Show notes
(This episode first premiered August 28, 2021.)A lot of people know about the “Southern Strategy,” the multi-year plan of 20th century Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon to get white voters in the South to stop voting for Democrats. But what isn’t widely known is that the GOP itself was changed by the electoral coalition that it attracted.While lingering support for racial segregation played an important role in flipping the South toward the Republican Party, the voters who changed their partisanship and the ones who followed them have views that do not reduce to simple racism.In her book “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics,” Angie Maxwell, a professor at the University of Arkansas, takes a deep look at how conservative politics was changed in both policy and style as Republicans reconfigured their entire concept of outreach around appealing to white fundamentalist Protestants.In this episode of Theory of Change, Maxwell discusses how the loss of the Civil War and negative media coverage of the John Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee were some of the reasons that many white Southerners felt aggrieved from the rest of the country, and how this set the stage for a politics that pandered to this resentment. Some white Protestants went to Republicans because the party decided to actively court supporters of racial segregation, others because the GOP rebranded itself into a party for fundamentalist Christians, and finally, still other party switchers went to the GOP because it stopped supporting the Equal Rights Amendment and other policies they believed to be violations of traditional roles for women.As Maxwell notes, those choices by GOP elites and voters ultimately led to the rise of Donald Trump, an event which many political observers couldn’t anticipate. The idea that voters constantly concerned with cosmic and earthly battles with Satan would support a thrice-married serial adulterer who owned strip clubs and casinos didn’t make sense.But, as Maxwell argues in the discussion, the white evangelical bargain with Republicans was never about shared ideals, so much as it was about politicians obeying and genuflecting to the ideas and the culture.VideoTranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: This is Theory of Change. I’m Matthew Sheffield.A lot of people have heard of the “Southern Strategy,” the long-term political plan of early American conservatives to win presidential elections by getting the votes of white people who lived in the southeast. Many historians and political scientists have written about the Southern strategy over the years. But what still isn’t widely known is how the Republican Party itself changed as it focused so heavily on winning over white Southern Protestants.From its very beginnings, the Republican Party up until that point was a northern Yankee party for city dwellers, industrial workers and university professors and farm workers. But that’s not who votes for Republicans nowadays, the huge influence of Southern Protestant culture played a big role in how the GOP changed.What’s interesting also is how American Christianity itself has at least in many ways, been remade in the image of Southern white evangelicalism. So joining me today to talk about all this is Angie Maxwell. She’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. And she’s also the author of the Long Southern Strategy, How Chasing White Voters in the South changed American Politics. Thanks so much for being with me today. Angie.ANGIE MAXWELL: Thank you for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right, well, so there’s a lot to cover here. Your book is really kind of, I think, groundbreaking in a lot of ways, because it looks at the Southern strategy from kind of the opposite direction. So a lot of people have written about the Southern strategy. But they haven’t written about this aspect that you did in yours. Why do you think that that is the case?MAXWELL: Well, I guess the best way to explain it is to say I feel like many people have written about what I would call like the short Southern strategy. So there’s, there’s two answers to this. First, is this, the short Southern strategy. So it’s kind of the story we have in our heads that Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 60s, tried to capitalize on Southern white voters who were frustrated with the direction of their National Democratic Party, particularly on issues related to civil rights, and with some effort by Republicans could be brought into the Republican fold. And then of course, we say, well, Nixon wins the South. And there we have it, right, the short Southern strategy, playing to these kind of aggrieved Southern whites.But I started to think about what a longer game it has been. Because even though Nixon wins the South in ’68, and ’72, the South completely goes back to blue for Native Son, Jimmy Carter, 10 of 11 states, and Republicans have to figure out once again, do they continue to try to make those investments? Was it a temporary gain? Or was it something that was going to kind of be the future of their party and a new base? And that kind of back and forth actually happens over the course of about 40 years. And so it’s a two steps forward kind of one step back dynamic.And so I wanted to see the Southern strategy in this longer perspective, right. That’s the first way that it’s different. And secondly, is I was looking at not just the policy positions that Republicans took to win the Southern white voters, but also the style of politics that they adopted, the one party political system that had dominated the south for most of its history, gave rise to a really distinct type of politics. And in order to really convert those diehard Southern Democrats to the Republican Party, you are going to have to do more than just take certain policy positions, you are going to have to kind of embrace that white Southernness. And so the book’s about both aspects of that effort.SHEFFIELD: And a lot of it, as you said, you were talking about aggrieved Southerners–aggrieved in many cases about, not only, but this idea there was this idea, very common in the south after the Civil War, that became a term the “Lost Cause.” How much of that do you think was playing a role in in white Southern politics before the Southern strategy?MAXWELL: Sure. Well, the Lost Cause kind of mentality is, I guess the best way that I always think of it personally, is, it was kind of an alibi. It was kind of a story that white Southerners told themselves after the war to deal with their grief and to deal with their resentment over reconstruction and to make somehow the failed effort seem somewhat noble and maybe not as much about maintaining slavery, right?So it’s a little bit of a coded kind of mask for what was really going on. And kind of speaking in those kind of coded terms was definitely part of the Southern strategy and something that white Southerners would have been used to–the famous examples about, like law and order, right, under Nixon?That phrase, meaning one thing, kind of to white Southern audiences, while not being explicitly direct about what it’s about, right? And so we see sometimes just the need to tell a story that things are okay, or we’ve moved past racism or structural racism isn’t still a problem, or the war effort was about heritage, right? And protecting a way of life, that kind of that kind of those stories are something that’s very common in Southern white culture.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And and we’ll get into more of that later in the discussion here. But so so basically, just to set the timeframe that we’re talking about here, American conservatism is a pretty young phenomenon in the historical sense and political sense. It was a collection of loosely organized people that were kind of affiliated with industrialists who decided they didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt.That’s where it kind of grew out of in the beginning and–as a political movement at least–and then it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they were going to be Republicans. And, so let’s do you want to talk about that a little bit? What are some of the other party strategies that people explored in the very early beginnings?MAXWELL: Well, I guess I would say that, I don’t know if American conservatism is, is relatively young. I think maybe American conservatism was kind of default and American progressivism is what was young. And when progressivism or kind of modern American presidents like Roosevelt that start to make that job, the executive so much larger, expand its scope and capacity, expand the role of government, when that happens, there is a need to kind of define what the objection to that is, right? What is the objection to government creating all of the social programs and the infrastructure that it created to try to put a basically put a floor underneath the economy during and after the Great Depression.And that could have gone in a couple of different ways. If FDR’s efforts had–if he had not been a four-term or three-and-a-little-bit term president, perhaps it would have been kind of an anomaly, right? This big government effort was for the purpose of getting us out of the Great Depression.But it becomes something that in the south financially, the region becomes very highly dependent on that kind of federal income. And that sets up a really different relationship between the states and the federal government. I think conservatism was started to embrace this concept of state autonomy and define itself that way. And that just kind of happened to work perfectly in terms of protecting Jim Crow. Does that make sense? It’s not always what state right state rights was about, but it dovetailed pretty nicely with kind of a growing American conservatism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but as a just purely party phenomenon. We had–MAXWELL: –sureSHEFFIELD: You could argue that the Democratic Party before Roosevelt was more conservative than the RepublicanMAXWELL: Oh, absolutely.SHEFFIELD: So and, and like in the early days of conservatism, American conservatism, mid 20th century, there were a lot of people who they identified as Democrats more and they were conservative, and they were not going to be Republican and then there were other parties, too.MAXWELL: Yeah, I was talking–I’m glad you say that. Because when I said that, I felt like American conservatism is not that young, it’s kind of been the default, I don’t, I don’t tie it to one party historically. I think Southern Democrats were as conservative as you–as you come. Their national party, under FDR and then under Truman started to shift. The national party under those presidents. Southern Democrats were not shifting.In fact, they were not shifting. They were so staunch in that conservative American conservatism that they left, you know, in 1948, and walked out and decided to run their own candidate, and that for president in the form of Strom Thurmond. So what we didn’t know in the 1950s, you look at middle of the 20th century, like you said, is we didn’t know which party was going to go which way. So if you look at the platforms in the 50s, from the national parties on things like civil rights, they’re almost identical.And you kind of didn’t know, but the national Democratic Party seemed like it was moving in a little baby steps in a pro-civil rights direction. But the Southern Democratic Party was the opposite. The national Republican Party was also–had been, at least rhetorically, kind of pro civil rights. But there was a growing conservatism that was kind of anti-labor, Midwestern, rural America that was starting to push back in that party. And what’s what’s hard, I think, as I look back on it, with the vantage of hindsight is, it’s a shame that one party, that the parties had to go in opposite directions on these issues, right? Who says one party has to be the champion of civil rights in the 60s and 70s? And one has to be the party is effectively at times trying to limit some of the some of that change. It’s a shame that we couldn’t have debated over like the best way, right, to deal with structural inequities based on race or racial uplift. Because there’s definitely tons of debate you have on what policies do work and help, right? It’s shame we couldn’t have done that, as opposed to really making it a polarized partisan issue. And I think there were a lot of people in both parties that disagreed with the way their party went, we know that to be sure,to be true.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the conservatives eventually decided that they were going to try to take over the Republican Party, but it was a–actually, to some degree, not that difficult for them because they were so well organized. National Review was founded in 1955. And Barry Goldwater got the Republican nomination not even 10 years after that. And of course, National Review wasn’t the only the only aspect of American conservatism. But that’s, that’s a pretty rapid ascent within one party. And one of the interesting things about that is that they, the early conservatives, actually, a lot of them were former communists themselves. And they actually copied a lot of Stalinist political tactics, that’s something that isn’t widely known and used them as a way of organizing within the Republican Party. So like they would send people into Republican meetings, and then they would have different–they’d have like, a group of people who would pretend not to know each other, and then they would cheer each other on.MAXWELL: Well, that is definitely a book that you should write, I was not aware of that.I will say this, the conservative impulse within the Republican Party was really strong, going into the 1950s. It just it just, it had trouble, kind of breaking apart with kind of establishment east and west coast Republicans, but it did not like big government, it was very concerned about labor. Right? Did not, you know, it was a big–did not like unions, was really concerned about communist infiltration. And in that, and then and then, you know, and this is interesting, but conservatives in the Republican Party really, really didn’t want [Dwight] Eisenhower on the ticket.SHEFFIELD: That’s true.MAXWELL: They did not they really wanted Taft, they really did, from Ohio. And they were devastated because Eisenhower kind of came on late in the convention. And they felt tricked. They felt like it was kind of unfair how it happened. And that really motivated them to get organized. Taft, unfortunately, died of cancer, like a year or two later. And so his part of the story kind of fades, but they’re so angry that he gets robbed of the nomination in ’52 that they really do start organizing and they start form–and they start looking for, how can we grow this conservative part of the part of the Republican Party? How do we do it? And they start clubs throughout the south, where they start trying to recruit people, they look at [Orval] Faubus actually, Clarence Manion looks at Faubus after 1956, the governor who–SHEFFIELD: Do you want to, do you want to talk about both who Clarence Manion was in and Orval Faubus for those who don’t know who they are?MAXWELL: Sure, it [Manion] was just a Republican operative. And a–he was very involved in kind of strategizing for the party,SHEFFIELD: And a talk radio host.MAXWELL: And a radio host. So he had access to audiences, which is actually a really important point. And they just, they know their numbers. They know they do not have enough. So how can they grow that base within the Republican Party? They start seeing, do they have some alliances with some very upset white Southerners who, (not all white Southerners, it’s never all) who really feel kind of in a partisan purgatory when the national Democratic Party starts really moving in the kind of a more pro-civil rights direction. They think can we be–can we build kind of an alliance here?And they look at Faubus, like I said, as this like pro-states rights gover…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
