of rising education levels and unprecedented in-migration, as well as manufacturing-job losses since the early 1990s, have made the region fertile territory for a reborn Democratic populism. Maybe the soundest advice for Democrats comes from Pete MacDowell, a fierce and funny liberal warrior from North Carolina who cofounded the advocacy group Democracy South. "Shit," he said, "just try being Democrats here. Remind Southern people what progressives actually believe. People aren't being told that they're getting poorer because of corrupt, crony capitalism. The anticorporate critique is not being made. People need to understand that the rich aren't paying taxes. They haven't had that gospel preached to them in a hell of a long time."
This gospel would get an enthusiastic hearing in today's South. Almost half of America's self-defined populists—47 percent—live in the region. That's according to the pollsters at Pew, who define populists as people who "favor an active role for government in both the economic and social spheres." Exit polls from the 2006 midterms sketched a political portrait of a region that will grow only more receptive to a progressive Democratic populism over the next few decades. While their elders leaned Republican by a slim margin, 51 percent of young Southerners (under thirty) favored the Democrats. That wasn't the most ominous news for Republicans: a relatively modest 62 percent of white Southerners, that supposedly "solid" core of Republicanism, said they voted for the GOP—while 87 percent of African Americans, 57 percent of Hispanics, and 52 percent of "others" went the other way. Among Southerners making less than fifty thousand dollars a year, 55 percent voted Democratic; among evangelicals, the largest GOP base in the South, support for Democrats rose from 19 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2006.
On economic issues, the progressive leanings of Southern populists are overwhelming: In 2006, just 25 percent said they wanted President George W. Bush's tax cuts to become permanent. Ninety-one percent of self-described populists favored raising the minimum wage. Only 42 percent thought free-trade agreements were good for the country—fewer even than those in Pew's poll, nationally who called themselves "liberals." While many populist Southerners leaned in a conservative direction on taxes in the 1980s and '90s, the vast middle of Southern voters consists of folks whose ideology has tilted back in the opposite direction: they want the government to do more, not less, to make incomes more equitable. And they say they are willing, by a generous margin, to pay more taxes if it will help the poor.
The ranks of these populists are being swelled by millions of Hispanic immigrants. Nine of the nation's fastest-growing Hispanic populations are in Southern states, and over the next three decades, these new voters will become the biggest swing demographic from Alabama to Virginia. The majority of those Southern Hispanics eligible to vote went for Bush in 2004, but they swung back to the Democrats' camp in 2006. Hispanic voters are anything but sure bets to become a large and loyal voting bloc for the Democrats— especially if the party continues to kiss off the South and blow its chance to make early and lasting connections with millions of immigrants learning American politics afresh.
The Democrats also risk losing touch with their most dedicated Southern voters—African Americans—though their voter turnout soared during Senator Barack Obama's 2008 primary campaign. What the Democrats must do in the South—to inspire black voters, reconnect with white voters, and woo Hispanic voters—is reverse their almost forty-year pattern of fighting elections on the Republicans' turf. "Why does the Democratic Party persist in a national political strategy that seems to play into the Republicans' hands?" asked political scholar and writer Adolph Reed Jr. on behalf of millions of rank-and-file Democrats. By failing to strongly assert the primacy of economic fairness in their campaigns, the Democrats have passively allowed the Republicans to transform too many elections, for too many voters, into referendums on cultural flash points like gay marriage. These wedge issues were once distractions; they are now, often, the entire basis upon which Southern campaigns are waged.
"The answer to the question of why white Southern identity is ‘unmeltable,'" said Alabama native Sheldon Hackney, the former National Endowment for the Humanities chair, "is that it has been periodically reactivated, awakened from its wary nap by changes that are perceived as threatening by whites who themselves feel alienated, marginal, and at risk." Meanwhile, Democrats are not engaging these same voters with alternative explanations—and far more plausible ones—of why they're feeling so glum about their prospects and their childrens' futures.
The Democrats' post-'60s emphasis on cultural liberalism, as both the liberal white scholar Todd Gitlin and the African American historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. have argued, has kept the left from articulating a broad common purpose for the country. Identity politics, Gates wrote, is "about the priority of difference, and while it is not, by itself, undesirable, it is—by itself—dangerously inadequate." When Democrats fret about having to compromise their party's soul to win down south, they are fretting only about identity politics. Democrats would certainly not have to move right on social safety net issues to win Dixie. They would need to move left, in fact, on issues like health care, corporate regulation and taxation, and antipoverty initiatives. On these issues, the very Democrats who fear the dark consequences of "looking south" have already sold down the river many of the principles the party once held dear. Democrats as champions of unfettered free trade? Democrats reluctant to fight against the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs? Democrats doing little to halt an unjust war fought almost exclusively by the sons and daughters of the working poor? A Democratic administration (Clinton/Gore) presiding over a "prosperous" decade of widening income inequality? These are hardly the characteristics of a party of such high-flown nobility that it cannot risk contamination by contact with Southerners.
In 2008 and beyond, Democrats have a historic opportunity to snatch back some of their old Southern turf. Thus far, that has less to do with Democrats' seizing the opportunity—though the Democratic National Committee's grassroots fifty-state strategy has enlivened many formerly moribund party organizations in Southern states— and more to do with demographic trends and disarray on the other side. For the first time in two generations, the GOP machine is sputtering. The religious right, such a mighty force in 2004, quickly became fractured and demoralized by the corruption and sex scandals of its political champions. At the same time, evangelicals began to grope their way toward a "purpose-driven" social gospel that looks beyond the moral wedge issues of abortion and gay rights to poverty and the environment. Many of the evangelical right's most prominent politicians—including Ralph Reed in Georgia, Senator Jim Talent in Missouri, Roy Moore in Alabama, Representatives Anne Northup in Kentucky and Katherine Harris in Florida—lost convincingly in 2006. Moderate "business" Republicans, many of whom are Yankee transplants, have increasingly split with their right-wing compatriots. And it hasn't helped the GOP's standing with independent-minded Southern voters—a fast-growing group— that Republicans have had a hard time governing in Southern states once they take power. "The Republicans have failed the most important test of any political movement," opined the Economist in 2007, "wielding power successfully."
Southern Republicans have also been deflated by the national and international power-wielding failures of George W. Bush. In many ways, Bush was the ultimate product of the Republicans' faux populism. Though many tried, no politician ever embodied the "one of us" style more devotedly than ol' 43, with his swagger, his snigger, his "dead or alive" bravado, his brush clearing on the Crawford ranch (home to perhaps five cows)—and with his singular devotion, when not in public, to multiplying the profits of Halliburton and Chevron. Like the greatest of actors, Bush seemed to not just be playing a role but actually inhabiting his character's skin. Unlike Al Gore, Bush walked, talked, and even laughed like a good ole boy. And Southern populists, along with most other middle Americans, cheered him on. But soon after the 2004 elections, they turned on him—hard—over the war and his dismaying attempt to privatize Social Security. When Bush became discredited in the South, so too did his political style and message—the one that had been so indispensable to the Republicans' Southern appeal.
Excerpted from Blue Dixie by Bob Moser
Copyright @ 2008 by Bob Moser
Published in 2008 by Publisher H.B. Fenn and Company Ltd
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
