The distinctiveness of the US South in America’s political life has long posed an analytical challenge. Too large to be defined wholly apart from the broader country, it has also been too exceptional relative to many of the country’s founding myths and patterns of development to be treated as just another region. This combination of size and peculiarity has made its relationship with the rest of the country unlike that of any other region, with change in the South having especially wide-ranging reverberations.
The South and the Transformation of U.S. Politics, by Charles S. Bullock, Susan A. MacManus, Jeremy D. Mayer, and Mark J. Rozell, provides a fresh perspective on this dynamic, cataloging the extraordinary changes that have taken place in the region since 1968. The book is a collaborative venture, but each author took primary responsibility for a particular subject area. MacManus contributes a chapter on the region’s changing demographics; Bullock catalogs changing patterns of partisanship; Rozell tracks the rise and entry into politics of an organized (and largely white) conservative Evangelical movement; and Mayer offers a fresh take on the significance of the South for Donald Trump’s election in 2016. A coauthored chapter by Bullock and Rozell considers the region’s changing politics of race. Each chapter offers a complex and nuanced account of how the region is changing. An introduction by Bullock laying out the central themes and a conclusion by Rozell summarizing its findings bookend the volume.
The portrait the authors paint is of a region transformed. Many of the familiar patterns have been redrawn by demographic change, the rise of the Christian Right, the conversion of the Democratic Party from the party of white supremacy, and the dismantling of the most visible Jim Crow institutions. What is more, the gradual but decisive shattering of the Democratic Party’s electoral hegemony ended only in the last two decades and has already begun to be reversed: from a stronghold of the Democratic Party to a stronghold of the Republicans, much of the South is now either competitive or likely to become so. The transformation of the South is ongoing.
The first task of any work on the American South is to define it, and the authors generally, but not exclusively (p. 139), go with the conventional 11 states of the Confederacy. The inevitable second task is to subdivide it. Instead of a geographic division based on proximity to the North or on the Black Belt and its legacies of slavery and especially intense Jim Crow institutions, a division between the “growth states” (Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia) and the “stagnant states” (Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana)—detailed in MacManus’s chapter—is repeatedly invoked, with in-migration seen as an especially important motor of change (pp. 5, 9–11, 47–48, 74, 95, 105–6, 147).
There is nothing distinctly southern about this division, but that perhaps is the point. Not only is the divide found across the country, but also the combination of economic diversification and in-migration is making the growth states more like the rest of the country. For the first time in its modern history the South has a sizable foreign-born and second-generation population, a development the authors credit with driving recent and prospective changes in southern politics (p. 24). The economic profile of the growth states now looks very much like that of other growing regions in the country. “The resurgence of a southern economy centered in middle- and high-skill occupations”—professional, educational, and health care services especially—has “created a patchwork of highly educated, relatively well-off cities surrounded by less-educated and relatively worse off rural areas” (p. 48). The same description could be applied to many other states.
This division serves the authors’ purposes but also raises a number of questions. Perhaps most tantalizing is the fact that the Republican Party made its earliest gains in what are now the growth states, a pattern identified (pp. 70–74) but left unexplained. Is this a coincidence or a causal relationship in either direction, or did growth initially help inflate GOP margins but now, with the parties’ shifting class compositions, redounds to the benefit of the Democrats? While demographic change is upending settled notions about the region and its politics, the older black–white cleavage persists, with whites’ attitudes toward African Americans informing both their partisan affiliation and choices among different Republican contenders. The book’s analysis of Trump’s southern conquest, for instance, shows that racial resentment among Republican primary voters was closely associated with support for this most explicitly racist candidate.
To treat this polarization as evidence of the persistence of the “old” features of southern politics, however, would be a mistake. Race still matters in the South—as it does everywhere in the country. But the authors make clear that democratization, the dismantling of the most explicit Jim Crow institutions, and in-migration have radically altered how race matters. The sequence they sketch is as follows. The civil rights revolution resulted in a black electorate that now turns out to vote at rates equal to or even higher than the white electorate. It also helped kick off a partisan realignment, slow moving at the state level but gaining organizational strength with the rise of the Christian Right. The 1980s to the early 2000s was a brief period of African American influence within state government, as black voters and legislators became increasingly important for the still-dominant (and still largely white) state Democratic Parties. This was curtailed by Republican political conquests. Although black and Hispanic legislators now have “enhanced influence in Democratic caucuses,” neither they nor their white co-partisans have “much say in setting the agenda or designing legislation in majority-Republican chambers” (p. 88). In the current period, demographic change is driving a Democratic resurgence that is empowering progressive white, Hispanic, and African American legislators in some states but not others. Both the cycle of change and its geographic variation belie the notion of an unchanging racial patterning to southern politics.
Nonetheless, the authors at times overstate the degree to which racial hierarchy has retreated from the center of southern politics (p. 106). The argument that “southern politicians spend far more time courting outside investment than in concocting new stratagems to keep African Americans from the ballot box, good jobs, or good schools” (pp. 106–7) is one that has been repeatedly made over the past 150 years to justify claims that a “new South” was emerging. The issue has never been whether there were other priorities, but whether and how southern elites could manage the potential trade-offs and tensions between, say, economic investment and control over racial hierarchy. The fact that southern school systems remain among the country’s least funded, and that Republican politicians have indeed been devising stratagems for keeping voters away from the polls, suggests that although much has changed, not everything has.
The authors are absolutely correct, however, that the South underwent an extraordinary democratization, and the altered political landscape this brought about paradoxically gave force to a reactionary swing in national politics. Two vectors of transformation were especially important: the rise of a Republican South and of the Christian Right. Bullock highlights how the loss of the South’s congressional seniority in a dominant Democratic Party was partially compensated by their leadership of the Republican majorities after 1994 and by the region’s increasing importance for winning presidential elections (pp. 55, 81). The altered political importance of the region in turn has helped consolidate the relationship between the GOP and a southern-inflected Christian Right. As Rozell notes, the national Republican Party has been profoundly marked by the rise of the Christian Right, giving the party a “strongly Evangelical and southern accent” (p. 127).
What is perhaps most striking about these vectors is their generalizability. No region of the country is written off entirely by the major party campaigns. Nor is the Evangelical movement uniquely southern. For much of American history, however, the South’s relationship with the rest of the country was different, with institutions and “pact[s]” (p. 14) negotiated that secured southern elites’ ability to set labor practices and racial hierarchies with a minimum of “outside” interference or consent from the governed populations. The civil rights revolution dismantled many of the arrangements that served this purpose, and it eventually fractured white southern legislators’ coherence. If southern exceptionalism had historically led its elites to try and secure national accommodations, the region’s democratization has made such efforts less relevant and less distinctive. Perhaps, for the first time since the founding, the South really is one region among others.
This does not make it unimportant. Paradoxically, the diminishment of southern exceptionalism might have facilitated a southernization of national politics, the most explicit example of which is the growing influence of racial resentment on vote choice across the country (pp. 19–20). Although “the white South remains the most resentful of blacks,” it is also “not nearly as much of an outlier on racial attitudes as it once was” (p. 150). With the most visible Jim Crow institutions dismantled, there is now space for a language of racial resentment that can resonate in the rest of the country more than “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” ever could.
If the end result of the transformation of the South is the southernization of American politics, then The South and the Transformation of U.S. Politics will have helped lay the foundation for understanding the coming moment. Regardless, the book will be instructive and profitable reading for anyone interested in the changing South and its impact on the United States.
