Amid swirling talk of a “postracial” politics in the wake of Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Joseph Lowndes offers a needed reminder of the central role played by race in American political culture. Nowhere is the discourse of race more apparent, according to Lowndes, than in the supposedly “color-blind” politics of modern U.S. conservatism. Using language that fashioned New Deal liberalism as a “racial synecdoche” (p. 158) for all that conservatives reviled in the four decades following World War II, conservative strategists forged a triumphant pro-business Republican platform that could simultaneously claim to be postracial while serving as the key vote getter of closet racists throughout the nation.

Focusing on the rhetoric deployed by conservative politicians from Strom Thurmond to Ronald Reagan, Lowndes rightly declares the “backlash thesis” untenable. According to the “backlash” school, modern conservatives decimated the Democratic Party by attacking the excesses of the left-leaning social movements of the 1960s. For Lowndes, the backlash approach fails on three counts. First, it cannot account for the “founding violence” (p. 78) of the birth of modern conservatism, ignoring the “bitter conflict” (p. 161) attending its rise. Second, the rise of modern conservatism had “nothing inevitable” about it (p. 44). Rather than being a predetermined response to leftist social movements, the conservative triumph took decades to implement and was “contingent, mobile, and highly adaptive”(p. 5). Finally, he persuasively argues, backlash alone cannot explain how conservatives craftily tied together the contradictory visions of “states' rights, more punitive sentencing, opposition to welfare, neoliberal economics, and ‘family values’ into one political identity” (p. 157).

The author unfolds his argument through case studies of key political moments in modern conservatism. Much of this material draws on the work of, among others, historian Dan T. Carter (From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–1994, 1999). Echoing Carter, Lowndes sees the 1960s not as the high tide of American liberalism but as a crucial era for the formation of conservative views framed by racial exclusion. In line with the work of Ira Katznelson (When Affirmative Action Was White, 2006), furthermore, Lowndes places the roots of postwar racialized conservatism in the actions of southern Democrats who sought to maintain a strict racial hierarchy in New Deal– and World War II–era policymaking.

Among the most insightful of Lowndes's contributions is his analysis of Charles Wallace Collins, the “primary intellectual” (p. 7) in the Dixiecrat rebellion. With the 1946 publication of his Whither the Solid South? Collins laid the groundwork for a nationally viable conservative attack on the New Deal by “linking racism and free market conservatism” (p. 11). Collins's text gained “wide circulation among Southern Democratic elites” (p. 27) in the late 1940s, as well as inspiring a more race-neutral defense of “states' rights” among northern conservatives at William F. Buckley's National Review. Equally enlightening is Lowndes's study of Asa Carter's 1973 novel Gone to Texas, which formed the basis for the Hollywood film The Outlaw Josey Wales. Carter, a diehard racist and Ku Klux Klan leader, became an important voice in the antistatist cultural politics of the 1970s, upholding the white American male as a victim of the liberal state. Such cultural representations of antiauthoritarianism in the 1970s helped transform the racially coded language of the Dixiecrats, Goldwaterites, Wallaceites, and Nixon's “silent majority” into a lasting basis for conservative control of the discourse of electoral politics by the 1980s.

One of the author's most important claims is also one of his most problematic. Correctly stating that it is impossible to “separate out race and class as fully distinct elements” (p. 5), he nonetheless posits race as the primary factor in modern conservatism's rise to power. Despite asserting that what makes the New Right “new” is its twinning of white supremacy with pro-business politics, Lowndes ignores the changing economic contexts of the postwar period. This is a crucial omission. As he notes, the racial chords struck by Barry Goldwater and George Wallace in their 1960s presidential bids held little purchase among white southerners who remained dependent upon New Deal largesse. Racism, even when carefully coded as seemingly race-neutral “states' rights,” could not singlehandedly undermine white southerners' appreciation of farm subsidies, Medicare, military-industrial spending, or the cheap electricity and fertilizer provided by the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Unlike historians Lisa McGirr, Kevin Kruse, and Matthew Lassiter, Lowndes provides little insight into the central irony of modern conservatism: that white Sunbelt voters somehow came to despise the economic policies of the very same government that made the Sunbelt the most dynamic region in the nation's economy. He declares that race has served as a “signifier for popular mobilizations against redistribution, regulation, labor protections, and myriad other aspects of neo-liberal opposition to ‘big government’” (p. 7). His argument would be more convincing, however, if more attention were paid to the dramatic economic transformations of the postwar period. Recent works by Larry Bartels (Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, 2008) and Jacob Hacker (The Great Risk Shift, 2006), for instance, suggest that economic inequality, rather than coded racial hostility, is the primary legacy of the conservative transformation of postwar American politics.

The author also portrays the New Deal as a consistent political entity. For Lowndes, the New Deal centered on a “coherent political ideology” (p. 12) throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Granted, the goals of “modernization, national economic coordination, and political inclusion” (p. 12) motivated many New Deal policymakers, but he overemphasizes the unassailable nature of Franklin Roosevelt's electoral coalition. Labor historians would be quite surprised, for example, to learn that antiunion politics held no traction in the 1930s and 1940s. While the New Deal order was premised upon a central conviction that the federal government should actively pursue economic policies aimed at boosting workers' purchasing power while promoting business stability, the policies developed in pursuit of these aims were often contradictory, exclusive rather than inclusive (in terms of region, gender, and class, as well as race), and often ineffective. The claim that the New Deal could only be challenged on racial terms, and not until after World War II, misrepresents both the coherence of the New Deal order and the timing of the New Deal's dissolution.

Despite these shortcomings, this book is an absorbing, enlightening read. Historians and political scientists seeking to understand the nature of late-twentieth-century conservatism would do well to engage with its provocative claims.