Byron E. Shafer and Richard Johnston's The End of Southern Exceptionalism, Earl Black and Merle Black's Divided America, Thomas F. Schaller's Whistling Past Dixie Matthew D. Lassiter's The Silent Majority, and Kevin Kruse's White Flight

...And I find it hard to take seriously two political scientists who conclude that "low-income (white) Southerners were no more Republican in the 1990s than they had been in the 1950s...

...In order to establish their argument, Shafer and Johnston rely heavily upon survey data beginning in 1948 in which respondents have been asked (in some form or another) whether they favor government support in helping individuals obtain a "job and a good standard of living" or simply allowing "each person" to "get ahead on their own...

...Presumably, this is in contrast to Democrats who preferred a racist and stagnant society built around bureaucratic statism and antiwhite laws and policies...

...The GOP came to dominance in the South by appealing to the "suburban, middle-class, educated, younger, non-nativeSouthern" voters on economic grounds...

...But not quite...

...For removing the carefully constructed mask behind which the lingering racism of southern Republicanism hides...

...This new generation of Southerners voted for Republican candidates not because of racism but because they believed that a "color-blind society lies down the road of individual choice and dynamic change, not down the road of state regulation and unequal treatment before the law...

...When Karl Rove concocted his false claims of massive voter fraud to make it more difficult for black and poor people to vote, there is little evidence to suggest that his primary motive was racism or "classism...

...Unlike these earlier writers who assumed that race was central to post92 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 Second World War Southern politics, Shafer and Johnston claim to have approached this issue with an open mind, using systematic voting data on Southern House races (heavily), Senate contests (secondarily), and presidential BOOKS races (occasionally) to separate the political effects of racial desegregation from economic development...

...But if we are serious about politics as something besides another version of "Saturday Night Wrestling," we need to try to examine the way in which these forces have interacted to create an America in which race, gender, and class privilege are increasingly built into the very structures of our society...

...He is also a member of that shrinking band of political scientists who write with verve and wit as well as a solid grasp of the more esoteric literature in his field...

...But white DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 95 BOOKS Southerners earning from $30,000 to $100,000 voted for Bush by 74 percent—a figure 22 percent higher than non-Southerners...

...For it is those structures of entrenched and repressive power, as well as attitudes, that we have to confront in the years ahead...

...Schaller has compiled an impressive array of voting data, social science, and historical research, as well as journalist accounts to support his argument that, politically, much of the white South is still another country—or at least an outpost of the larger nation...

...Could it be that class or—to put it another way—economic self-interest drove the process of political transformation, with white backlash playing a distinctly secondary role in the process...

...And even though they are concerned with larger issues in their recent book, Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics, one of their central arguments revolves around the continued distinctive political identity of the white South...

...If they sometimes acted out of racist fears, however, their motivations were little different from white suburbanites outside Detroit or Philadelphia...

...No wonder Schaller urges the national Democratic Party to develop a non-Southern political strategy, or at least a strategy that abandons all hope for gains in the Deep South during the immediate future...

...Even among low-income white voters—the only major demographic group of white voters that Kerry won nationally-57 percent of white Southerners in households of less than $30,000 stuck with the GOP...

...Although this notion of Southern exceptionalism is one of only seven "myths" of received wisdom the authors claim to refute, it is a critical one, and their findings have implications far beyond academia...

...Y MOST fundamental doubts, though, have to do with their insistence that economic motivation can somehow be neatly excised from racial as well as other nonquantifiable factors...

...Whites in the growing suburban communities of the region responded to the Republican calls for tax cuts and reduced government far more than coded racist appeals or even to the emphasis upon such emotional cultural issues as abortion, gun control, and school prayer...

...What if Southern suburbanites are just members of America's rising GOP middle class on the make with a bit of a drawl...

...There is a case to be made for a greater emphasis on the economic motives of Southern Republicanism...

...While I am perfectly happy to allow political scientists to quibble over their use of "logistic regression," multivariate and bivariate analyses as well as their "translation of logistic coefficients," I remain skeptical about their deemphasis upon the presidential voting choices of white Southerners over the course of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, because much of that data can be used to contradict their arguments about the primacy of economics...

...It's just America on steroids...

...His most recent publication is "Rightward Currents: Bill Clinton and the Politics of the 1990s," in Todd Shields, et al., eds., The Clinton Riddle: Perspectives on the Forty-second President (University of Arkansas Press, 2004...

...DAN T. CARTER completed a visiting appointment as the Douglas Southall Freeman Professor at the University of Richmond this past spring...

...And then there is political scientist Thomas F. Schaller, who has received a great deal of attention for his provocative advice to Democratic Party leaders, which is captured in the title of his new book, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South...

...For one thing, their work helps to absolve the Republican Party of the stigma of its racist Southern Strategy born in the 1964 Goldwater campaign and refined and used by Republican candidates to varying degrees over the next three decades...

...At the same time, the policies they embraced— a hostility to government (particularly the federal government) and expenditures for the urban black poor, a passion for low taxes, and a general rejection of public spaces—were all "articulated and advanced in the resistance of southern whites to desegregation...

...According to the 2004 National Election Pool Poll, George W. Bush won 52 percent of the vote of white Americans in households earning from $30,000 to $100,000 and 58 percent of those earning more than $100,000 a year...

...As Schaller added, The interesting twist is that Republicans whacked Lott like some Joe Pesci character at the end of a mob movie, and the hit was rumored to have been ordered by none other than Karl Rove, the president's consigliere...

...One by one he outlines the disparities between the attitudes, values, and voting behavior of white voters in the South and those in the rest of the nation...

...Let's first count the votes...

...If Southern white voters act on the basis of the same motives as their counterparts across the nation, there is no need for a Southern strategy by either party because, practically speaking, there is no longer a South...

...The NorthSouth gap was even greater for voters in households earning more than $100,000...

...Lott got the garrote...

...As in the evangelical hymn, I'm "almost persuaded...

...In the coming elections, the political handlers will have to decide how to advise their clients on the best way to weave their way through the maze of conflicting interest groups and voting blocs...

...In their summary of why the GOP has achieved overwhelming majorities in the region, they emphasize the critical role that economics has played (as they have done in their earlier works), but they also point to the ways in which racial, religious, and cultural values continue to shape the political choices made by white Southerners...

...After elaborate multivariate analyses, the authors conclude that by the 1990s, "racial feelings showed only the tiniest hint of any relationship" to the policy preferences of Southern whites as far as social welfare is concerned...

...And as the racial fears and passions of the 1960s and 1970s faded, white Southern suburbanites ultimately voted for low taxes and limited government for many of the same reasons as their fellow suburbanites across the nation...

...One of the most annoying aspects of The End of Southern Exceptionalism is the tendency of the authors to caricature the arguments of their opponents even as they exaggerate the extent to which their emphasis on the economic and class origins of the Southern GOP has overturned the "prevailing" literature...

...According to Byron Shafer and Richard Johnston, Americans have been led astray by a generation of scholars and writers on Southern politics who have created an "established literature" that is "charmingly and richly contextualized, but also unsystematic and deeply inbred . . ." (Translation: earlier writers about the South foolishly believed that voters' political choices spring from a complex mixture of rational decisionmaking, inertia, prejudice, selfless idealism, ignorance, and deep-seated emotional attitudes that can only be approximated...

...Shafer and Johnston are correct in suggest94 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 ing that they downplay the importance of race more than most other writers...

...Even if racial issues have receded and gone underground, they remain alive and well in the suburbs as well as the blue-collar communities of the white South, which, in Schaller's view, remain as "exceptional" as ever: not simply more racist, but more militaristic, less unionized, and more conservative in their religiosity and their obsession with social issues than most non-Southerners...

...In a much-cited Spring 2004 article in the Claremont Review of Books that foreshadowed the findings of Shafer and Johnston, University of Virginia political scientist Gerard Alexander dismissed what he called the "myth of racist Republicans...

...So what is going on here...

...Earl and Merle Black are generally regarded as the leading political scientists on the subject of post—Second World War Southern politics...

...UT WAIT...

...If his findings are hardly reassuring to those who wish to absolve the national GOP leadership of manipulating the politics of race, they do reinforce the argument that Southern exceptionalism is fading, while economic and class forces increasingly lie at the center of the region's political transformation...

...Lassiter acknowledges the role that racial fears and concerns played in mobilizing white middle-class homeowners and eventually pushing them toward the conservative policies of the GOP...

...Collectively these works reinforce my sense that we have now reached a point where we need to look beyond evidence of "racist" intent, because it is clear that many attitudes (and actions) that lead to horrendous consequences for people of color are not rooted in deliberate and conscious "racism" as we have understood it...

...As he shows, suburban secession allowed new forms of class segregation that would prove to be far more effective in fending off school desegregation and higher local government welfare and education costs than outright defiance...

...96 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...

...Racism is still with us, and even though I believe racism—and a tragic form of hyperconservatism— still plays a powerful role in the American South, the South is not really anCORRECTION We regret that Marco Roth was not given proper credit as the translator of Marc Sadoun's article in the Spring 2007 issue...

...That, in a nutshell, is the central argument of two distinguished political scientists in The End of Southern Exceptionalism...

...While some cities did better than others (Charlotte as opposed to Atlanta and Richmond, for example), he emphasizes the racial moderation of his subjects and concludes that Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy initially backfired precisely because it turned off these business-oriented New South suburbanites who recoiled at the prospect of the kind of racial conflict that had crippled Little Rock and damaged the economies of recalcitrant Southern communities...

...In Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South: The Silent Majority, University of Michigan historian Matthew D. Lassiter analyzes the response to school desegregation by suburbanites in several Southern cities during the 1960s and 1970s...

...Unfortunately, they don't make their argument very persuasively...

...This doesn't look like convergence to me...

...Is it really possible for any serious scholar (or general reader) to go back and review the debate over the welfare "reform" bill of 1996, read the speeches of Southern Republicans in the Congressional Record, review the media coverage, and conclude that racial feelings have only the "tiniest hint" of a relationship to the attitudes of Southern whites toward social welfare...

...Kruse concludes that the resistance of Southern whites to desegregation during the 1950s and 1960s played a key role in shaping what appears to be a "non-racist" philosophy of government...

...Members of the region's rising white middle class, facing the collapse of legal segregation, accelerated their flight to the suburbs...

...But perhaps the pundits, the politicians, and the scholarly experts all have it wrong...

...I defy anyone to go into a white Southern country club, listen to the casual locker room conversation over the course of a few days, and make that statement with a straight face...

...AS PRINCETON HISTORIAN Kevin Kruse shows in his White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, ideas about race and economics are interwoven in ways that may be impossible to separate...

...In 1985, Kenneth Jackson explored the broad social, cultural, and political implications of suburbanization in his Bancroft Prize-winning study Crabgrass Frontier, and in the years since, any number of political scientists, sociologists, historians, and journalists have been explicit in describing the critical role of economics and suburbanization in the rise of the modern Southern Republican Party during the Eisenhower years, a rise that predates the heightened racial turmoil of the 1960s...

...To this litany, he might well have added the boundless enthusiasm with which the majority of white Southerners continue to embrace the wholesale execution of black men...

...THE TRANSFORMATION Of the solid Democratic South to the predominantly Republican South after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the mid1960s is one of the most critical developments in American politics and only a handful of dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republicans have denied the important role that race played in triggering this process...

...Schaller is an unapologetic supporter of Democratic policies...

...It is not possible to compartmentalize race any more than we can separate with certainty economics, or notions of gender, or religion from the warp and woof of Southern and American society...

...And the political implications seem equally obvious...

...as impartial social scientists, however, we have constructed statistical models that can differentiate the racial and economic motivations of voters and establish their importance down to the last quarter percentile...

...He just looked at the political demography and figured out a way to whack several hundred thousand Democratic voters...

...How did we get it all wrong...

...It is a book well worth reading...

...There is an argument to be made that scholars—and I include myself in that group— have given undue emphasis to race and neBOOKS glected the critical way that such attitudes interacted with class and economic considerations...

...These data, along with polling results on the welfare policy preferences of white Southerners, allow them to prove that "the engine of partisan change in the postwar South was, first and foremost, economic development and an associated politics of social class...

...While Shafer and Johnston can hardly be held responsible for the political exploitation of their research, their findings are already being used by GOP apologists who want to pull the curtain over the most unsavory aspects of the party's historical southern strategy...

...Republicans may not find his humor to their liking, but opponents of the current administration will enjoy his description of such episodes as the GOP's desertion of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi after Lott praised Strom Thurmond's 1948 racist presidential campaign and thus committed the ultimate Washington blunder: revealing his DISSENT / Summer 2007 • 93 BOOKS true feelings...

...Shafer and Johnston do it badly...

...other country...