Down South it always was serious—no, dire actually—even after Emancipation and the botched Reconstruction. Prison enslavement (authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment) with convict leasing, the Klans, lynching, and much, much more.
It took several election cycles to ramp up the racism, misogyny, and theology of the Southern Strategy, and to expand it nationwide. This included getting Southern Baptists and others to vote for Republicans of various religions and none. Then it took decades more to expand Republican identity in the South to all state and local offices, and to run the moderates, now called RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, out of the party. The authors do not mention the increasing tendency of Republicans to vote for criminals and the sexually scandalous, apart from the case of Trump.
Richard Nixon and his advisers and partisans made the Southern Strategy work by providing enough dog whistled encouragement to the racists, misogynists, and science deniers in the South coupled with enough deniability in the North. Campaign strategist Kevin Phillips advised Nixon to enforce civil rights and voting rights laws to keep the South riled up. This seems to have been the strategy in the Nixon Justice Department lawsuits against the Trumps for racial discrimination in apartment rentals, where they were let off with no penalties, just a promise to do better that they completely ignored.
Reagan and Lee Atwater expanded it to explicit courting of Evangelical/Fundamentalist/ Southern Christianoids and so-called Reagan Democrats in the North. They were greatly aided by the Fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and the purge of all theological moderates in 1979.
W and Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove added in LGBTs as targets. Trump expanded the target list to include Latinos and Muslims.
One of the most pernicious myths embraced by many Republicans is that of Post-Racial America, the pretense that systemic racism is over. The Supreme Court embraced it in gutting the Voting Rights act.
The book goes into much more historical detail, starting back in the time of enslavement, the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy, and the Purity of Southern Womanhood. It then traces the development of Southern religion as a support for all of this, and how all of these threads grew together into a solid cultural structure that was imposed on almost all Southerners, so that those who didn't agree with it all had to keep quiet about that.
Notable Quotations
Barry Goldwater
We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are.
The more the Federal government has attempted to legislate morality, the more it actually has incited hatred and violence.
Strom Thurmond
I know you want to vote for Reagan, the true conservative, but if Nixon becomes president, he has promised that he won’t enforce either the Civil Rights or the Voting Rights Acts. Stick with him.
Congressman Trent Lott of Mississippi
The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican Platform.
Robert Penn Warren
A Great Alibi
George McGovern
What is the Southern Strategy? It is this. It says to the South: Let the poor stay poor, let your economy trail the nation, forget about decent homes and medical care for all your people, choose officials who will oppose every effort to benefit the many at the expense ofthe few—and in return, we will try to overlook the rights of the black man.
Senator Jeff Sessions, his aide, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon
The path to Republican dominance lay not in tamping down racial polarization but in ramping it up.
Lyndon Johnson
I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
Antonin Scalia, on the unanimous Senate vote on renewing the Voting Rights Act
Now, I don’t think that’s [the unanimous vote] is attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.
Lillian Smith
The majority of southern women convinced themselves that God had ordained that they be deprived of pleasure, and meekly stuffed their hollowness with piety, trying to believe the tightness they felt was hunger satisfied.
Phyllis Schlafly
A lot of people don’t understand what feminism is. They think it is about advance and success for women, but it’s not that at all. It is about power for the female left. And they have this ridiculous idea that American women are oppressed by the patriarchy and we need laws and government to solve our problems.
Pat Buchanan
Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior…because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free…We cannot raise a white flag in the cultural war because that war is who we are.
Data
There has been quite a lot of polling and analysis done over decades to try to tease out the components of these attitudes and practices, and how the various methods used to support them came to be. I can only call out a few notable highlights here, of course.
We have polling on racism, misogyny disguised as putting Southern woman on a pedestal and expecting them to police their own subjugation, science, and White victimhood. Several sets of polls distinguish a number of markers of fundamentalism, and find different attitudes among groups with different combinations of those markers. Living in the South is another distinctive marker, one that turns out to be quite distinct from feeling Southern. The book teases out these differences wherever possible, frequently noting that various combinations of markers are correlated with more extreme views, particularly those with multiple traits of Fundamentalism plus strong Southernness. This includes variations in racism, opinion about different minorities and women, and distrust of or hatred for government. They also despise Liberals and the media for looking down on them, and claim that they are often insulted personally by outsiders.
The data demonstrate that Southerners are not now and never have been homo economicus, the rational actor fantasy of many economists. Instead they weigh economic factors against social and political factors such as privilege against minorities, women, foreigners, and others. As we saw in Dying of Whiteness, and as broader survey data cited here show, many are content to deprive themselves of government healthcare, nominally through fear of the government, but actually to keep the disfavored groups in their society from getting any.
The authors observe that Whiteness is a valuable wage, which those receiving it will not give up lightly or indeed at all.
The data also show that Republicans are not Conservatives in any meaningful sense. They certainly repudiate Edmund Burke's views on a strong government that makes major investments, on toleration, and on most political issues.
Five of the top six issues on which Republicans and Democrats are most polarized—as indicated in the Pew Research Center’s 1987–2012 “Trends in American Values” study—are rooted in maintaining white racial dominance: social safety net, labor unions, federal equal opportunity programs, and immigration, as well as disagreement on the size and scope of government.
Mistrust comes naturally to Southerners.
As late as 2006, the South as a region has been shown to be statistically, significantly less trusting overall than the rest of the country.
There is very little reporting on non-whites in the book. But it does note that three-quarters of African-Americans called Reagan a racist. (And so do I and other Progressive Whites.)
Hope?
These attitudes are declining very, very slowly. It is common for new political ideas to advance at about 1% of the population per year, more or less. Racism has been at high levels for 150 years since Reconstruction, and is still going strong, due to the vast effort that has gone into maintaining all of its intertwined strands. We examined some of them in Raising Racists.
In 2016, slightly fewer white “southerners” (64.7 percent) disagreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have made it hard for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” than in 2012 (67.9 percent). Once again, whites who do not identify as southern dropped from 56.2 percent disagreeing with that statement in 2012 to 49.3 percent in 2016.
3% in four years is consistent with the common trend.
The biggest change in Racial Resentment occurs in contemporary assessments of the idea that “In the last few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.” Close to 70 percent of whites who identify as southern disagreed with that statement in 2012. Now, in2016, the number has fallen to 63.1 percent. However, among non-southern whites, the decline is much steeper—from 55.4 percent disagreeing in 2012 to 45 percent in 2016, from the majority to the minority.
That's more like it.
Since the advent of the Internet, and the increasing diversity seen in movies and on TV and so on, the process has been speeding up, so that millions of the children of the racists give it up every year. This book does not cover such trends. However, it does look at efforts to change minds directly.
Even negative reactions to consciousness-raising about white privilege can be transformed into “prejudice reduction” if awareness is paired with opportunities for social activism. The perception of potential efficacy alone, as opposed to helplessness, allowed whites who were educated about privilege to alter their attitudes toward out-groups in a positive direction.
Maxwell and Shields give hundreds of references for those who really want to dive into the research and the debates about it. These are just a few of the most salient and interesting. Some descriptive and analytical, and some offering Southern Strategy handbooks for practicing Republicans.