Mapping how we got here
Tuesday’s column about a new book from political science professors Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville ran short of space to develop adequately the book’s central point.
The crux of The Long Southern Strategy is that Republicans established a template when they chose to exploit Southern resentment of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The model could then be parlayed into exploitation of anti-feminism and other perceived affronts to conservative Southern culture, mostly to fundamentalist and evangelical religion.
All of that went together to form the foundation of the GOP’s Southern stranglehold that fuels its national dominance today.
Race fear was drawn from traditional Southern white male patriarchal protection of subservient white women from black males.
That fed a Southern white culture that resented the feminist movement, thus strengthening the political power of Southern conservative fundamentalist and evangelical churches whose preaching seemed under attack by godless Democrats.
The model could thus tap new fears and resentments—of a liberal U.S. Supreme Court, bans on prayer in school, gay rights, immigration, socialized medicine, a president with Kenyan roots and a tolerance toward Muslims.
It didn’t matter to Republicans’ Southern dominance if large numbers of Southerners evolved on one fear, such as of black people. There always was another fear coming right along.
It’s not that the modern South couldn’t take a shine to an occasional Democrat. It perked up for Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Not incidentally, both those men were Southern Baptists.
But Republicans always found something new to which to apply the model—something like, in 1988, a furloughed African American criminal in Massachusetts named Willie Horton.
As Maxwell recalled the other day, the central conservative Southern female refrain regarding the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh—recited by conservative women outside the South as well—was that the attack on Kavanaugh for alleged long-ago sexual misbehavior could be used against their husbands’ distant pasts or their sons’ current and natural hormone-driven behavior in college.
Boys will be boys in a patriarchal culture, you see.
Maxwell said the central fascination and motivation that led her to the four-year project was an attempt to come to terms with growing up a Southern white female and trying to understand why so many other Southern white females weren’t inspired in their voting habits by gender-equality issues and female empowerment as she was.
She found that the answer started with the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy” to exploit race. But more to the point: It turned out the strategy was a living organism adaptable to whatever new fear or resentment came along.
Maxwell and Shields began working on the book before the Donald Trump phenomenon. But the work happened to get published at the very time Trump raged in exploitation of racial division and in fortification of his Southern white electoral base— not merely on race, but on general resentments and fears.
Trump’s appeal also relies notably, Maxwell explained, on style.
Historically, the South was a one-party Democratic culture putting a premium on entertainment, on showmanship, in place of issues. Republicans found a way to treat the South to better modern showmen— an actor, Ronald Reagan; a good old boy like George W. Bush, outpolling in the region a stiff Tennessean named Al Gore; and now the arena-filling demagogue in Trump, spouting fearmongering rhetoric that entertains as much as it riles.
Trump, in a way, is the quintessential Southern president. Fox News is, in a way, a Southern country music station gone nationwide.
It didn’t have to be this way, Maxwell said. The Republicans had a more progressive history on racial moderation than the Democrats. They could have chosen not to exploit fear and prejudice.
They could have stood for stronger rights for women by addressing rather than exploiting unfounded fears of unisex bathrooms and women being made to work and leave their children in day care under the Equal Rights Amendment.
For that matter, they could have let Trump go along as he seemed inclined with a comprehensive immigrant reform compromise. Instead they sent in Stephen Miller and our own Tom Cotton to tell him not to compromise because they needed to restrict legal immigration, not just illegal immigration, to higher-quality people.
They said they’d never get that if Trump made a deal with Democrats giving him stronger border security and them paths to citizenship for the Dreamers and others.
Those compromises would have risked the solid South, which would have undercut the currently reigning equation by which the Republicans have installed two second-place candidates as presidents this century, thanks to the red electoral bounty from South Carolina westward to Oklahoma.
This book, The Long Southern Strategy, does a better job than anything else I’ve read explaining how we got to the current state of angry paralysis in American politics.