Another interesting political science feature in Sunday’s Ideas section of the Globe, this time about a book from political scientists Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer called The End of Southern Exceptionalism. Sounds like another book to add to the reading list. In short,
[E]conomics, not race… upended the Southern apple cart. As the South boomed and Sunbelt cities added millions of suburban residents, they argue, its burgeoning middle classes naturally tilted to the Republicans’ fiscal conservatism, which promised tax cuts and smaller government programs.
‘’The engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class," they conclude after sifting through reams of electoral and polling data. ‘’The impact of legal desegregation and an associated politics of racial identity had to be understood through its interaction with economic development." In other words, the Southern realignment wasn’t about white racial backlash. Rather, it was about a new, middle-class South that focused mostly on economic issues and only secondarily on race.
It’s a bold conclusion-and one that few observers of the postwar South will agree with.
Maybe I’m in my Marxist-materialist bubble, but I’m not sure why a reasonable observer of postwar Southern politics would have major disagreement with the notion that economic transformation was a primary driver behind the parties’ realignment. It’s not an either/or, economics or race. That is, Southern realignment was about white racial backlash to the extent that petit bourgeois "silent majority" class ressentiment (in the North, too) was overlayed with a sometimes subtextual fear of black urban unrest, or more recently, a sense of cultural otherness from the urban constituency of the Democratic party. But the carving out of a petit bourgeois ideology itself had something to do with the specific economic conditions of the South and the transformations of the postwar years.
The good news is that class conflicts, whether economic or prestige-social in orientation, aren’t set in stone. I’m always mystified by Judis-Teixeira-esque studies that predict that the Democratic party is demographically destined to victory or failure. In the short run, clearly, political parties work with the demographic possibilities at hand. Over the medium run, the class, race, and ethnic bases of political alliances can shift around. I’m sure the last thing one would have imagined in 1925 would be a New Deal coalition between highly ethnic-immigrant Northeastern cities and the largely white and rural power alignment of the South, yet even before the Great Depression, Al Smith was already setting the Democratic party on that road.
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