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The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White

Voters in the South Changed American Politics
Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields. New York, NY: Oxford University Press,
2019. xxiii and 534 pp., notes. $34.95 cloth (ISBN 9780190265960).

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White Voters in the South Changed American Politics, The AAG Review of Books, 8:3, 140-142,
DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2020.1760060

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The AAG Review OF BOOKS
The Long Southern Strategy: How
Chasing White Voters in the South
Changed American Politics
Angie Maxwell and Todd
Shields. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2019. xxiii and
534 pp., notes. $34.95 cloth
(ISBN 9780190265960).
Reviewed by John Agnew,
Department of Geography,
University of California, Los
Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.
An exchange student from Virginia in
my U.S. politics course at the University
of Exeter in England in 1968 first intro-
duced me to what he called the “Southern
difference” from the rest of the United
States. It was not just about the history
of slavery and the legacy of white supremacy that had per-
sisted long after the Civil War; it was also about the cult of
“Southern womanhood,” and a peculiar religious enthusiasm
that was, he suggested, more about justifying earthly “real-
ities” than preparing for the world to come. Until reading
this book from Maxwell and Shields, I had never encoun-
tered a similar cross-linking of these three features of the
culture of the white South in the years since. The book is
about the entwined politics of race, gender, and religion and
how they have jointly animated the long drift of the U.S.
South, the states that seceded from the Union in 1861 but
lost the Civil War in 1865, from the embrace of the
Democratic Party to that of the Republicans. The outcome
is that Southern whites, in southernizing the Republican
Party, have thereby southernized U.S. politics. In other
words, the South is now exacting its revenge. Dixie has risen
once more. Another brilliant book making a similar if more
historical argument in this vein has the bolder title How the
South Won the Civil War (Richardson 2020).
Studies of U.S. electoral politics are showing something of
a renewed enthusiasm for geographical perspectives. From
The AAG Review of Books 8(3) 2020, pp. 140–142. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2020.1760060.
©2020 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
Rodden’s (2019) Why Cities Lose and D.
A. Hopkins’s (2017) Red Fighting Blue to
Enos’s (2019) The Space Between Us, the
rural–urban, regional, and neighbor-
hood-level contexts for voting behavior,
respectively, are receiving close atten-
tion. Yet, the orthodoxy of a country in
ever-immanent transition to a com-
pletely nationalized pattern of electoral
choice and national-level determinants
of political behavior still holds its own
(e.g., D. J. Hopkins 2018). Into this con-
tentious field comes a new challenger on
both sides of the debate. At one time,
the South was solidly Democratic, as the
common parlance would have it.
Beginning in the late 1940s and with
hesitant steps and reversals until the
1990s, Southern whites slowly but surely
shifted their predominant political affiliation to the
Republican Party. If strongly claiming the continuing sig-
nificance of the “Southern difference” in determining the
electoral behavior of Southern whites, this book also points
out how much the “long strategy” has changed national
politics. The authors quote Glen Feldman to the effect that
“[T]he South did not become Republican so much as the
Republican Party became southern” (p. 1). The book is a
focused exploration of this theme of the southern coloniza-
tion of one of the two U.S. parties using survey data drawn
from samples that, unlike in much previous U.S. electoral
research, privilege southern white respondents numerically,
yet use national sampling to facilitate comparisons of this
group with whites elsewhere in the United States.
The centerpiece of the book is the idea that the initial ten-
tative decision of the Republican Party to court southern
white voters moved beyond its early focus on harvesting
votes. It moved from throwing doubt on the enforcement
of the national civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s to a
later full-blooded endorsement of a set of views that
extended beyond racial animus toward black Americans.
These included patriarchal expectations about the behavior
of women (initially coded under the sign of “family values”),
and religious beliefs that privilege rhetorical statements of
faith rather than good works and Bible stories that fortify
hierarchy and patriarchy. If then-Arizona Senator Barry
Goldwater can be seen as the “godfather” of the original
southern strategy, in a speech in the aftermath of Richard
Nixon’s loss in the 1960 presidential election, Kevin Phillips
(1969), in his book The Emerging Republican Majority, was
its herald. The New Deal coalition that had led the
Democratic Party to dominate U.S. politics for forty years
was unraveling. Phillips laid out a way of making it unravel
even faster by prying southern whites away from their
long-standing affiliation with the Democrats because of that
party’s turn to civil rights and the threat that this posed to
the traditional “southern way of life.” This was code for the
racial and gender hierarchies of the white South intertwined
with its justificatory religiosity.
The authors trace the ups and downs of what became a
long-term strategy rather than the short-term fishing for
votes that perhaps Nixon had originally envisioned in his
dealing with southern white-supremacist politicians such
as Strom Thurmond. This initial strategy was designed to
reduce the impact of the third-party candidacy of George
Wallace, the reactionary pro-segregationist Alabama gov-
ernor, in the 1968 presidential election. Despite the presi-
dential successes of such white southern Democrats as
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the net trend was toward
the increased power both regionally and nationally of such
new southern Republican politicians as Newt Gingrich and
Thad Cochran. The detailed empirical chapters at the core
of the book examine, in turn, the historical context and
the polling data comparing whites living in the South,
whites who identify as southern, and whites who are
non-southern, across the years 2010, 2012, and 2016. These
statistics are backed up with some religious polling from
2007 and 2010 and several other polls about white southern
attitudes. The authors point out how undersampled south-
ern whites have usually been in national polling studies,
and how this has not just limited prior investigations, par-
ticularly on the topic of the attitudes and behavior of south-
ern white women, but also fed into the idea that the South
was becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the United
States. The chapters are thematic, moving from southern
white racial attitudes in the first part, through family values
and patriarchy in the second, to politics and the pulpit in
the third. Throughout, the message is that the constella-
tions of attitudes they have identified led not only to chang-
ing political affiliations, but that to match these attitudes,
the Republican Party not only had to accommodate itself
to these, but to mutate into something totally different from
SUMMER 2020141
the party of old. This is the Republican Party that we see
today, led by a non-southern doughface who channels per-
fectly the values that southern whites have bequeathed to
the national Republican Party.
Some plausible objections to their claims are dealt with
openly. For example, to the obvious riposte that there are
many non-southern white reactionaries, they respond that
it is precisely the intersecting elements of race, gender, and
religion that give the southern white identity politics its
defining power. Elsewhere the impact is largely imitative or
derivative rather than generative. Of course, there has been
much of that imitation, dating back even to Wallace’s suc-
cesses in the 1968 presidential election and in the
Democratic primaries in 1972 in places well beyond the
South. Nationalizing white identity has become an essential
part of the Republican Party’s national approach to rule.
Over the past forty years it has “emphasized an ‘us vs. them’
America, accused the media of liberal bias, prioritized iden-
tity over the economy, insisted that the southern way of life
was under attack, promised that white southern fears were
right and southern white anger was justified, and champi-
oned a politics of vengeance” (pp. 335–36). It thus remade
itself in a southern image and nationalized southern white
identity. The one area that traveled less well was always the
southern obsession with “states’ rights.” Of course, this was
cover for Jim Crow policies excluding blacks from public
life. The irony is that Lincoln’s Republican Party is now the
instrument for pursuing shrunken federal government (at
least as far as providing services to “undeserving” groups like
blacks and non-white immigrants) when it was always the
party of a consolidated nation-state. In this regard, the neo-
liberalism of Ronald Reagan neatly fits into story. The
“magic of the marketplace” masks the assault on the national
welfare state on behalf of the makers (us) as opposed to the
takers (them). The populist and business wings of the
Republican Party are thus brought together. The current
op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal enshrines this seeming
paradox.
More problematically, however, the drift of the southern
churches, particularly the Southern Baptists, toward both
fundamentalism and political engagement needs relating
to such pervasive trends in U.S. society as secularism as
much as toward the “southern way of life.” Be that as it
may, there is also a need to determine if this overall story
of national southernization is reaching its end of days or
has more life in it yet. Some writers have pointed to the
fact that future demography is not on the side of white
Christian America, both southern and not (e.g., Jones
2016). There is also a swing away from fundamentalism, as
the authors themselves point out, as younger believers
become concerned about issues, such as climate change,
that cannot be accommodated in the southern-way-of-life
framework. Finally, there is some suggestion that the entire
enterprise only works well, at least beyond the South, if
the messages about hierarchy, patriarchy, and holy writ are
embedded in what were once called “dog-whistle politics.”
Today the Republican agenda has become much more
wholeheartedly and openly hostile and insulting toward
anyone outside the favored core group of white Americans
(Grohsgal and Kruse 2019). Could this lead back to the
southern containment of the very strategy that worked so
well for so long in southernizing the Republican Party and
the country at large?
References
Enos, R. 2019. The space between us: Social geography and
politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
142
Grohsgal, D., and K. M. Kruse. 2019. How the Republican
majority emerged, 50 years later. The Atlantic 6
August. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/
2019/08/emerging-republican-majority/595504/
Hopkins, D. A. 2017. Red fighting blue: How geography and
electoral rules polarize American politics. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Hopkins, D. J. 2018. The increasingly United States: How
and why American political behavior nationalized. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Jones, R. P. 2016. The end of white Christian America. New
York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Phillips, K. P. 1969. The emerging Republican majority. New
Rochelle, NY: Arlington House.
Richardson, H. C. 2020. How the South won the Civil War:
Oligarchy, democracy and the continuing fight for the soul of
America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Rodden, J. A. 2019. Why cities lose: The deep roots of the
urban-rural divide. New York, NY: Basic Books.
THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS