They’re not whistlin’ dixie
Southern conservatives are racists. The leaders of the movement are straight up, almost unrepetent segregation loving white supremacists. The rank and file vary. You may already know or believe that.
What you don’t know or don’t believe is this: they’re smarter than you.
Southern conservatives have twice had to learn a hard, but incredibly useful lesson about winning, holidng, and using power to support their racist goals. The first time was in the civil war. A lot of leading southern politicans opposed secession. Many, because they saw it as a sure loser rather than on any loyalty to the U.S. State nationalism was alive and well in most of the country. It was dominant in the south. In most states, the vote on secession was close. In some, the regional split within states produced, essentially, mini civil wars within the state. The south lost and learned that armed uprising against the federal government was a losing proposition. In the long run, it was easier to get the yankees out, disenfranchise the blacks, and reap the benefits of generally having a twenty something senator block with a relatively united ideology. The disputed election of 1876 gave southern conservatives the perfect vehicle for achieving this. They gave up the presidency for real power. The one party rule that emerged in the south after the civil war was almost a godsend. It allowed southern congressmen and senators to accrue seniority that vastly increased their already considerable power. The Democratic party’s emergence as the more liberal party, the party that drove real social change through the legislature gave southern conservatives even more power. They could easily use (and twist) the language of populism and be within the ideals that their party supposedly espoused. Southern conservatives were willing to compromise on economic and social policy with northern liberals at the cost that northern liberals would protect white supremacy in the south. It was a bargain that held sway for eighty years, giving the Democratic nominee a reliable block of electoral votes into the 1950s.
Things did really start to change in the 1950s, though. Eisenhower didn’t owe much to conservative southern Democrats. Ultimately, neither did Kennedy really, at least not compared to previous Democratic presidents. Eisenhower and the Kennedys could have given a weak and half-hearted federal response to the various Supreme Court decisions. The Kennedys in particular were vigorous in their push to end segregation and institutionalized, legally sanctioned white supremacy in the south. Consequently, Jimmy Carter’s 1976 run for the presidency is the only one since where a Democrat has carried the whole region. While this realignment was happening, Richard Nixon was a shrewd enough politician to see the writing on the wall and implemented his “Southern Strategy” to try to bring conservative southerners into the Republican party. As an increasingly liberal Democratic party marginalized the southern segregationists. Nixon welcomed them in terms they understood quite clearly without having to be the publicly direct, open racist and anti-semite that we know him to have been. In 1964, Strom Thurmond* was the first of the prominent old segregationist conservatives to switch to the Republican Party. Over the next 25 years, the trickle that started with Thurmond became a flood until the once solidly Democratic segregationist south became the solidly Republican segregationist south.
After the civil war, the southern conservatives learned that they couldn’t have actual slaves, but they could keep blacks in virtual slavery through sharecropping, segregation, and the Klan. They used a long term, calculated political plan to protect that system. After the civil rights era, they learned that they could no longer enshrine inequality into the law, but with another long term, calculated plan, they could keep white supremacy enshrined in the center of our culture. Over the last 25 years, they’ve also learned that blacks aren’t their biggest threat. They dropped out of the Klan. They changed the names of their “white citizen’s councils” to “conservative citizen’s councils”. They learned to package an agenda that pushes white supremacy in the values of our country: freedom, meritocracy, and equality. They’ve made an unholy alliance with big business, radical christians, and pretty much anyone else who thinks the country was better off the way they believe it to have been in 1880 than it is now.
That alliance has had one goal in mind for the last forty years: get control of the Supreme Court. Southern segregationists saw how their way of life could be turned upside down when the court demands equality for all. Religious nuts saw it in 1973 with Roe. Bush v. Gore was a naked power play that was designed more to permanently swing the court to the right than it was even to put Bush in power. Aware of what a dangerous thing they were doing, the decision was handed down, but specified as a one off decision that was not meant to set any precedent. For all the frustrating court decisions we’ve seen in the last five years, those of us concerned with equality and democracy may well look back on this time period as the proverbial “good ol days” before things really went to shit. We’ve already seen 50 years of precedent all but overturned on the question of racial diversity and equality in our schools. That was a judicial precedent we never really even lived up to in our society during those 50 years, but it’s gone. We’re rapidly seeing the erosion of our scant worker protections against harrassment and discrimination. Four of the five justices on our supreme court would probably be happy with the way this country was run in the 1920s. Three of those justices aren’t going anywhere. Clarence Thomas will only be 60 next year. Samuel Alito will be 57. Chief Justice John Roberts won’t even be 52 until later this year. These guys may well be on the court for the rest of my working life. At 71, Antonin Scalia is only in late middle age by supreme court standards. He could easily sit on the court another decade. If they get one more vote, you can forget damn near every good thing that has happened in our courts over the last 50 to 80 years. These guys openly espouse an ideology that would have (and did, prior to FDR’s “court packing” scandal) declared the entire New Deal and Great Society unconstitutional, that would have said the federal government has no right even to limit child labor. No matter what they say today about this or that principle, about “up or down votes’, etc., you can bet that even if we win the next three presidential elections, they won’t let us put similarly liberal people on the court as long as they’ve got 41 votes in the senate.
If you see this as nothing more than partisan cheerleading or fearmongering, as simple “go team go!” on the part of a very partisan Democrat, then you’re not paying attention and you’re part of the reason they’ve been able to get this far. This is a chess game. The electoral left, no matter how broadly or narrowly defined, is planning our moves over the next two to maybe four years and often badly at that. The right is planning theirs over the next two to three decades. If you don’t believe me, spend a little time looking at the position papers that The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, and dozens of other less famous (but equally connected and influential) conservative think tanks started putting out in the 70s and 80s. They’ve had a vision. They’ve been willing to build coalitions, accept short term compromises, and make sacrifices to ensure their long term vision. I often hear liberals and leftists complain about politicians who are willing to accept something less than the full glorious worker’s revolution right here and now as sell outs, as being no different that the Republicans, etc. Tell me, who is more principled: the person who only gets 40% of what they want today, but uses that as a means to get 80% of what they want over the next 20 years or the person who gets all (or more likely none) of what they want today, but watches the social and economic problems they’re working to fix actually worsen over most of their lives? If neither is more principled, then tell me who is more effective at actually serving their principles.
*Thurmond, many years later did moderate his stance on race.
