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THE REPUBLICAN SOUTH

As few Americans need reminding, the South was a Democratic domain for most of its political history. In 1950, to select a sample year, 103 of its 105 seats in the House of Representatives were held by Democrats. (The other two were in Tennessee.) Its eleven governors and twenty-two senators were also from that party. Today, the region is almost as reliably Republican. No other assemblage of states has made so momentous a shift. So it’s worth taking the time to learn how and why this happened and to ask whether, even with so grand a partisan pivot, Southern politics have basically changed.

The South has traditionally been delineated as the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. But segments of Florida and Virginia are experiencing cultural changes, due mainly to migrations from more urbane states. Similar shifts are occurring in Texas and North Carolina, albeit at a slower pace. Added to which, Hispanics are now the principal minority in Florida and Texas, altering the dimensions of race and ethnicity.

The South has been America’s most problematic region from its very beginning. Its spirit and structure were indelibly set when nineteen shackled Africans were taken ashore in Virginia in 1619. Viewed as property that could be bought and sold and punished, they became the root of the region’s economy. The legal enslavement of living beings continued for almost two and a half centuries, and was only ended by a gory war. Yet its imprint, more than any other factor, still explains the texture and temper of today’s South.

The choice of chattel labor gave it a pharaonic structure, more primitive than the vassalage of feudalism. Relying on trammeled sweat and muscle, there was no need to nurture the ingenuity that ignites innovation, as in pursuing the promise of technology. Even after bondage was ended, the South did not join the industrial age. It had manufacturing, of course, but not enough to lift the weight of the past. Our time has seen once-backward countries enter the modern world. Think Taiwan and South Korea. But this nation’s South never fully shed the lethargy endemic to enslavement. That, as much as anything, is why it continues to have the lowest living standards in the nation. Indeed, by many measures, lower than in Taiwan and South Korea.

The importation of human cargos brought about a need by those of European lineage to differentiate themselves distinctly from those of African origin. Even with epithets like “rednecks,” “crackers,” and “trash,” it was accepted that those deemed white were full members of the race.1 More explicitly, there was the avowal that no white person, no matter how degraded, could ever be consigned to bondage. To this day, anyone viewed as white can gaze upon anyone deemed black, and muse: “Only your people were enslaved; mine could never be.” Thus the surmise, still much alive in the South, that descendants of chattels are from a lower evolutionary level. Germans coined the term Untermensch. An American word wasn’t needed. That’s not quite right. The N-word served the purpose.

In the South, more than elsewhere, those who are endowed as white hold it as their most salient trait. If an assurance of white superiority was needed during slavery, that affirmation serves similar purposes today. Being regarded as white becomes especially important when the rest of one’s life lacks recognition and promise. Southern whites, on average and in distribution, are visibly behind members of their race in the rest of the nation. This is evident in official indices. Whites residing in the South lead in infant deaths and teenage births, in lower incomes and lower rates of college completion, with more incarcerations and broken marriages. Also high are firearms deaths they inflict on one another, whether by homicide or happenstance.

Coincidentally, despite all efforts to preserve distinctions and division, racial disparities are actually narrower in the South. In South Carolina and Alabama, rates for black and white teenage births are only ten and eleven points apart. Up in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the racial divides are almost twice that. With household income, the races in Arkansas are twenty-five points closer to each other than they are in Illinois. These and other convergences spur Southern whites to look for other ways to affirm their superiority. If they are kept dispossessed, their race will serve as their solace. Today, Republican rule in the South at best makes token efforts to reduce its residual lag relative to the rest of the country. Public education and public health, to cite two examples, seldom rank high on its agendas.

As the 1960s got underway, it became clear that Southern Democrats were primed to deserting their national party. Until that time, it had been conceded that its Southern wing could build on an all-white electorate, while the rest of the party was becoming increasingly diverse. Clearly, that concordat couldn’t last. The fifties brought the Brown decision banning segregated schools, which was met by a revanche to undercut that ruling. Northern Democrats, for their part, were aghast at fire hoses, attack dogs, and back-road executions.

Two events, both in 1964, ended the old Democratic détente. The first occurred during the convention that would nominate Lyndon Johnson for a full term. A motion was introduced to seat a delegation from Mississippi whose members were mostly black. While it failed, its very submission led the former Confederacy to conclude that Democrats were no longer an accommodating home. That fall, five of its states gave majorities to Barry Goldwater on the GOP ticket. (Such a breach had a trial run in 1948. Then, a similar bloc rejected Harry Truman in favor of a segregationist senator who had assembled a States’ Rights slate.)

The other 1964 development was in Washington, where Northern Democrats used their congressional numbers to enact a national civil rights statute. Its focus was opening the franchise and was plainly aimed at the South. If few schools ended up desegregating, extending the ballot came quickly, not least because federal lawyers made it happen. (Plus voting was less traumatic than youngsters sitting side by side.)

Now able to vote, black citizens in the Southern states soon started to register, and they did so as Democrats. Nor was this surprising. Throughout the bulk of the region, the party was the only available platform. Even in 1964, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia were sending only Democrats to the House of Representatives. As a near-monopoly, the party had been the principal route to public office, and the vehicle for voters who sought an effective voice.

What happened next shouldn’t have been startling, either. What do whites so often do, when even one or two black families appear in their neighborhoods or black children start attending their schools? The short answer is that they move out. Before the eyes of white Southerners, what had been their party was literally becoming integrated. But if you’re going to move, you have to move somewhere.

The GOP acted swiftly. The mid-1960s saw the emergence of its “Southern Strategy,” which invited whites of the region to switch their partisan allegiance. Almost all of them soon did. In public, they cited their loyalty to states’ rights and limited government. Privately, the GOP offered a haven for whites seeking to escape racial mingling in their politics. Today, the South is the Republicans’ firmest base. Together, its states averaged nine points higher for Donald Trump than his national edge.

It’s not widely realized that by census counts, today’s South is comfortably and dominantly white. Even in Georgia and Mississippi, which have the largest black populations, whites lead by twenty points. In outer states like Florida and Tennessee, whites are three-quarters of the total. So any analysis of the South should stress that it is predominantly a white region. Of course, black citizens have the vote. But they are isolated in what is seen as primarily their own party, the Democrats, whose ballots have little overall effect.

And here arises another calculation. Political folk wisdom says that parties seek to increase their share of votes by bringing new people to the polls. In theory, recruiting new adherents helps to attain and maintain power. This tactic has not been embraced in the South. Republicans have concluded that any effort to court black voters will backfire. For every five black citizens they might lure to GOP ranks, ten whites would leave. Since whites have comfortable majorities in all eleven states, the GOP sees no need to diversify its racial ranks.

White legislators have used their majority power to draw districts that hold black representation to the barest minimum. A glance at seven states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—shows how that has been done. In these seven states, black residents make up 24 percent of the population. Together, the seven have been allotted fifty seats in the House of Representatives. Yet maps were so contrived that in only six—12 percent—could a black candidate be elected. Of course, there’s no rule that seats must be racially proportional, or that voters must have officials of their own race. Still, the numbers are plain: 24 percent of the population gets 12 percent of the seats.

Needless to say, Republicans have always welcomed a handful of black conservatives, like South Carolina’s Tim Scott. And of course Clarence Thomas. It would be astounding if of 40 million black Americans, some didn’t choose to turn to the right. In a similar vein, the GOP can find enough Cuban Americans to give it a suitable Hispanic catchment.

Of course, there are other states where white Republicans hold key offices and dominate the voting rolls. Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah come to mind. The difference is that in these states, the principal race doesn’t use its power to repress another that it outnumbers. The white South is not inclined to admit that the Civil War is over. In more than a few ways, they are redressing its outcome.

Islam is a sneaky dogma that is not a religion of peace. (Texas)

I go to a shooting range once a month. (Georgia)

I do not believe in unions. They lead to economic destruction. (Connecticut)

If more women were responsible with birth control, the abortion issue would decrease significantly. I’m female and a proud Republican. (New York)

Republicans are the heart of America: down-to-earth, basic people. (Alabama)