Books Discussed in this Essay:

The Southern Strategy Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South, by Joseph A. Aistrup.

The Rise of Southern Republicans, by Earl Black and Merle Black.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994, by Dan T. Carter.

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell.

The Emerging Republican Majority, by Kevin Phillips.

Amyth about conservatism is circulating in academia and journalism andhas spread to the 2004 presidential campaign. It goes something likethis: the Republican Party assembled a national majority by winningover Southern white voters; Southern white voters are racist;therefore, the GOP is racist. Sometimes the conclusion is softened, andRepublicans are convicted merely of base opportunism: the GOP is theparty that became willing to pander to racists. Either way, today'sRepublican Party—and by extension the conservative movement at itsheart—supposedly has revealed something terrible about itself.

Thismyth is not the only viewpoint in scholarly debates on the subject. Butit is testimony to its growing influence that it is taken aboard bywriters like Dan Carter, a prize-winning biographer of George Wallace,and to a lesser extent by the respected students of the South, Earl andMerle Black. It is so pervasive in mass media reporting on racialissues that an NBC news anchor can casually speak of "a new era for theRepublican Party, one in which racial intolerance really won't betolerated." It has become a staple of Democratic politicians likeHoward Dean, who accuses Republicans of "dividing Americans againsteach other, stirring up racial prejudices and bringing out the worst inpeople" through the use of so-called racist "codewords." All thismatters because people use such putative connections to form judgments,and "racist" is as toxic a reputation as one can have in U.S. politics.Certainly the 2000 Bush campaign went to a lot of trouble to combat theGOP's reputation as racially exclusionary. I even know youngRepublicans who fear that behind their party's victories lies a dirty,not-so-little Southern secret.

Now to be sure, the GOP had aSouthern strategy. Willing to work with, rather than against, the grainof Southern opinion, local Republicans ran some segregationistcandidates in the 1960s. And from the 1950s on, virtually all nationaland local GOP candidates tried to craft policies and messages thatcould compete for the votes of some pretty unsavory characters. Thisrecord is incontestable. It is also not much of a story—that a partyacted expediently in an often nasty political context.

The newmyth is much bolder than this. It insists that these events shoulddecisively shape our understanding of conservatism and the modernRepublican Party. Dan Carter writes that today's conservatism must betraced directly back to the "politics of rage" that George Wallaceblended from "racial fear, anticommunism, cultural nostalgia, andtraditional right-wing economics." Another scholar, Joseph Aistrup,claims that Reagan's 1980 Southern coalition was "the reincarnation ofthe Wallace movement of 1968." For the Black brothers, the GOP had oncebeen the "party of Abraham Lincoln," but it became the "party of BarryGoldwater," opposed to civil rights and black interests. It is only ashort step to the Democrats' insinuation that the GOP is the latestexploiter of the tragic, race-based thread of U.S. history. In short,the GOP did not merely seek votes expediently; it made a pact withAmerica's devil.

The mythmakers typically draw on two types ofevidence. First, they argue that the GOP deliberately crafted its coremessages to accommodate Southern racists. Second, they find proof inthe electoral pudding: the GOP captured the core of the Southern whitebacklash vote. But neither type of evidence is very persuasive. It isnot at all clear that the GOP's policy positions are sugar-coatedracist appeals. And election results show that the GOP became theSouth's dominant party in the least racist phase of the region'shistory, and got—and stays—that way as the party of the upwardlymobile, more socially conservative, openly patriotic middle-class, notof white solidarity.

Let's start with policies. Like manyothers, Carter and the Black brothers argue that the GOP appealed toSouthern racism not explicitly but through "coded" racial appeals.Carter is representative of many when he says that Wallace's racialismcan be seen, varying in style but not substance, in "Goldwater's voteagainst the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, in Richard Nixon's subtlemanipulation of the busing issue, in Ronald Reagan's genial demolitionof affirmative action, in George Bush's use of the Willie Horton ads,and in Newt Gingrich's demonization of welfare mothers."

Theproblem here is that Wallace's segregationism was obviously racist, butthese other positions are not obviously racist. This creates ananalytic challenge that these authors do not meet. If an illegitimateviewpoint (racism) is hidden inside another viewpoint, that secondview—to be a useful hiding place—must be one that can be held forentirely legitimate (non-racist) reasons. Conservative intellectualsmight not always linger long enough on the fact that opposition tobusing and affirmative action can be disguised racism. On the otherhand, these are also positions that principled non-racists can hold. Tobe persuasive, claims of coding must establish how to tell which iswhich. Racial coding is often said to occur when voters are highlyprone to understanding a non-racist message as a proxy for somethingelse that is racist. This may have happened in 1964, when Goldwater,who neither supported segregation nor called for it, employed the term"states' rights," which to many whites in the Deep South implied thecontinuation of Jim Crow.

The problem comes when we try toextend this forward. Black and Black try to do this by showing thatNixon and Reagan crafted positions on busing, affirmative action, andwelfare reform in a political climate in which many white votersdoubted the virtues of preferential hiring, valued individualresponsibility, and opposed busing as intrusive. To be condemned asracist "code," the GOP's positions would have to come across as proxiesfor these views -and in turn these views would have to be racist. Theproblem is that these views are not self-evidently racist. Manyscholars simply treat them as if they were. Adding insult to injury,usually they don't even pause to identify when views like opposition toaffirmative action would not be racist.

In effect,these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that theseviews could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a"code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so canbe reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that theirclaims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these viewsare deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts tosaying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rightsestablishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects thesetheorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree withthe Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But theydo not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanshipposturing as social science.

The Southern Strategy

Thisbias is evident also in how differently they treat the long Democraticdominance of the South. Carter and the Black brothers suggest that theaccommodation of white racism penetrates to the very soul of modernconservatism. But earlier generations of openly segregationistSoutherners voted overwhelmingly for Woodrow Wilson's and FranklinRoosevelt's Democratic Party, which relaxed its civil rights stancesaccordingly. This coalition passed much of the New Deal legislationthat remains the basis of modern liberalism. So what does thesegregationist presence imply for the character of liberalism at itselectoral and legislative apogee? These scholars sidestep the questionby simply not discussing it. This silence implies that racism andliberalism were simply strange political bedfellows, without any commonvalues.

But the commonality, the philosophical link, is swiftlyidentified once the Democrats leave the stage. In study after study,authors say that "racial and economic conservatism" married whiteSoutherners to the GOP after 1964. So whereas historically accidentalevents must have led racists to vote for good men like FDR, after 1964racists voted their conscience. How convenient. And how easy it wouldbe for, say, a libertarian conservative like Walter Williams togenerate a counter-narrative that exposes statism as the philosophicallink between segregation and liberalism's economic populism.

Yetliberal commentators commit a further, even more obvious, analyticerror. They assume that if many former Wallace voters ended up votingRepublican in the 1970s and beyond, it had to be because Republicanswent to the segregationist mountain, rather than the mountain coming tothem. There are two reasons to question this assumption. The first isthe logic of electoral competition. Extremist voters usually havelittle choice but to vote for a major party which they consider at bestthe lesser of two evils, one that offers them little of what they trulydesire. Segregationists were in this position after 1968, when Wallacewon less than 9% of the electoral college and Nixon became presidentanyway, without their votes. Segregationists simply had very limitednational bargaining power. In the end, not the Deep South but the GOPwas the mountain.

Second, this was borne out in how little theGOP had to "offer," so to speak, segregationists for their supportafter 1968, even according to the myth's own terms. Segregationistswanted policies that privileged whites. In the GOP, they had to settlefor relatively race-neutral policies: opposition to forced busing andreluctant coexistence with affirmative action. The reason thesepolicies aren't plausible codes for real racism is that they aren't theequivalents of discrimination, much less of segregation.

Whydid segregationists settle for these policies rather than continue tovote Democratic? The GOP's appeal was mightily aided by none other thanthe Democratic Party itself, which was lurching leftward in the 1970s,becoming, as the contemporary phrase had it, the party of "acid,amnesty, and abortion." Among other things, the Democrats absorbed acivil rights movement that was itself expanding, and thus diluting, itsagenda to include economic redistributionism, opposition to the VietnamWar, and Black Power. The many enthusiasms of the new Democratic Partydrove away suburban middle-class voters almost everywhere in thecountry, not least the South.

Given that trend, the GOP did notneed to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract morevoters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up votingRepublican says a lot less about the GOP than it does aboutsegregationists' collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips washardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. Hewrote in 1969 that Nixon did not "have to bid much ideologically" toget Wallace's electorate, given its limited power, and that moderationwas far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching aracialist strategy. While "the Republican Party cannot go to the DeepSouth"—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whitesthere seemed to desire most—"the Deep South must soon go to thenational GOP," regardless.

Electoral Patterns

Inall these ways, the gop appears as the national party of themiddle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation,and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myth'sproponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southernwhite backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the DeepSouth. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in theSouth, on the strength of Goldwater's appeals to states' rights.Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. SoGoldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP.

Buthidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no senseif white solidarity really was the basis for the GOP's advance. Thesepatterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. Howdid the GOP's Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguishbetween two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas,Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained manygrowing, urbanizing "New South" areas and much smaller blackpopulations. Race loomed less large in its politics. In the more rural,and poorer, Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina,and Louisiana —black communities were much larger, and racial conflictwas much more acute in the 1950s and '60s. Tellingly, the presidentialcampaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majorityof white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in thePeripheral South.

The myth that links the GOP with racism leadsus to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most stronglywhere and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. TheGOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites andonly later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least asmuch, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-classwhites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but whowere George Wallace's base. The GOP should have received more supportfrom native white Southerners raised on the region's traditional racismthan from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest andelsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuingdecades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higherrates than younger ones raised in a less racist era.

Eachprediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in theSouth because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (andnon-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewherein the country.

Take presidential voting. Under FDR, theDemocrats successfully assembled a daunting, cross-regional coalitionof presidential voters. To compete, the GOP had to develop a broadernational outreach of its own, which meant adding a Southern strategy toits arsenal. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower took his campaign as nationalhero southward. He, like Nixon in 1960, polled badly among Deep Southwhites. But Ike won four states in the Peripheral South. This markedtheir lasting realignment in presidential voting. From 1952 to theClinton years, Virginia reverted to the Democrats only once, Floridaand Tennessee twice, and Texas—except when native-son LBJ was on theballot—only twice, narrowly. Additionally, since 1952, North Carolinahas consistently either gone Republican or come within a few percentagepoints of doing so.

In other words, states representing overhalf the South's electoral votes at the time have been consistently inplay from 1952 on—since before Brown v. Board of Education, beforeGoldwater, before busing, and when the Republicans were the mainstay ofcivil rights bills. It was this which dramatically changed the GOP'spresidential prospects. The GOP's breakthrough came in the leastracially polarized part of the South. And its strongest supporters mostyears were "New South" urban and suburban middle- and upper-incomevoters. In 1964, as we've seen, Goldwater did the opposite: winning inthe Deep South but losing the Peripheral South. But the pre-Goldwaterpattern re-emerged soon afterward. When given the option in 1968, DeepSouth whites strongly preferred Wallace, and Nixon became president bywinning most of the Peripheral South instead. From 1972 on, GOPpresidential candidates won white voters at roughly even rates in thetwo sub-regions, sometimes slightly more in the Deep South, sometimesnot. But by then, the Deep South had only about one-third of theSouth's total electoral votes; so it has been the Periphery,throughout, that provided the bulk of the GOP's Southern presidentialsupport.


The GOP'scongressional gains followed the same pattern. Of course, it was harderfor Republicans to win in Deep South states where Democratic-leaningblack electorates were larger. But even when we account for that, theGOP became the dominant party of white voters much earlier in thePeriphery than it did in the Deep South. Before Goldwater, the GOP'sfew Southern House seats were almost all in the Periphery (as was itssole Senator—John Tower of Texas). Several Deep South House memberswere elected with Goldwater but proved ephemeral, as Black and Blacknote: "Republicans lost ground and stalled in the Deep South for therest of the decade," while in the Periphery they "continued to makeincremental gains." In the 1960s and '70s, nearly three-quarters of GOPHouse victories were in the Peripheral rather than the Deep South, withthe GOP winning twice as often in urban as rural districts. And six ofthe eight different Southern Republican Senators elected from 1961 to1980 were from the Peripheral South. GOP candidates tended consistentlyto draw their strongest support from the more educated, middle- andupper-income white voters in small cities and suburbs. In fact,Goldwater in 1964—at least his Deep South performance, which is allthat was controversial in this regard—was an aberration, not a modelfor the GOP.

Writers who vilify the GOP's Southern strategymight be surprised to find that all of this was evident, at least inbroad brush-strokes, to the strategy's early proponents. In hiswell-known book, Kevin Phillips drew the lesson that a strong appeal inthe Deep South, on the model of 1964, had already entailed and wouldentail defeat for the GOP everywhere else, including in what he termedthe Outer South. He therefore rejected such an approach. He emphasizedthat Ike and Nixon did far better in the Peripheral South. He saw hugeopportunities in the "youthful middle-class" of Texas, Florida, andother rapidly growing and changing Sun Belt states, where what hecalled "acutely Negrophobe politics" was weakest, not strongest. Hethus endorsed "evolutionary success in the Outer South" as the basis ofthe GOP's "principal party strategy" for the region, concluding thatthis would bring the Deep South along in time, but emphatically on thenational GOP's terms, not the segregationists'.

The tensionbetween the myth and voting data escalates if we consider change acrosstime. Starting in the 1950s, the South attracted millions ofMidwesterners, Northeasterners, and other transplants. These"immigrants" identified themselves as Republicans at higherrates than native whites. In the 1980s, up to a quarter ofself-declared Republicans in Texas appear to have been such immigrants.Furthermore, research consistently shows that identification with theGOP is stronger among the South's younger rather than older whitevoters, and that each cohort has also became more Republican with time.Do we really believe immigrants (like George H.W. Bush, who moved withhis family to Texas) were more racist than native Southerners, and thatyounger Southerners identified more with white solidarity than didtheir elders, and that all cohorts did so more by the 1980s and '90sthan they had earlier?

In sum, the GOP's Southern electorate wasnot rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentratedin the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionatelysuburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-native-Southern, andconcentrated in the growth-points that were, so to speak, the least"Southern" parts of the South. This is a very strange way toreincarnate George Wallace's movement.

The Decline of Racism

Timingmay provide the greatest gap between the myth and the actual unfoldingof events. Only in the 1980s did more white Southerners self-identifyas Republicans than as Democrats, and only in the mid-1990s didRepublicans win most Southern House seats and become competitive inmost state legislatures. So if the GOP's strength in the South onlyrecently reached its zenith, and if its appeal were primarily racial innature, then the white Southern electorate (or at least most of it)would have to be as racist as ever. But surely one of the mostimportant events in Southern political history is the long-term declineof racism among whites. The fact that these (and many other) bookssuggest otherwise shows that the myth is ultimately based on ademonization not of the GOP but of Southerners, who are indeed assumedto have Confederate flags in their hearts if not on their pickups. Thisview lends The Rise of Southern Republicans a schizophrenicnature: it charts numerous changes in the South, but its organizingcategories are predicated on the unsustainable assumption that racialviews remain intact.

What's more, the trend away from confidentbeliefs in white supremacy may have begun earlier than we often think.David Chappell, a historian of religion, argues that during the heightof the civil rights struggle, segregationists were denied the crucialprop of religious legitimacy. Large numbers of pastors of diversedenominations concluded that there was no Biblical foundation foreither segregation or white superiority. Although many pastors remainedsegregationist anyway, the official shift was startling: "Before theSupreme Court's [Brown v. Board] decision of 1954, thesouthern Presbyterians. . . and, shortly after the decision, theSouthern Baptist Convention (SBC) overwhelmingly passed resolutionssupporting desegregation and calling on all to comply with itpeacefully. . . . By 1958 all SBC seminaries accepted blackapplicants." With considerable understatement, Chappell notes that"people—even historians—are surprised to hear this." Billy Graham, themost prominent Southern preacher, was openly integrationist.

Thepoint of all this is not to deny that Richard Nixon may have invitedsome nasty fellows into his political bed. The point is that the GOPfinally became the region's dominant party in the least racist phase ofthe South's entire history, and it got that way by attracting most ofits votes from the region's growing and confident communities—not itsdeclining and fearful ones. The myth's shrillest proponents are asreluctant to admit this as they are to concede that most Republicansgenuinely believe that a color-blind society lies down the road ofindividual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of stateregulation and unequal treatment before the law. The truly tenaciousprejudices here are the mythmakers'.