claremont.org/publications/crb/id.928/article_detail.asp Given that trend, the GOP did not need to become the party of white solidarity in order to attract more voters. The fact that many former Wallace supporters ended up voting Republican says a lot less about the GOP than it does about segregationists collapsing political alternatives. Kevin Phillips was hardly coy about this in his Emerging Republican Majority. He wrote in 1969 that Nixon did not have to bid much ideologically to get Wallaces electorate, given its limited power, and that moderation was far more promising for the GOP than anything even approaching a racialist strategy. While the Republican Party cannot go to the Deep South—meaning the GOP simply would not offer the policies that whites there seemed to desire most—the Deep South must soon go to the national GOP, regardless. Electoral Patterns In all these ways, the gop appears as the national party of the middle-class, not of white solidarity. And it is this interpretation, and not the myth, that is supported by the voting results. The myths proponents highlight, and distort, a few key electoral facts: Southern white backlash was most heated in the 1960s, especially in the Deep South. It was then and there that the GOP finally broke through in the South, on the strength of Goldwaters appeals to states rights. Democrats never again won the votes of most Southern whites. So Goldwater is said to have provided the electoral model for the GOP. But hidden within these aggregate results are patterns that make no sense if white solidarity really was the basis for the GOPs advance. These patterns concern which Southern votes the GOP attracted, and when. How did the GOPs Southern advance actually unfold? We can distinguish between two sub-regions. The Peripheral South—Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Arkansas—contained many growing, urbanizing New South areas and much smaller black populations. 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 conflict was much more acute in the 1950s and 60s. Tellingly, the presidential campaigns of Strom Thurmond, Goldwater, and Wallace all won a majority of white votes in the Deep South but lost the white vote in the Peripheral South. The myth that links the GOP with racism leads us to expect that the GOP should have advanced first and most strongly where and when the politics of white solidarity were most intense. The GOP should have entrenched itself first among Deep South whites and only later in the Periphery. The GOP should have appealed at least as much, if not more, therefore, to the less educated, working-class whites who were not its natural voters elsewhere in the country but who were George Wallaces base. The GOP should have received more support from native white Southerners raised on the regions traditional racism than from white immigrants to the region from the Midwest and elsewhere. And as the Southern electorate aged over the ensuing decades, older voters should have identified as Republicans at higher rates than younger ones raised in a less racist era. Each prediction is wrong. The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 21:18:45 +0000
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